Loose Leaf Teas for Iced Tea

Marshallville, Georgia, 1870. Samuel H. Rumph found a yellow peach in his orchard and named it Elberta, after his wife. He built a refrigerated rail car to move the crop, the Georgia State Horticultural Society was founded near Augusta in 1876, and by 1928 the state was shipping almost eight million bushels. The Elberta led Georgia's crop until 1960.

Peaches were on that coast long before him. Franciscan monks planted them on St. Simons and Cumberland islands in 1571, and the Cherokee were growing peaches and plums by the middle of the 1700s. After the abolition of slavery pushed farmers off labour-hungry cotton, peach acreage grew in its place, along the fall line in Crawford, Peach, Taylor and Macon counties.

Long Island's North Fork does the same work with strawberries. The Mattituck Lions Club held its first Strawberry Festival on 16 June 1955, and it still falls on the third Saturday in June. Turkey keeps a different habit again: the everyday cup there is black çay grown in Rize, brewed in a stacked double pot and poured into tulip glasses over cubes of beet sugar, while apple tea is mostly what visitors drink. Tea only reached Rize after trial plantings at Bursa failed in 1888 and a central nursery handed about fifty thousand seedlings to farmers in 1924.

Cold brew is the lazy method and it suits all of it. Georgia Peaches, Organic is the orchard, Long Island Strawberry, Organic the farm stand, Turkish Apple the tulip glass, Blueberry White, Organic the quietest jug on the step, and English Breakfast, Organic the pot that makes the Southern kind.