Asahi

Caffeine-free grain and herbal Japanese tea produced in Taiwan. Ingredients: purified water, pearl barley, barley, habu tea leaf, malted barley, corn, vitamin C, brown rice, loquat leaf, black soybean, malted brown rice, shiitake mushroom, jujube, mulberry leaf, black rice, foxtail millet, Japanese millet (kibi), red bean

Tons of roasted barley-grainy-soybean flavor, some sweetness, some light tang probably from the Vitamin C, some mushroom earthiness to fills out the base tones. Overall, it tastes mostly like a roasted barley tea but with more complexity of flavor. Great cold refreshment.

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.

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)

I was in the grocery and had settled on “Namacha” from Kirin, when this caught my eye. With a name like TeaO, I HAD to try it. Apparently, Asahi had ceased sale of this in 2004 and was now reviving it, aiming it towards men in their twenties and thirties. The appeal is not immediately obvious to me, but I am A. Not male and B. not Japanese, so what do I know?

This tea’s “thing” is that it tastes sweet but doesn’t contain any sweeteners. Instead the sweetness comes from something they call the “golden drop” which seems to refer to, from what I understand although admittedly I didn’t put THAT much effort into it, the deliciousness of the last drop of tea in the pot. So…I guess they collected all of those drops and made it into tea? What did they do with the rest of the tea?

The ingredients, however, pretty clearly list sweeteners as the second entry, so I have no idea what that’s about. Is it because the “no sweeteners” on the front label uses a different kanji compound than the one in the ingredients? The one on the front can also mean “saccharides” while the one in the ingredients is “sweetening materials” and includes three words, the first two I have no idea on (oh wait no, one is xylitol. can’t think how I didn’t immediately get that from kishiritooru), but the last on is sucrose. So yeah. Asahi advertising scandal blown WIDE OPEN, you saw it here first, steeples!

The taste is interesting. It’s only very lightly sweet and the sweetness has an interesting quality to it that I could totally be fooled into thinking was a property of the tea itself if I didn’t instinctively mistrust everything that advertisements tell me. The tea itself is lightly perfumed – I’m almost getting a hint of rose here (are you SURE you’re marketing this to dudes, Asahi?), light in color, and fairly light in terms of the black tea taste as well, although definitely present.

If you absolutely MUST sweeten all your black teas, Japan, I guess this is the way to do it, although your weird marketing ploy seems a tad dishonest, not to mention lazy since you don’t even try to conceal the ingredients. Or maybe the fact that you don’t bother hiding them circles it around back to honest? I don’t know. Still, it mars my enjoyment of this tea and that makes me sad because it was quite enjoyable.