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Ok, I admit it, I was avoiding steepster. After having spotted chocolate milk tea once and then being subsequently unable to find it again, I fell into a deep depression wherein I cursed myself constantly for not just getting it the first time I saw it. I seriously thought I had missed my chance and it was just SO SAD.

BUT! This morning I found it again at a sort of local convenience store. (Reports that I had been combing every single grocery/convenience store I could find in ever widening circles are COMPLETELY FABRICATED. Who would go that far for a silly bottled tea? (me!)) I was so pleased! At last, I could inflict the undoubtedly too sweet taste of chocolate milk tea on myself! This was going to be SO WORTH IT.

Actually, I noticed while writing this up that this is not in fact “chocolate” milk tea, but “chocolat” milk tea. Apparently they used French chocolate flavoring.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad! I know! I was shocked too! Perhaps I had built it up so much in my head that it was impossible for a single bottle to contain as much sugar as I was expecting. But really I don’t think it was that sweet. Or rather, it was about as sweet as normal chocolate milk is. Which is, incidentally, what it tasted like. Chocolate milk with a very light hint of tea around the edges. In consistency too, it was thicker than I would usually expect from tea, even milk tea – almost pudding like in nature even.

Not bad! But I doubt I’ll have it again :P

So I was all ready to try the lipton chocolate milk tea, but when I went to the grocery store where I’d seen it it wasn’t there! (well, I went down to that one store / where I’d seen that tea just days before / but the man there said the tea, it wouldn’t breeeeeeeeeew /) OMG did I hallucinate it? Did I miss my ONE AND ONLY chance to have chocolate milk tea? I am going to be so sad if I can’t find it now. I will cry bitter tears of sadness.

Anyway, to console myself, I decided to get the milk tea version of TeaO in order to amuse myself with thoughts of golden drops and tea gnomes/fairies (I recently had it pointed out to me that tea gnomes would be much more clever than fairies and would thus be more likely to be assigned to golden drop thievery) It’s all right, maybe marginally less sweet than the other milk teas I’ve had, but the “tea” flavor was also kind of less present making it taste a lot like sweet milk.

Oh well, at least it was calorie off! (Japan makes your English terrible, troofact)

Man! I am totally getting to the point where A. I do not remember what teas I have already drunk and B. I am running out of teas to drink, period! I’ve been avoiding buying the generic brand from the convenience stores because they’re unique to each store and therefore impossible to get from vending machines, the normal source of drinks for the average Japanese person. Also, I doubt I’d be able to distinguish between them.

Anyway, mugicha! Barley tea! I drank this and I was all like “yep, that’s barley tea!” and then I was all like “yep, that’s all I got.”

But seriously, I don’t have much other mugicha to compare this to, but it tastes kind of lightly sweet, which seems to be the case for a lot of these bottled teas. I wonder if the natural sweetness of the non-black teas is why the black teas tend to be sweetened? Because black tea doesn’t really possess that much natural sweetness? No idea!

Other than that, not too bad, it has a kind of odd undertone to it, but the overall taste isn’t as overwhelming as some of the other graintastic teas I’ve had, which is good.

Since I liked the Iyemon Reicha so much, I decided to try another one, this time from Ito En. Like the Iyemon one, this Reicha is a seasonal tea and thus is only available for the summer (hence the name, which means: Cold Tea for the Summer – the sad thing about learning Japanese is you start to realize that being able to combine pictographs has left them really unimaginative when it comes to names “ok ok ok, so we’re making a special summer tea for cooling of, what should we do?” “let’s combine the symbols for ‘cold’ and ‘tea’” “that’s BRILLIANT!”). Unlike the Iyemon, this is just straight green tea, no added matcha, sadly. (yes I realize that matcha is also green tea, you know what I mean!).

This is all right, but I definitely prefer the Iyemon reicha for it’s matchaliciousness. It’s a little more bitter than the standard bottled green teas and it seems the tea they used is the kind of butter kind, but otherwise it seems pretty unremarkable. Another tea your are just not meant to pay that much attention to as you drink.

I was with a friend when I got this and her reaction to it was “that’s just normal tea!” and that is pretty much the feeling I get from it. It’s actually kind of nice, a little sweet, but otherwise unremarkable, not too strong, not too weak, a tea you almost won’t even notice drinking. I give it 4 out of 5 "eh"s.

So the name of this tea basically translates to: “This one for greasy meals” which, someone should probably inform Asahi, is really more of a sentence than a name. I found it at the hundred yen store and was surprised to note that it was another blend of pu erh and oolong! I was surprised to find one in the form of the Chou BouBouCha, but I guess they are just everywhere.

Rather than touting itself as a remedy for post-binge eating/drinking indigestion/nausea, however, this tea is meant to accompany a greasy meal in order to prevent the aforementioned states. I should probably have had some last night when I went out to yakiniku. Missed opportunity!

