{"id":1395,"date":"2010-04-09T03:10:02","date_gmt":"2010-04-09T11:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/09\/japanese-beverage-report-unknown-asahi-tea"},"modified":"2010-04-09T03:10:02","modified_gmt":"2010-04-09T11:10:02","slug":"japanese-beverage-report-unknown-asahi-tea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/09\/japanese-beverage-report-unknown-asahi-tea","title":{"rendered":"Japanese Beverage Report: Unknown Asahi Tea"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m writing this on an express train we boarded in Okayama, bound for Matsue. It’s not as smooth as a shinkansen but it’s roomy and comfortable. Since this will be a 2.5-hour ride, I grabbed a bottle of tea from the nearest vending machine. It wasn’t stocked with teas with which I am familiar, so I chose this bottle somewhat at random:<\/p>\n

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To paraphrase one of the great lines from The Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em> movie series, I chose unwisely. I don’t think I could acquire a taste for this one. Tracie grabbed the camera to capture a visual record of my reaction:<\/p>\n

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It reminded me almost immediately of something, but I couldn’t place the flavor at first.<\/p>\n

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Then it hit me: it tastes like wet wool. It tastes very much like wet wool, in fact. If you know the taste you get in your mouth when you have a wool scarf wrapped around your face because it’s cold and damp, or if you remember what it was like to be a kid and suck on the damp ends of your wool mittens after playing in the snow, that’s what it tastes like. There might be a hint of graphite in the flavor also. I wonder whether there’s a traditional Japanese tea that involves steeping tea in a pot with wool socks and broken pencils.<\/p>\n

Looking around the train car, I see three kinds of bottled tea in posession of locals. None of them are drinking the kind that I have. That’s probably significant.<\/p>\n

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I’m writing this on an express train we boarded in Okayama, bound for Matsue. It’s not as smooth as a shinkansen but it’s roomy and comfortable. Since this will be a 2.5-hour ride, I grabbed a bottle of tea from the nearest vending machine. It wasn’t stocked with teas with which I am familiar, so… Continue reading Japanese Beverage Report: Unknown Asahi Tea<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan-2010","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}