The Alabama Sweet Tea Company first began to take shape when Wes Willis, a musician, and Golson Foshee, a real estate developer, began an unlikely friendship and discovered their mutual desire to invest in their community and share their love of the South.

While founded in 2015 and dreamed up many years before, the Alabama Sweet Tea Company’s origins can be traced back much further—to years of enjoying homemade sweet tea at family gatherings, lunch after church or simply around the dinner table and even to Wes’s childhood memories of hot summer days playing in the yard and coming into his grandmother’s kitchen for an ice-cold glass of her homemade sweet tea.

With so much family tradition backing us up, we knew we wanted to do things the old-fashioned way—no artificial stuff, no preservatives. So we went to work sourcing the finest ingredients around: our own custom blend of high quality loose-leaf tea leaves, pure cane sugar, and hand-squeezed fruit juice. We spent countless hours blending and re-blending, brewing and re-brewing, to fine-tune our recipe. And in our search for the perfect tea blend, ideal steep time, and just-right amount of cane sugar, we relied on everything from family recipes to taste testings with our children, friends—and anyone else we could invite in for a glass!