Caca-Cola

[Mortblanc]

I will bet you there are more iced tea drinkers in the U.S. than there are hot tea drinkers in the U.K., simple math.

Kettles?? We don't need no stinkin' kettles. I live in the southern U.S. We can drop a dozen tea bags into a one gallon glass jug, drop in a couple of sliced lemons and fill it up with water. Sit it in the sun for a couple of hours and you have tea. Pour it over the crushed ice and it is perfect. We call it "sun tea".

Plenty of kettles over here but not like the ones you use. Since you need a supply of hot water that is what your kettle is made for. As coffee drinkers primarily our "kettles" are designed as drip coffee makers with an urn to hold the hot brew.

I have a dedicated pot for making tea with my "coffee maker" for my detestable iced drinks. I put the tea bags into the pot and run the hot water through the maker into the pot, let if brew for two hours and them mix with sugar and pour over the ice. Delicious!

Our teas are not well blended for hot consumption from what I hear. Fortunately I have folk that keep me supplied in good tea from your side for a hot drink and I have tried your tea blends as iced tea and found them not so good for that use. They are better hot.

We drink almost any nonalcoholic drink in a cold form over here. Iced coffees and frapachinos are very popular as well as the iced teas we consume by the barrel. We have citrus drinks that contain no natural citrus, but do have 4x the caffeine as a cup of tea, in a form known locally as "Mountain Dew". And we have the root beers and sarsaparillas made fro herbs and twigs boiled up in a kettle and bottled, then chilled to near freezing for consumption.

We also prefer out beers and ales chilled to the point of freezing. If they do not hurt you teeth they are not cold enough.

Back to the original thread, back in the 1930s coca-cola did some test marketing in the UK before building bottling plants over there. Most Uk residents had the same opinion of the entire range of cold drinks and CC decided to not invest in a market that would not support their products due to not having a cold beverage culture, except for the G&T with crushed ice.

During the war they brought bottling plants to every area of Europe to service the GI population and I suppose some of the British adopted our habits.

Coca Cola actually had portable bottling plants that followed the troops as they moved across Europe.