This drink is a specialty of a town in northern China called Cheng De (承德） where I tried it for the first time. The drink has since gained a lot of popularity throughout China. The name of this almond drink is 杏仁露 which literally means "almond nectar." The taste is nutty, sweet, and a little dry but refreshing, and has a milky consistency.

This almond drink is very simple - just water, sugar, and almond. Overall it's a good drink with a unique flavor. It's best when very cold.

I tried this mangosteen juice at a Vietnamese sandwich stand near New York's China Town. Mangosteen is easily one of my favorite fruits. It's flavor is so unique it's hard to pinpoint, but it's creamy, cool, & refreshing. The juice is good, sweet and a little bit like pear juice. The only complaints I have is that it's a little too sweet, and it really can't compare to fresh mangosteen.

The first time I tried aloe juice, I had just arrived in Seoul, Korea. I couldn't wait, so I bought it on the way out of the airport in a convenience store. I have an idea of what I thought aloe should taste and smell like - it has a characteristic smell. Most people in the US might be familiar with aloe because it has a cooling sensation if you rub the plant (or products made from it) on sunburn. Not exactly something I'd think about drinking.

Well, it tastes a little bit like real aloe, but the second-best way I can think of to describe it is like watermelon bubblicious gum. It has little peices of pulp that are pretty similar to the grape drink. It's good and refreshing, kinda sweet with no aftertaste.

This one gets my full recommendation. Good Stuff.

This mulberry drink actually tastes like it's namesake fruit, which I've found rare in the many fruit juices I've tried. It has a distinctly "planty" fresh taste, like you're chewing on a sapling. It's hard to describe the flavor of this drink to someone who has never tasted it or mulberry before. It's somewhere between apple, cranberry, raspberry, and birch. The birch is the weird part.

This plum juice from Korea is very sweet, and tasted like watermelon jolly ranchers. It even reminded me a bit of smarties candy, which I love. While it's a little too sweet for me to drink everyday, and it doesn't taste like plum really at all, I think it's overall a good drink.

I wish I knew the name of this one, but I can't read Korean. If you can help me out with the name, please leave a message in the comments. Thanks!

Crushed Strawberry Drink is another crushed-fruit drink from Korea. It smells like one of my favorite candies of all time - the hard candy with liquid filling where the wrapper is designed to look like a strawberry. I'm sure at least some readers know what candy I'm talking about.

The juice itself doesn't taste as good as it smells though - it's a really sweet, flat strawberry flavor. My first instinct was right, and it does taste like the liquid inside of that strawberry candy. The thing that makes this a weird drink though is that it has little chunks of strawberry floating around in it. Most people are used to orange juice having pulp, but not strawberry pulp.

Actually, how many of you have even drank strawberry juice at all? I've seen it blended into smoothies, but I never thought of it as a good juicin' fruit. The strawberry pulp is less like crushed strawberry than strawberry shreds. You can feel them when you drink it, but only if you're paying attention. We're not talking chewable strawberry chunks here people.

To be honest, I didn't have high expectations for this Korean crushed strawberry drink when I picked it up in a store in China. It lived up to my expectations exactly. It comes in a small can like a lot of Korean soft drinks, and it's the perfect size.  It's good for a tasting of an interesting flavor, but it's not particularly refreshing and I probably wouldn't want to drink a lot of it.

Most juice comes from fruits, although we have seen some made from seeds, flowers, and herbs. But here's a vegetable that I never thought would be made into a drink: asparagus juice.

When I was a kid growing up I hated asparagus. We had it growing in our garden and my mom would make it steamed about once a week and force everyone to eat it. It wasn't until I started to like dipping it in horseradish that it became edible. While it's ok in limited portions these days, asparagus will not show up on my plate unless it's  a free side at a restaurant that I don't know about.

So, I don't know that they were thinking when they decided to squeeze the juice out of (what seems like) a very un-juicy vegetable to make asparagus juice. But it's China, the land of peanut juice and corn juice, not to mention Jew's ear juice, so what can I say?

The asparagus juice (芦笋汁 lu2 sun3 zhi1) came in a juicebox probably to deliberately obscure the sight of what I thought was going to be a nasty green liquid. It turned out completely unexpectedly that it's clear juice.

And actually it doesn't taste that bad!

It strangely reminds me of Capri Sun and honeysuckle juice, finished off with asparagus. It doesn't even have a bad aftertaste like normal asparagus does. It's kindof refreshing, but not really. The thing is, which I found out after reading the label, it's mostly sugar water, with only 10% real asparagus juice. If you drink it quickly, you can't even taste the asparagus at all.

I tried this juice at the floating market north of Bangkok, where it was in one of the stalls on the shore. There were several juices sitting there in large glass vats, and when I ordered the galingale juice (by pointing), the lady who owned the stand ladled a watery purple liquid  into a cup full of ice. A Thai friend I was with explained that it's a purple flower called something like chun or chuan, I can't remember exactly.  It's pretty difficult to explain the taste  - it is similar to the roselle juice in that it kinda tastes like you're eating a flower. But other than than it's slightly sweet and refreshing over ice, great to cool off on the side of the river on a hot summer day in Thailand.

After doing some research as I usually do out of curiosity, I think this juice is made (at least partially) with Black Galingale or Galangal, a.k.a. blue ginger, a root in the ginger family that is used often in traditional asian medicines. I am able to recognize the first two characters on the label as Kha, meaning galanggal, but my Thai is not so good to be able to recognize the rest. If you can read Thai, please help me out and leave a full translation in the comments. Also, if you've tried this juice I'd like to know what you think.

This is a really good drink from Korea. It tastes sweet just like fruit punch should taste. The flavor reminds me of drinking Juicy Juice when I was a kid, and just like that delicious children's beverage, I have no clue what kind of fruits or berries actually went into making Pok Pun Ja. The only downside is that it comes in a really small bottle, like a lot of other Korean drinks.

This roselle drink is from the same restaurant and same brand as the longan juice. It tastes a lot like rose, or a very light cranberry juice. While it's pretty good and refreshing, I wasn't a big fan of the somewhat artificial-tasting flowery flavor.

It did, however, beat out the longan juice in a side-by-side taste test. I couldn't help comparing since I ordered them both at the same time. I even got a second opinion who agreed that the roselle juice was the better pick out of the two.

Roselle is a type of hibiscus flower, which is used often for making teas and is made into a drink in many other countries as well, including Mexico where it is called "agua de Flor de Jamaica"