Dragon Tea - Green Tea

Saw this while grocery shopping today and couldn’t resist picking it up.

The marketing is just… yikes.

It looks like a very stereotypical Westernized take on something “Asian inspired”. Plus, the other flavour they’re carrying as part of this line up is a yerba mate blend, and it uses the same weird dragon motif. When I looked this up on the Monster website, to add it to Steepster, I did the BIGGEST eye roll because the copy writing for the product description references the tired “Shennong discovered tea with a leaf blew into his cup” myth. Ugh.

Flavour wise, this is unsurprisingly not good. You know when you get “green tea” scented perfumes/body washes and things of that nature? There’s a very specific kind of scent that those products usually have that isn’t really accurate at all the the real flavour of green tea; it’s hard to describe but if you’ve ever smelled one of those products I feel like you probably know EXACTLY what I mean. This tastes like how that fake sweet/floral and cosmetic green tea smells. Like, fake green tea…

It’s actually a LOT more light and refreshing that I would have ever pictured a Monster energy drink to me – and if you’re not a green tea drinker and you’re sort of wanting that idolized commercial green tea type of profile I imagine this could be dangerously chuggable. Especially because so many energy drinks just taste like ass. That was the primary reason I stopped drinking them years ago – they just NEVER tasted good.

I picked up the yerba mate flavour too – so I’m very curious to see how they approached that flavour profile…