Today on Food on Fridays we’ll taste a beverage that apparently has become ubiquitous in the U.S., at least in Florida: the Arnold Palmer.

Chris and I were seated in a restaurant here in Melbourne a day or two after we arrived, and the woman at the next table ordered an “Arnold Palmer.” When it came, it was a glass with what looked like a lemonade with a darker liquid darker floating in it. It turned out to be a non-alcoholic drink that was merely a mix of lemonade and iced tea.

According to Wikipedia, sometime in the 1960s Arnold Palmer was at a diner and he ordered a drink made with part lemonade, part iced tea. A woman at a neighboring table saw it and supposedly then ordered one by saying “I’ll have a Palmer”. And a drink — soon re-named the “Arnold Palmer”, though — was born.

Now, we’ve been coming to visit folks in Melbourne for many years, but I don’t recall ever hearing about this before, although apparently it really has been around since Arnold Palmer first ordered it. Who knew?

Of course, it’s probably become more popular recently, after Arnold Palmer (the man) started working with the Arizona beverage company to make Arnold Palmer (the bottled drink).  Over the past few years this bottled drink has become phenomenon, selling like crazy and making Arnold Palmer a very, very, very wealthy man.  Check out this short clip from ABC news from a couple of years ago, which explains what happened and how a golfing legend like Arnold Palmer is now known  by a new generation only for his bottled beverage:

Since I’d never heard of this drink before two weeks ago, I’ve been ordering it ever since to conduct research before blogging about it.  I have yet to try the bottled variety, preferring to get it at places where they mix it when you order it. You see, I was hoping to answer a key question about how to make it, since they just described as a mix of lemonade and iced tea.  But in the South, there’s not just one iced tea drink, but two: one that is brewed with sugar, called “sweet tea” and the other kind, without sugar, just called “unsweetened”. In my experience from both visiting and living in places in the South, when you order “iced tea” here you always get “sweet tea” by default.  So, when they say an Arnold Palmer is made with lemonade and “iced tea”, that means it’s made with “sweet tea”, right?

Well, maybe.  The Wikipedia article doesn’t comment on “sweet tea” or not, nor does Arnold himself in that ABC news piece above. I’ve taken an informal poll among our relatives here, and they don’t agree: half think that an Arnold Palmer is always made with sweet tea, and the other half think that it is always made with unsweetened tea because the sweetness comes by design from the lemonade.

But earlier this week, Chris and I went to a restaurant where Chris ordered an Arnold Palmer, and I thought I’d finally found my answer.  The college-student aged waitress enthused that was so cool that he’d ordered that, as Arnold Palmer (drinks) always make her think of her father, since her father has always loved Arnold Palmer (drinks).  Cute. Although she offered Chris his choice of sweet tea or not in the drink, it was her opinion that a real one was properly made with sweet tea.  Chris and I ordered one of each to taste-test, of course. It was my “expert” opinion based on the versions I’d been trying over the past two weeks that it was indeed more likely to be made with sweet tea than unsweetened tea.

So, I thought I’d finally gotten the answer to my question: an Arnold Palmer is made with sweet tea.

But then, just tonight, we were in another restaurant, and the waitress there said that in her opinion, an Arnold Palmer was definitely not a real Arnold Palmer unless it was made with unsweetened tea.

Ah ha. Back to square one on the question, as the search goes on for the definitive answer.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the most photogenic of all the Arnold Palmers I’ve tried in the past couple of weeks. It’s one where the iced tea is not yet blended all the way through the glass, which creates a sweet effect …  even if this one was actually made with unsweetened tea.

Enjoy.

An Arnold Palmer – photo #1

An Arnold Palmer – photo #2