Special Brew and Salty Bits

There are two foods I'm not totally crazy about: sweetened tea and pretzels.
Here, both are a religion.
A religion where entire shrine-like-aisles are set up at the grocery store and people have the same kind of brand loylety that they have for their team.
So I figure, an entire state can't be all wrong, right? Scratch that, Arkansas is indeed, all wrong, right JP?
Anyways, Berks County, the one in which I reside, is the pretzel capital of the world, or something...
There are entire dough-bending factories, where they even bag up their salty bits and sell them for cheap-o. There are other industries in this area where people sell their salty bits for cheap-o, but that's a whole different blog entry.
The hunt for my perfect pretzel has led me to some pretty skankey, sour, lip-sticking snacks (you know how when you bite a pretzel, the part touching your lips, sticks... yeah, I don't dig that.) But, there are some alterna-ingredients, like oat bran and honey wheat, that I really like.
So I got that going for me...
Now for the sweet tea. For those who don't know the the kind of sweet I'm referring to, this shit is sweet like rock candy is sweet.
I've bought a couple of single servings, which by the way can also be bought by the gallon, and have thrown away all of them.
That is until I found the sweetened Oolong tea from Topher's crazy handy-man at work.
Yes, Topher has this cookey janitor-like guy, who is apparently not only compulsively into this tea, but is also into "Radioing" - which I think entails trying to pick up obscure radio stations.(Does anyone know anything about this?)
I've never met the guy, but I have this picture in my head of a man, emptying waste baskets with a tin-foil antenna-hat and a Oolong drip.
So the story goes, this guy makes a special trip to Philly's China Town once a year to buy 25,000 tea bags of this stuff (ok, that may be an exaggeration, but it is in the thousands.)
So Topher, being the friendly, inquisitive guy he is, notes this guy's interest in the tea, and asks him about it.
Next day, there's a frakin' gallon of it on Topher's desk. It's pre-sweetened, from home, in a obviously re-re-re-recycled lemonade Jug.
You can understand my initial suspicion. I'm thinking, maybe this guy likes his tea so much because it's a good way to keep ingesting his crack all day long. Needless to say, the jug went untouched for quite a few days.
But for some reason, I tried it.
DAMN! Now, I can't stop thinking about when I can get some more!
The thing is, the gallon is almost gone, and I can't keep putting in orders to the cookey janitor for tea, right?
I know what you're thinking, just make your own, but I doubt it would be the same.
Besides, where am I going to get the crack