The weirdest green tea flavor you’ll ever see
I never really like green tea back home in Australia and since moving to Taiwan nothing much has changed. You’d think what, with the 19 billion different varieties of green tea that exist over here that I’d find at least one that I like but no;
Green tea is and always will be to me like drinking liquid grass.
Like dark chocolate, green tea sucks the fun out and taste out of something and leaves you with a bitter experience. Yes, you can add sugar to green tea but sprinkling sugar onto lawn clippings doesn’t make them any tastier either.
Strong as my dislike is for green tea I was walking through a supermarket in Taiwan a while back when I came across a variety of green tea that almost made me reconsider my position on the drink.
…almost.
At that stage I was still hunting down tins of Milo and hitting up every store I could think of. One sunny afternoon I was cruising the drink section of a particular supermarket (can’t remember which one it was now) and came across this;
Yes ladies and gentlemen, what you’re looking at there is BEER flavored green tea.
The kick in the nuts? It’s non-alcoholic beer flavored green tea.
The kick in the nuts with 12 inch steel capped stilettos? It’s labelled soft drink beer flavored green tea.
So bizarre is this canned concoction that it doesn’t even know what type of drink it should classify itself as.
I mean with 0% alcohol content it’s clearly not beer and for some reason despite the big ‘GREEN TEA’ text on the can apparently it’s not green tea either. I can only assume the drink is carbonated but surely the fusion of beer flavour and green tea falls well short of the definition of soft drink.
Soft drink is sugary carbonated goodness. I love soft drink. Beer flavored green tea on the other hand is like the bastard son of the worst batch of fosters ever brewed (which is every fosters batch ever brewed) and farmer McGee’s grass field.
How dare some unnamed Taiwanese company tarnish the good name of soft drink. The hell do they think they are?!
June 10th, 2010 at 9:56 am Ian(Quote)
How could I have missed this treat when I was in Taipei a few months back?
Have you dared to try it?
June 10th, 2010 at 10:02 am lemmiwinks(Quote)
Send me a can, I’ll have a bash at it
June 10th, 2010 at 11:37 am Amal(Quote)
man asif you wouldnt try something that bizzare
June 10th, 2010 at 4:11 pm ozsoapbox(Quote)
Of course I didn’t try it!
I ran out of the store crying and then sat outside with a zippo lighter for hours contemplating whether or not to burn the entire complex down.
…
In the interest of uh.. scientific research though, if I come across the beer tea again I’ll pick up a can and give it a spin. If I suddenly dissapear from a prolonged period of time, you know what happened.
(I’ll be on the run from the law for grand arson).
June 10th, 2010 at 9:13 pm Yi(Quote)
YOU DIDN’T TRY IT?!?! you took photos, rant about it and you DIDN’T TRY IT?!!? I’m so so deeply disappointed. what ever happened to ‘drink first ask later’?
June 11th, 2010 at 3:51 am ozsoapbox(Quote)
Dude this is Taiwan. If I adopt that policy I’m going to either
a. wind up dead
b. grow an extra testicle (not so much a bad thing), out of my head (ok so that’s bad).
or
c. wind up drinking god knows what and never living it down.
The longer I’m here the more I accept the weird things Taiwan has to offer but I’m a ways off from not asking questions and going ‘EWWWWWWWWWW!’ yet.
Having said that I’ll track down a can of this beer tea soon enough and give it a spin. Definitely not looking forward to it though.
(insert mumbling about stupid blogs and social responsibility)