I grabbed this drink at a 7-11 in Beijing for about 7 RMB (about $1 USD). It's sour and tastes like sour apple even thought it's supposed to be plum flavor. I guess it's supposed to be some sort of plum wine, but with 4% alcohol it's more like a bad wine cooler. It's carbonated, weak, and overall not very tasty.

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.

Pocari sweat has to be the most famous weird drink on the internet. It's made almost every list of top 10 weird drinks that I've ever read. But the people who made these lists obviously didn't taste the drink. They just looked at the label and thought it had a weird name.

Sure, it might seem weird to call a drink "sweat," but it's just a sports drink. I saw a commercial for Pocari Sweat that said "it has composition similar to body fluid, so it is absorbed quickly" to rehydrate you. That's where it gets the name sweat. Those of us in the states will be familiar with Gatorate's marketing of their electrolytes - same concept, fancier name.

In the taste department, Pocari Sweat is actually one of my favorite sports drink. It only comes in one flavor, which tastes like Gatorade glacier blast or whatever the white flavor is. The flavor doesn't really taste like any fruit I can think of - it's very neutral. Not too sweet, and refreshing. Even though it's an internet weird drink legend, it's actually nothing special.

There are versions from China, Korea, and Japan, and it's spreading! The commercial I mentioned above was on Etihad Airlines flying to Abu Dhabi. I don't know if it's spreading because of the name, or despite of it. But I would choose this over Gatorade or Powerade any day.  I'm curious to see if they are going to come out with any more flavors.

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.

This stuff smells just like lychee candy.  Since it came in a can I wanted to see what it looked like. Poured out in a glass, this lychee flavored beer is whitish-clear similar to the lychee fruit itself and very bubbly. Judging from the color alone, I would probably be more likely to call this a wine cooler than a beer. It does say 荔枝啤 "lychee beer" on the bottle, but it could just be a translation issue.

Actually, I can't find anywhere on the label that would indicate how much alcohol it has. This leads me to question whether it's a beer or even alcoholic at all, despite being labeled as such and put in the beer section of the grocery store.

It tastes just like it smells. If you've tried any kind of lychee candy or lychee jelly it pretty much tastes like that. There's not a hint of beer flavor, and it's very very sweet. It's a little artificial-tasting, but not nearly as bad as the 1 yuan blackcurrant soda.

This particular brand of lychee beer is called Lan Bei Lychee Taste. I got it in a grocery store in Beijing, china.

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 had this weird coffee in one of Shanghai's art districts, tianzi fang (田子放）, at a terrace cafe.

I was in the mood for spiked coffee, so I figured I'd go with something new rather than the usual Irish coffee. I'd never heard of Indian coffee before, and it sounded interesting so I went with it. It was a choice that let me to discovering the weirdest coffee I have ever seen.

The waitress said it's coffee, plus Bacardi white rum and egg. I thought that the egg would be mixed in somehow, but it came and there are some kind of flakes floating around that I guess are the egg whites or some part of them. When I went to stir it, I discovered a whole egg yolk sitting at the bottom. Needless to say, I was a little surprised.

The coffee itself is just a pretty mild coffee with the rum coming through a little bit. It's not too strong in bitterness or alcohol.

I thought that the yolk was hard-boiled, but I bit into it and it popped, spilling yolk all into the coffee! They must have put it in there raw. The whole coffee is now a yellowish light brown or golden color. It actually didn't even change the taste much though, just made it a little more bitter. Toward the bottom of the cup though, it did start to taste distinctly eggy.

Even though I'm not sure that the egg was necessary, after adding some milk and sugar this Indian coffee turned out to be really good and one of the weirdest coffees I've had so far. Toward the end of the glass there was a higher concentration of egg yolk because it had all settled to the bottom. I was a little turned off by the chunks in the bottom, similar to the bottom of the yak milk tea, but in both cases it didn't ruin the rest of the drink.

I haven't been to India yet, but when I do, I will order a coffee there and see if it's the same. Do they actually drink coffee like this in India?

