NOT EASY BEING GREEN

A few weeks ago, as I was wandering the aisles of the neighborhood Hooch Shoppe trying to decide what to buy Eric for his birthday, a tall green bottle caught my eye.

It was something called Zen, a new Green Tea flavored liqueur.

Now, green tea is one of those things that can be very good under the proper conditions. I will drink hot green tea when I’m eating Japanese food - it’s a workable alternative to the hot sake and the chilled Kirin Ichiban beer I would otherwise be guzzling. Take away the Japanese food, however, and it’s a different story.

And when it comes to iced tea, the National Drink of the South, green tea really just doesn’t do it for me. I like my iced tea strong and made from black tea. Green? No, thank you. Herbal? Go away. Instant? Get the fuck out of my sight. However, unlike True Southerners, who will drink their iced tea tooth-achingly sweet, I, as an Adopted Southerner, will use fake sweetener so as to avoid the calories.

[I don’t so much avoid the calories as consume them in other forms. Chocolate, whiskey, and beefsteak, to name a few.]

Where were we? Oh, yeah: Green Tea.

Green tea really shines as an ice cream flavor. I love me some of that green tea ice cream that the Japanese restaurants offer as a dessert option here in the States. Häagen-Dasz makes a green tea ice cream sandwich (!) but they sell it in Japan - not here, dammit.

So when I saw that bottle of green tea liqueur, I got all excited. I was all ready to plunk down $30 to buy the bottle when I suddenly asked myself: “Is this stuff gonna taste like Green Tea Ice Cream...or Green Tea Iced Tea?”

I decided to wait until I had a chance to sample the stuff. Last night, I finally did so, ordering a shot at the local Chow Mein Palace.

Foo.

I’m glad I waited. There’s no Buyer’s Remorse quite like that you get when you piss away a wad of dollars on a Taste Experiment Gone Wrong.

Some liqueurs are downright yummy. Pama pomegranate liqueur. Benedictine. Cointreau. Chartreuse. Irish Mist. Grand Marnier. Drambuie.

Zen, however, sucks. It’s like drinking that pile of fermenting grass clippings behind the 16th green. Yeef.

Green Tea Liqueur. Perfect for those moments when you wish to ponder that age-old Zen Buddhist koan: “What is the sound of one ass crapping?”