As with the Chou BouBouCha, the pu erh and oolong work surprisingly well together although in this case the oolong is definitely dominating. The pu erh is really only noticeable because the normal oolong taste is slightly off. This could either mean that it is a successful blend or that there is too much oolong. I know which one I think it is! Still, a pretty nice tea and as my (still somewhat delicate) stomach can attest to, it IS pretty soothing in that regard.

Hay gaiz! Remember that Teas’ Tea New York thing that I didn’t like so much because it was too sweet and I didn’t want to try anymore because all of the rest of them would probably be too sweet and gross? I tried another one! Because I do not learn from experience.

Well, actually, the real reason is twofold. One: it amused me that adding ginger to tea turns it into chai now. Two: it was ON SALE.

So here I am, drinking another theoretical “New York” tea. I think I’ve said it before, but sweetness in general is a lot easier to take in milk teas than in just straight black teas for me, and this continues that trend. It’s still too sweet but it works a little better both because it is a “chai” and because it is a milk tea. In fact, this isn’t too bad, although I wouldn’t say that it was all that chai-ish. You can definitely taste the ginger though. Well, I think I can. I mean, I do know it’s there, though. Maybe I’m just imagining it. No no, it’s there. In fact, it kind of makes the entire tea taste like a cookie! I have spent all day trying to figure out what kind of cookie but to no avail, maybe a ginger snap? It definitely reminds me of SOME cookie…I don’t even eat that much cookies why is this so hard? Maybe a snickerdoodle? Let’s go with snickerdoodle. Anyway, it wasn’t too bad. Nice dessert type tea.

Incidentally, I totally saw a chocolate milk tea while at the grocery store yesterday. It is probably so sweet it will instantly give me diabetes, but I am SOOOOO going to try it. For Science!

As is probably not too difficult to discern from the few times I’ve mentioned them, I am not a huge fan of Starbucks, and yet, here I am giving them my money in exchange for tasty drinks! Inconsistent, you say? Well yes. Willingness to bend/selectively forget my “principles” in the pursuit of curiosity is just ONE of my many attractive character traits! Others include: tendency toward snark, tendency toward whining, the inability to say “fantastic” without sounding sarcastic, AND passive aggressiveness!

Anyway, I saw this when I accompanied a friend in pursuit of a matcha latte to starbucks today and decided to give it a go. I really like the taste of yuzu, it is so refreshing and so lightly sweet, yum! And that is basically what the drink tasted like, the light citrusy taste of yuzu, not very sweet at all, very lightly sour and just a hint of the underlying green tea at the end. In fact, I’d say there wasn’t enough of a green tea taste to it – it could have used more presence. Still it was a great drink for the half hour walk home in the summer heat.

I do not know why I keep getting these bottled iced black teas. They are all sweetened far too much, but I keep hoping that I’ll find a good one that is delicious and not sweetened at all. It is probably impossible though.

Anyway, while this tea hasn’t been as terrible as some (I’m looking at you, Teas’ Tea New York) it is still too sweet and, on top of that, seems to be quite weak. Actually the fact that it is so weak might be making it too sweet as it isn’t THAT sweetened (it’s “calorie off” after all!) but since the taste of the tea itself is also weak, it overwhelms the tea anyway. Fail! At the same time, the taste in general is just so light that it’s not like it’s bad either. I give this one a resounding meh.

Bought this in Chinatown – Yokohama has the largest Chinatown in Japan and one of the largest in the world – from a shop that I happened to duck into because it was raining. The nice old lady there followed me around and explained what everything was and even gave me some jasmine tea to try. I bought this because I thought it sounded neat: pu erh, oolong, and rose! I learned from a friend that these types of blends are actually quite popular in China for dealing with drinking and eating too much. Well yesterday I definitely did the former if not the latter (all you can drink karaoke, baybeeeeeeeeee).

This is quite nice! I like the dynamic of the oolong and the pu erh, both teas are quite present but somehow their interaction smooths out the taste, so that the normal dirt taste of the pu erh isn’t quite so noticeable and the sort of resiny aftertaste of oolong was also unnoticeable. I had thought that since it appeared that the tea just had rosebuds put into it, they wouldn’t do much to change the taste since I’ve read in other parts of this site that flowers added like that are mostly cosmetic. These must be some sort of magical flowers because the taste of rose was VERY noticeable. (I’ve also since had just the tea without a flower in it and it doesn’t taste of rose at all, so it’s really the rosebuds doing it) Magic or not, the rose taste also fits this tea really well, I am quite pleased!

It was also quite helpful for my nausea although it failed to do anything about the icepick lodged in my brain. Oh well, I guess you can’t have everything.