A most interesting drink….

From Guest Blogger, Mark, on his recent business trip to Hangzhou:

Here’s a drink that’s not likely to show up anytime soon at your local Starbucks.  Yes, that’s a drink.  It kind of reminds me of that Portlandia episode where they “put a bird on it!!!”…only it’s more like “put a snake in it!!!”.  In addition to the herbs, fungi, tubers, seeds, weeds, and general mucky debris you can clearly see in this photo, there is in fact a huge poisonous snake in this drink.  It’s important apparently for the snake to be poisonous.  If it was a simple harmless non-venomous snake, the drink wouldn't be as potent, and then what’s the point???

You may be thinking smugly to yourself “Mark, of course there must be some medicinal value to this drink…don’t you know anything???”.  And if course you would be right.  I’m told that if you are sick and you drink this, the result is that you will get better.  (That was my second guess…my first guess was “you will die”.  But I’m told that is unlikely.)  If, on the other hand, you are already healthy and you drink this (and you are a man), it will make you “strong”.  Not the “Fred Jones I can bench 220” kind of strong…the “leisure-suit-wearing hot-tub swinger’s party hey baby I can go all night” kind of strong.

So really, there ended up being several reasons why I didn’t try this drink…not the least of them being the fact that they told me “it wasn’t ready yet”.  Everything in there looked pretty thoroughly dead to me so I don’t really know what else needs to happen before they break out the highball glasses & start toasting each other’s “strength”.  Maybe the “firm, peaty body with peach, walnut, blackcurrant, and dead reptile notes” take time mellow or something.

Maybe next time…