Southern Brewed

Long ago there was a fancy hotel in Nashville, “The Maxwell House,” that was famous for serving coffee that was, “Good to the last drop!” A smart coffee company heard that line and ran with it, naming their coffee after the hotel, and stealing the tag line itself to advertise it. It made the coffee people a billion some dollars while the hotel went broke. That hotel has since been replaced with one of the same name by different owners in an attempt to capitalize on the success of the coffee, but of course the new hotel is not as rich as the old. There is more than a cup of “bitter-sweet” irony in there somewhere.

I grew up drinking “tea.” It was iced, and it was sweetened. Every time. You didn’t ask for, “sweet tea,” or “iced tea,” just “tea.” It was assumed you meant “iced“ because it was too hot outside for hot drinks, and it was assumed you meant sweetened, because... well... I don’t know why, it just was. There was no other kind of tea except “sun tea,” and sun tea was still made sweet, and was still iced. That is, until the Yankees came down and changed everything. We even work on Sundays now! I really do miss those olden days. Well... except that I was too young to buy beer.

Southerners also drank “Coke” back then. Not “soda,” not “pop,” not “soda pop.” If you were under eighteen you probably drank “Coke.” You might have said you were going to get a Coke, but then returned with a Mountain Dew and no one would have questioned your choice, because Mountain Dew was an acceptable flavor of Coke, just like RC, or Dr. Pepper. Lastly, should you have approached the counter and said you wanted a Coke, the person working it was liable to look at you funny before asking which kind of Coke it was that you wanted? (Pssst... If it was actually “Coke” you wanted, you’d have asked for a Coca-cola.)

Today, women down south drink bottled water while they run to “stay hydrated.” They drink lots of it. So much so that they have to “run” to the bathroom an ungodly number of times each day because they are over-hydrated, wasting both the water that rushes through them, and the 1.6 gallons of water they use with each flush, not to mention the loads of plastic they are sending to the landfill... so much so that I read yesterday where Virginia has been approved to turn a landfill into the world’s largest indoor ski slope. I always knew that all those plastic bottles Pooky-Bear drinks would some day make a “mountain” of trash! (It’s all downhill from there, folks ;)

PS- We still drink corn liquor down here too, but we don’t talk a lot about it, so...