Back when blogging was fun, and before I worked for Texas Monthly, I had a blog called Full Custom Gospel BBQ. A group of guys in Austin ran another blog that was similarly dedicated to Texas barbecue, called Man Up Texas BBQ. One of the founders, Drew Thornley, was just as passionate about iced tea as he was about smoked meat, and he shared his reviews via a Twitter account called @IcedTeaSnob. His last review was posted nine years ago, but I thought of him recently when sipping from a Styrofoam cup full of beige water. A Texas barbecue joint called it iced tea, but it tasted more like the former than the latter. I wondered if Thornley, now an associate professor of legal studies at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, still had strong feelings about tea, so I called him up on a number I hadn’t used in a dozen years. “Nothing turns me off a restaurant more than weak iced tea,” he said at the mere mention of the subject.
Thornley prefers unsweet tea with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, like the one he was drinking as we spoke. If he’s visiting a restaurant for the first time, “I take my own Ziploc bags of cut lemons in case they don’t have lemons.” In his view, the least a restaurant can do is brew its tea fresh every day. He’ll inspect the tea coming out of the urn to make sure the liquid is dark brown before ordering. “Finding really good iced tea is the exception, not the rule,” Thornley said. “It’s super rare, but I’ve been to restaurants that advertise double-brewed tea,” he told me with excitement. Thornley still remembers a glass of tea he was served over a decade ago at the Four Seasons in Austin that contained ice cubes also made of tea. Besides the tea he brews at home, that is his holy grail.
I drink iced tea with my barbecue so often that it has become my reflexive beverage order at any restaurant—unless I spy a Nestea logo on the fountain-drink machine. That swill is to iced tea what the McRib is to ribs. I like my tea half sweet and half unsweet. More specifically, if I can pour it myself, I do a quarter unsweet, half sweet, and another quarter unsweet on top, so my first sip from the straw isn’t all or nothing. Regardless of how meticulous the process is, few barbecue joints are memorable for their iced tea. InterStellar BBQ, outside Cedar Park, is a notable exception.
“In the restaurant business, you have to serve things you don’t like,” InterStellar’s owner, John Bates, told me. “I drink coffee, hot tea, beer, and bourbon,” but not iced tea, he said. That’s ironic for a pitmaster who has a signature dish of peach tea–glazed pork belly. That peach tea is also available to drink, and Bates also brews black tea, for his unsweet tea, and brown sugar tea. His reason for using brown sugar rather than white sugar is simple. “If I did drink tea, that sounds good,” he said.
At InterStellar, employees use a Bunn coffee-and-tea brewer to make a very strong, concentrated version of iced tea. Once the tea has been steeped, they add cold water to dilute it down to the proper strength. Bates said they brew it early in the morning so it’s not still warm when customers arrive. “I think one of the lamest things to do is grab a fresh cup of tea and it’s warm and melts the ice and waters down your tea,” he said.
Up in Stoneburg, northwest of Dallas, Wes Stalcup recently made the switch to a Bunn tea brewer at 5 BarBQ. “It was too hard to do pots on the stove,” he said, which is how he originally got the strong tea he desired. He buys Luzianne-brand tea bags, each meant for a gallon of tea, and uses four for every three gallons of water. “The default settings made weak tea,” he said of the brewer, so Stalcup adjusted the timing to allow the tea bags to steep for longer. He also gave me an unusual tip: Add a dash of baking soda to the tea to maintain its clarity and give it a smooth texture.
A cup of the Stalcup’s iced tea is so dark you can hardly see through it. It’s also more expensive to make than canned soft drinks are to buy. If you order a combination plate that includes a drink at 5 BarBQ, a can of soda is included, but iced tea has an upcharge of $1.50. That also accounts for refills, but the tea is so memorably good, it’s worth a little extra.
Few barbecue brands are more closely associated with iced tea than Bill Miller Bar-B-Q. Headquartered in San Antonio, it has more than seventy locations. All the barbecue is smoked in massive smokers at its commissary downtown, but the iced tea is freshly brewed every day at each location. They all use the same recipe, and the same proprietary blend of tea leaves, but the company wouldn’t divulge its supplier.
Bill Miller’s social media specialist, Allegra Gonzalez, told me over email that the company brews an average of 68,112 gallons of tea each week across all locations. Besides the proprietary blend itself, the key to making the beverage taste great is keeping the brewing equipment and the urns where the tea is stored clean. The sheer popularity of the tea and the large portions Bill Miller serves also keep the fresh batches coming. The Texas Tea Bucket, a Bill Miller–branded mug that’s insulated and holds 32 ounces of tea, is just $4.75 and can be brought back to any location for 69-cent refills.
While I think the fried chicken is superior to the barbecue at Bill Miller, we agree on the tea’s importance to the brand identity. In 1991, Bill Miller updated an existing water tower at the company headquarters to resemble a cup of tea with a straw coming out of it. The company introduced Sweetie, the sweet tea mascot, in 2020; Sweetie has made appearances at events around town, including minor league baseball games.
I recently stopped at a Bill Miller location in North Austin, the closest one to my home, in Dallas. I got my own Texas Tea Bucket and enjoyed the half sweet, half unsweet tea, then got a refill for the rest of the day. I love the stuff, but Thornley disagrees when it comes to Bill Miller’s unsweet tea, which he recalls as being average (@IcedTeaSnob never officially weighed in). To be fair, he said, “I think a lot of people like Bill Miller because they’re drinking sweet tea.” Considering the name of the company’s mascot, I’d say Bill Miller agrees. “Sweet tea is the saucy chopped beef, and the unsweet tea is just a slice of brisket,” he said. I like them both. I’ll keep dunking my brisket in sauce when I get the hankering and asking for my tea half sweet. I won’t even mind if I mistakenly get fully unsweet tea—just don’t serve me weak tea.
