But sugar dissolves in cold water. It just takes a bit longer. This is 9th grade chemistry. At 20°C 203.9g sugar are soluble per 100ml of water.
[Edit: Sorry, for the Americans here: At 68°F, 1 cup of sugar is soluble in 21/50 cups of water.]
Wikipedia (de): Zucker cites Hans-Albert Kurzhals: Lexikon Lebensmitteltechnik. Volume 2: L – Z. Behr, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-86022-973-7, p. 723.
And most of all, solubility being a function of the temperature, if you lower it the excess sugar will leave the solution and cristallize.
example: you don’t make a pitcher of kool-aid with hot water.
however, adding sugar to the hot tea does work better than adding it after it’s already chilled.
Well that explains the diabeetus.
Would love to see an updated graph. I feel like everyone gained 50lbs in the last three years.
That is really just a map of poverty.
Sugar should be heavily taxed, it’s so dangerous at rates of more than 10 grams a day
It should be taxed on the corporate side. Taxing sugar on the consumer side becomes a poor tax, because poor people will still want sweets from time to time, making those treats now more and more expensive. Well off people will just accept the tax because it’s marginal to them, but when your chocolate bar that you treat yourself to once a week goes from 1.29 to 3.29, then it really fucks your day up.
What should be done is incentives to provide less sugar/glucose-fructose on the product side and encourage companies to make snacks and beverages that have less sugar content.
Sweet tea is trash anyway. Might as well just dump sugar into the water and drink it why even have the tea in it at all
It really is. I was raised in South Carolina and drank sweet tea regularly as a child. In my college years, I had easy access to as much as I wanted and gained around 50 pounds. One summer, I realized how much better I felt drinking less of it and swore it off. By swapping sweet tea for water, I lost all that weight and have kept it off for 20 years.
Nowadays, I’ve gained an appreciation for unsweetened iced tea. The initial sip is always a shock when restaurants accidentally serve me sweet tea.
Just a follow-up for my neighbors in the southeast: don’t fall for the sweet tea propaganda. Regardless of culture or tradition, it’s a bad habit.
Maybe the amount of sugar that cold water easily accepts is the correct amount to not taste like shit
Yeah, and if you saturate hot tea, won’'t the sugar simply materialize back as the tea gets colder? Seems to me that nothing about this has to do with saturation.
Water can dissolve a ridiculous amount of sugar even at room temp. For an average 12 oz glass of tea, the most sugar that could dissolve is a whopping 700 grams. One packet of sugar is about 5 grams. At the saturation point it would be basically syrup thickness, too.
Yes. Not sure what the other person is on about. Hot water can have more sugar dissolved in it. When it cools it crystalizes but only if the saturation level is higher than what the water can hold. It’s how rock candy is made. This is like basic chemistry.
It’s not about achieving saturation, it’s about how quickly it dissolves. The sugar packets would absolutely dissolve, if you stir vigorously for half an hour… Rate of dissolving varies as temperature. 9th grade chemistry…
That wasn’t the original argument now was it? If you’re going to move goalposts then at least be halfway correct the first time.
And here I was happy to learn something new on social media contradicting my previous knowledge lol. But yeah, I definitely intend on having a basic chemistry refresher video now!
Hot water dissolves it much quicker, giving the illusion that it dissolved more. It’s not actually saturated when you’re trying to stir it into cold tea, it just dissolves extremely slowly. If you were to saturate it while hot (which would take an insane amount of sugar), then yes, it would recrystalise. But in pracrice, you need to dissolve it while hot because the more energetic molecular motion in the solution dissolves the sugar faster, since the heat is causing more effective collisions. Saturation point and the change thereof is, contrary to the proposal above, not a factor here, since everything is happening well below that point even with the sweetest teas commercially available.
No, I can assure you sugar does not re-crystalize after being mixed in hot tea. It is super interesting how differently people view this subject just based on where they grew up.
You’re right with normal tea, but normal tea is never saturated. If you added another pound or so of sugar while hot, then let it cool, it would absolutely recrystalise (barring supersaturation). But you’re right, that’s not a factor in normal tea. It’s about the rate of dissolution (which also depends on temperature), not saturation point.
