Luo Han Guo Juice
Imagine my excitement when I saw a juice stand at a market in Thailand. Lo Han Kao juice was one of the options. This is a dark brown juice of some fruit I have never heard of. It tastes like chinese plum or date, and is pretty good. I wish I got a picture of the juice rather than just the sign (which didn't turn out great anyway), but it looked just like a dark brown iced tea, served with ice. It is sweet and supposedly good for your skin too. It's also sometimes spelled as Luo Han Guo, which I think might be the Mandarin Chinese version of the name.
According to Wikipedia, other names for this weird fruit are arhat fruit, monk's fruit, la han qua, and even a longevity fruit. It's used in Chinese medicine, mainly as a sweetener and is even used to create a sugar substitute because it is so sweet. But is also said to help with some illnesses such as heat stroke, larynx infection, cough, and diabetes. I can't vouch for any of these "cures," all I can say is that the juice does taste pretty good.
Dragon Eye Juice – Longan Drink
This is another one of those drinks that doesn't taste like what it says it is. It's supposed to taste like Longan
This Thai drink is sweet like a plum or a date, and reminds me of the flavor of sno-cones when I was a kid. It's an artificial flavor, so of course it's not dead on to what the fruit tastes like, but I can see how you could imagine that it tastes like longan.
While I'm a little disappointed at the flavor, it's not bad for artificial fruit juice.
Palm Sugar Juice
I tried this palm sugar juice at Samyan Market in Bangkok, Thailand. At the time I'd never heard of palm sugar juice before, I guess it comes from a palm tree, like a coconut or date tree. I'm still not too sure actually.
It tastes similar to regular sugar cane juice, but not as "fresh" or "green." it has a slight hint of coconut water taste, which makes me think it could be made from coconuts or something like coconut. It's very refreshing and also very sweet. It's light brown in color, which is a little more appealing than the neon green of the regular sugar cane juice.
I think that if you can get this palm sugar juice, go ahead and get it, but it's not much better than the regular sugar cane juice, for about the same price.
Blackberry Juice from Ecuador
I tried this blackberry juice for the first time at my hotel in Guayaquil, Ecuador. In Spanish it's called Jugo de Mora. It's maroon or magenta in color, and sweet, not bitter or sour at all. I'm not sure that it had such a strong blackberry flavor though. It tasted a bit like it had pineapple juice in it as well. It also had slight flavors of strawberry and raspberry. Blackberry juice is very refreshing and went well with my breakfast.
Black Currant Juice
This Black Currant Juice drink comes from Connecticut, where I picked it up in a local grocery store. It's a dark juice, and very strong smell, a lot like concord grape, and similar almost to wine. The taste is very much like a dark purple grape juice. There are slight tannins, but overall it's a very smooth drink.
It only has 3 ingredients: water, black currant juice (from concentrate), and fructose. But it's only 22% juice. How can that be? I'm not sure, maybe that means it's only 22% concentrate, with the water as the majority of the other 78%. If you know how they calculate the percentage of juice, please leave a comment. Regardless, this leads me to imagine that straight-up black currant juice is probably either bitter or sour - which is why cranberry juice is usually sold as a juice blend. The water and sugar really easily cut that though if it's the case, because it's actually very good.
Black currant is a small black fruit very high in antioxidants and vitamins, including Vitamin C. It has four times the Vitamin C of oranges, and twice as many antioxidants as blueberries. I think that qualifies it as a superfruit. It comes from Europe, and is working on making a comeback in the United States where it was banned in the past because of a threat to the logging industry. It is still banned in some states.
The black currant juice I tried was made by Currant Affair. You can visit their website at www.ConnecticutCurrant.com
