Hemp is being touted as the miracle plant, and it seems you can make anything out of it, so why not milk? While I have tried hemp seed drinks before, Hemp Bliss is completely and totally different. It's white and has a skim milk-like texture, very thin. The original flavor has a slight grassy flavor, but is very mild. It reminds me somewhat of an oatmeal drink because they're both milky but you can still tell they're made from plants.

I also tried the vanilla flavor, which was a bit thicker than the original hemp milk flavor. The vanilla wasn't very strong, but it was enough to cover up the grassiness. Most people would probably prefer the vanilla over original Hemp Bliss. The chocolate was empty when I got there, so unfortunately I didn't get a chance to try it.

Hemp Bliss is made by Manitoba Harvest, and it's certified organic.

I tried Hemp Bliss at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. I'm not a vegetarian myself, so I was a little skeptical to go and eat dried seaweed and meat substitutes, but the food & drinks and the festival in general ended up being completely awesome. There were only one or two things I didn't like, and the rest were on par or better than the food I eat all the time. This hempmilk was one of my favorite drinks there, but among the mixed fruit juices and wheat grass, there were some other interesting beverages up for tasting as well: Saffron pistachio milkshake mix, Cas Cal fermented sodas, and Sambazon acai juice.

Makgeolli is definitely one of the weirdest Korean drinks I tried. It's fizzy. It looks like it has milk in it, and this makes a weird foam at the top. It smells like vinegar. You can taste the alcohol in it, but it's weak -  like 10%, around the same level as soju or sake. It tastes a white russian gone wrong, plus soda. Even with the small amount of alcohol, after a few sips I can already feel it in my head, a slight soju-like headache. My Chinese friend tells me it's a type of rice wine called mi jiu (米酒）in Chinese, and now that she mentions it, it does taste pretty similar to that, and has the same warming effect on my face. It's surprising how 10% alcohol can hit you quickly if it's something you're not used to.

Sorry about the out-of-focus picture -  It's the best one I could take at the time.

This is another milky creamy soft drink from Korea. It's basically Coca-Cola's version of milkis, it tastes pretty much exactly the same and is really good. Mmm who would've thought milk soda would be so tasty?

When I was a kid, I would mix milk with coke and other sodas, to make a kind of cream soda / melted ice cream float kind of drink. It was good, but you had to drink it fast because as I found out, soda and milk don't mix. To prove me wrong, someone finally figured out how to mix milk and soda, and they called it Milkis.

Milkis is a milk soda from Korea made by Lotte described on the label as "New feeling of soda beverage." Milkis tastes a lot like cream soda or Sprite mixed with cream. And even though it's not alcoholic, it tastes kindof like the milk beer I had in Beijing. It's really refreshing, cooling taste. Maybe it also tastes like a melted slushy. Whatever the milky taste reminds you of, I recommend it.

This opaque white beer stood out clearly as the weirdest beer among the other normal beers at the cafe in my hotel in Beijing.  The label in Chinese says  奶啤酒 (nai pi jiu), literally translated as "milk beer." It smells like sweet cream, and tastes a lot like the frosting I had on my last birthday cake. It tastes a bit like cream soda, but not quite as sweet. The best way I can hunk to describe it is whipped cream mixed with flat sprite. It's not bitter at all and if I didn't know, I probably wouldn't guess that it was beer at all. On that note though, it isn't a very strong beer, weighing in at only 3.5% when most flavored beers are more like 4.5%. According to the bottle it comes from Inner Mongolia, a part of china that also I home to an interesting style of milk tea. Thankfully, they taste nothing alike.

This is the first time I've seen or heard of milk beer, but it seems like a version called Bilk was developed in Japan two years ago to use up the excess milk supply in a small town. I decided to do more research about the milkbeer that I found:

This milk beer is made by a company called Health (汉奥斯), which says that this is the "First milk beer in China." It claims to be rich in nutrients like amino acids, calcium, vitamins, and trace elements.  It has no preservatives,  and seems to be healthy. I know beer and milk are both healthy, so why not combine them? I've heard of a lot of people mixing beer and milk, but it didn't seem like it turned out well.

According to Health's website, there is a long history of milk alcohol and milk wine in China, especially with the northern minorities. In the Western Han and Yuan Dynasties, supposedly it was pretty common for the people to mix milk and alcohol and have that as their main drink. Also according to the website, the company won an award for "Outstanding innovative Chinese beer." They produce 6 varieties of milk beer and milk alcohol.

ps.

Windows XP users: Can't see the Chinese characters? It's easy, just follow up to step 4 here: How to Install East Asian Languages

Anyone else seeing boxes instead of characters? Contact me in the comments. and I will help you out.