That is very interesting, and not something I remember from my very limited exposure to chemistry in school. Thanks for clearing that up!
That is only because it’s not saturated. If you added an ungodly amount of sucrose (and I like it ridiculously sweet but this would be undrinkable), it would recrystalise when chilled. That’s why there’s a controversy here. A saturated solution would recrystallise, but people are pointing out that tea obviously doesn’t do that. That’s simply because no one drinks it saturated. It’s hard to stir in while cold because the rate of dissolution varies as temperature. That’s why there’s some confusing as to thinking it’s about the saturation point. It’s actually below it in both cases (hot and cold). To learn more about that mechanism, read about how reaction rate is affected by temperature.
Lemmy is now getting reposts. We’ve reached critical mass!
We got Union as hell on this post, didn’t we. Every time I come back it has more comments.
I’m still mad as fuck that I can’t get my precious Lipton Instant Tea at Walmart, because I really was raised in a trailer park, so maybe that’s why I had to delete my own giant shitty comment about this.
i hate when i go down south and go to restaurants and order iced tea and get a glass of concentrated sugar water
Sweet tea is extremely common up north. Wtf you talking about?
Texas Roadhouse and whatever is in the gas station cooler do not count.
In case anyone needs it, Texas Roadhouse serves proper sweet tea, brewed hot, put over ice, all that. It’s kinda their gimmick.
I am not even referring to that. Sweet tea was never a southern thing, they just claimed it as theirs for no good reason. My grandmother makes her own, her grandmother made her own and they only ever lived in the North. I been to friends houses where their parents made it. This was in PA and NJ. I personally hate tea so I would get offered it and turn it down all the time.
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They aren’t from where I’m from. They are all stupid, racist, idiots, bad. OK man. I’m sure you’re the only one with the right perspective on the world.
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Bless your heart
Ya I’m calling bullshit on some of this. Plus, do you really need to put others, and even places you’re not from, to make yourself feel better? That’s extremely smart, healthy, doesn’t lump groups of people into one, and definitely not a dangerous mentality to have. You’re doing great buddy.
Damn that’s some bad English. You’re just proving him right!
I mean it would be inconvenient but they would still dissolve, they aren’t super saturating sweetened tea in the south.
Don’t give them ideas
That’s exactly what they are doing for tea in the south.
No, even with the 2 cups of sugar per gallon it seems to make sweetend tea it still isn’t super saturating the mixture. It might make it take longer to dissolve but it’s not because the tea is fully saturated. They could put 4 cute per gallon and it still wouldn’t be fully saturated, even when cold.
This is correct, it’s sad to see that you’re getting downvoted for pointing that out. People aren’t seeing that It’s about how rate of dissolution is affected by temperature, not saturation point. Even in the south it isn’t supersaturated (although it does get very close to saturation when chilled with some brands). More would still dissolve when cold, just very, very slowly (‘vigorously stirring overnight’ slowly…)
As a server, southerners stare at me in wide eyed awe when I pour a disgusting amount of simple syrup into a glass of iced tea.
What do they think they do at the factory?
simple syrup
Wait, do americans use glucose syrup in kitchen?
It’s just a high concentration of sugar dissolved in water. Not used in food really unless you need to sweeten some cold tea for some southerners, i guess. Very commonly used to make alcoholic mixed drinks though.
North of what? South of what?
the mason dixon line noob
This seems like a US thing I’m too European to understand
(aka. they bring us the ingredients, and we make our own tea at the restaurant table)
What’s called sweet tea in the US is overwhelmingly sweet. That was my reaction to it the first time I tried it. It’s so sweet, the only way you can get that much sugar in it is if you dissolve that sugar in hot tea.
The trick is to order half sweet/half unsweet. Otherwise you get Aunt Jemima on ice.
I don’t know if you need to be told this.
Pay the money and buy real maple syrup, not ‘pancake syrup.’ Real maple syrup is one of the best tastes on the planet.
I’m aware of the existence and superiority of maple syrup. I only use Aunt Jemima in this example because that’s what oversweetened tea tastes like to me: shit.
I have never been in a place in the South where they don’t serve gays
