Does Cracker Barrel Make Its Iced Tea To Order?

Cracker Barrel is known for its Southern-style comfort food. And that, of course, means iced tea has a place on the menu. In addition to traditional sweet tea, the restaurant chain also serves an unsweetened version, one that's cut with half lemonade, and sweet tea with added flavors like strawberry and peach. Given how many different options there are, you might assume that Cracker Barrel's iced tea would be pre-bottled or made from a powdered mix. However, that's not the case.

Cracker Barrel's menu refers to its iced tea as "freshly brewed," and according to TikTok videos posted by current and former employees, there's truth in that claim. One employee recounted a story about how he once doubled the amount of sugar in the iced tea one night and received compliments about it throughout the dinner service, which would mean that the tea had to have been freshly made. But while that may offer confirmation that Cracker Barrel does make its tea from scratch, it isn't made to order. 

A TikTok posted by another employee showcased how the iced tea is stored, and on the container, there's a visible prep date and use-by date. The iced tea is reportedly served for up to three days after it's prepped, meaning it isn't always "freshly brewed."

Cracker Barrel has a handful of its recipes on its website, but iced tea isn't one of them. Thankfully, the label of the discontinued Cracker Barrel brand tea that was originally released in 2014 gives us a good idea of how it's made. According to the ingredients list, the restaurant uses a blend of orange pekoe and pekoe cut black tea.

Based on the recipe on the back of the box, you can recreate Cracker Barrel's signature drink simply by brewing a bag of black tea with water and letting it steep for at least three minutes or up to five for a stronger flavor. This results in unsweetened iced tea; to make the sweetened kind, you'll need to add half a cup of sugar for every half gallon of tea. 

The package also lists a recipe for substituting simple syrup, made with one cup of water and one cup of sugar.

Cracker Barrel may be set up to resemble a humble hometown restaurant, but the truth is that the chain has more than 600 locations across the U.S. But even though Cracker Barrel is a major restaurant chain, it still operates much like it did back when it first opened in the late 1960s. 

In addition to using locally sourced, fresh ingredients, Cracker Barrel has never stopped making its food from scratch. "'Homemade' may not be an ingredient, but it's something you can taste," the restaurant explains on its website.

Considering Cracker Barrel prides itself in hand-rolling its biscuits and slow-roasting its beef for 18 hours, it makes perfect sense that it would put the same amount of effort into its iced tea recipes. And considering how much of a customer favorite its teas are, it seems unlikely that Cracker Barrel will ever stop doing so.