13: Singapore's strangest drinks
Their sweetness is our weakness
When I was 12, I created a drink made from Nesquik chocolate milkshake powder, banana ice-cream and Ribena blackcurrant cordial topped up with Lucozade Orange. I’m not saying I invented mocktails, but if you put that on a trendy Singapore bar menu today they’d call you a bloody genius.
As the photo shows, I clearly had the necessary devil-may-care insouciance of a hipster bartender in the making. Here I am posing next to a model suspension bridge made out of dried spaghetti.
To the delight of my insouciant 12-year-old self, eclectic drink flavours are quite normal in Singapore. If they have one thing in common, it’s sugar. A lot of sugar.
Vending machines routinely sell saccharine sodas with flavours such as lychee, winter melon, aloe vera and even bird’s nest, which should of course be served in a beaker.
Such flavours are entirely innocuous for me, the inventor of Chocolate Pukozade. One of my local favourites is Kickapoo Joy Juice, which turns out to be lemonade plus caffeine. Quite how they came up with the name I neither know nor care to find out.
Qoo White Grape was another favourite until I found out that one can contains a third of your daily sugar allowance. I also liked Sparkling Fuji Apple - an exciting new-age carbonated beverage with real fruit juice to provide you with sparkling enjoyment like never before, according to the manufacturer - but one can of that contains more than your entire daily sugar allowance.
As you might say in Singlish: one can cannot one.
Meanwhile in hawker centres, drinks are sold at dedicated stands which, in addition to cans, offer an array of freshly made options that are no less sugary. My default choice is lime juice made with squashed calamansi, poured over a cup full of ice and sugar syrup. But for the hardcore that want pure unadulterated calories, you can drink raw sugar cane juice squeezed through a mangle.
The same stalls sell hot drinks too, which opens up a whole new dimension of confusion. Tea is called teh and coffee is called kopi - I can follow that much. But there are at least 16 variations of each1 based on the proportions of milk, sugar and thickness required. I can never remember which combination I prefer, which must mean I have enough thickness already.
Things only get more complicated when you enter the bubble tea category. For the uninitiated, bubble tea contains chewy balls made of tapioca, to be slurped up through an extra-wide straw. They are now so ubiquitous there’s even a bubble tea emoji🧋. They come in all manner of flavours but they all look like frogspawn. The last one I drank was an iced oolong milk bubble tea that tasted of sweetened milk and fish2 and which was probably not far off the taste of actual frogspawn.
For me, a much safer bet is Mr Coconut, the Singaporean home-grown drinks chain offering coconut shakes, bubble teas, juices and lattes - not least because you can control the amount of added sugar. Even though navigating their touchscreen menu is more complicated than making a prize-winning suspension bridge from dried spaghetti, I have discovered my perfect order: a medium-sized fresh coconut signature shake with zero added sugar.
Then I simply stir in Nesquick, banana ice-cream, Ribena and Lucozade and I’m telling you I’m a bloody genius.
https://blog.seedly.sg/singapore-coffee-kopi-tea-teh-guide-difference-in-price-how-to-order/
apparently, this is the result of bad tea-leaf storage: https://www.teasenz.com/chinese-tea/pu-erh-tea-smells-like-fish-green-tea-with-fish-taste.html
I came for the wine, I stayed for the Kickapoo. Great writing, very much enjoyed the bird's nest beaker. Keep up the snappy liquid journalism
Excellent. You are a bloody genius mostly because you have solved the puzzle of Singapore drinks for me.