Here's a new weird combination that turns out to be really good. It's bubbly cherry iced tea, called TOT 苏打红茶 suda hong cha (Iced Tea Soda).

On first taste, it's almost like the tea flavor is hidden behind the bubbles, and you feel like you're drinking seltzer water. The tea and cherry flavor is subtle and actually pretty good. I'm not a fan of most bottled iced teas like brisk, but this one is different. It's got a lighter flavor and is not so overpoweringly sweet or artificial tasting as other ones I've tried.

Even weirder than the drink itself is the TOT Iced Tea Soda Commercial (I apologize, that this video might not be available outside China without a proxy). I'm not sure how this sells the drink at all, but here's a recap of the commercial:

It's pronounced T-O-T

Guy: "Why are you going to college all the way in Beijing? You know my test scores aren't high enough to go there with you!"

Four Years Later....

Girl: "Iced Tea Soda, please"

Guy sees her ordering the drink, gets all teary-eyed

Girl sees him, nods slightly

Next thing we know, they're happily ever after, but noone has even drank any of the tea

Obviously, this is marketing at its best. The commercial has nothing to do with TOT or iced tea, or even drinks in general. It suggests that if you buy an iced tea soda at a grocery store, you will find your long lost love. You don't even have to drink it! Unfortunately that didn't happen to me today when I bought mine. Maybe I'll have better luck next time.

This drink is a Chinese herbal iced tea, with the slogan "中国人的凉茶," which means "The Chinese people's herbal tea."

It's taste is sweet, fruity, and fragrant. It reminds me a lot of the flavors of xiakucao, and luohanguo juice. While it's not too sweet, it tastes like it was sweetened with a dark cane sugar.

He Qi Zheng Herbal Tea is very similar to 王老吉 Wang Lao Ji, another Chinese herbal tea brand, but has a little bit of a lighter taste. I also like the fact that it comes in a bottle rather than a can, and there's more than enough of it to quench your thirst.

The ingredients of Heqizheng are water, sugar, 仙草 xiancao (grass jelly), licorice root, 鸡蛋花 jidanhua (Plumeria rubra, a type of flower), 布渣叶 buzha leaf (Microcos paniculata, a type of shrub traditionally used in Chinese herbal teas), chrysanthemum flower, honeysuckle flower, and 夏枯草 xiakucao (selfheal).

It shares a lot of similar ingredients with other herbal tea-style drinks I've tried in China, a lot of which are also used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). This has caused some controversy, and this company has been sued, though unsuccessfully, by a man claiming that the HeQiZheng commercial said it could cure diseases. The claim arose over the use of jidanhua and xiakucao in the drink, but the court decided that the drink is perfectly safe and that the man who sued them was ill for completely unrelated reasons.

On my trip to Hong Kong, I picked up another weird drink that I had never seen before in a 7-11. Beside the fact that I didn't recognize the name 夏枯草, I could tell it was weird because of the drink's tagline: "Common selfheal fruit-spike drink."  That doesn't give me any clue as to what's in it.

It tastes basically like raisin juice, but really a mild flavor. It's not sour or bitter at all, and not even too sweet. It just has a little raisin-y aftertaste, and is pretty refreshing cold. I think you could also drink it hot, like the jew's ear juice, and it might taste good that way too.

Checking my trusty Chinese translator, nciku.com, it seems I've never heard of this fruit before either. It's xia1 ku1 cao3 in Mandarin, ha6 fu1 chou2 in Cantonese, Prunella vulgaris in Latin, and "Self-heal" in English. Also known as Lance Selfheal in the US, it's a flowery plant that's harvested for it's medicinal properties. It supposedly can help to heal a whole bunch of diseases, and is being researched for cancer, AIDS, and diabetes treatments.

Getting to the label, here are the ingredients: purified water, cane sugar, common selfheal fruit-spike, dates, grosvenor momordica fruit, and liquorice root. If you're wondering what the second-to-last ingredient is, it's luo han guo, which is probably why this tastes a little similar to the luo han guo juice I tried in Thailand.

The xia ku cao juice has no preservatives or artificial colorings, and based on the ingredients it sounds like it's really good for you. It tastes good too.