What’s the Best Drink? What's the best drink you can have for just about any occasion you can think of? I'm going to tell you the story of my search for the best drink, my experiences along the way and my surprising discovery at the end.
Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast episode number 380. This podcast is actually about a kind of tea but we'll talk about lots of drinks.
When I was a child there were a lot of drinks that I liked. Coke was good but I also like ginger ale quite a bit and 7UP as well. you'll notice that they're all fizzy sweet drinks. I also really enjoyed Kool-Aid. In fact I might even say Kool-Aid topped the list when I was a child except that my mom almost never made it. When I went into my tweens I got hooked on juices. I had started to become aware that fizzy drinks weren't really healthy. I wanted healthy drinks and juices were being touted as very healthy back then. The problem with juices was that after you drank them, ironically you started to get more thirsty. Also, they were quite expensive. My mom didn't want to buy as much juice as I wanted to drink. It was limited to one glass in the morning. And I was about to take up a new hobby.
In my late teens I took up rock climbing and Mountaineering. I always wanted to carry a drink with me, naturally and I went hunting for a good drink. There was a new kind of Kool-Aid on the market that didn't have sugar. It was cheap, very light, and really tasty. At least, it was tasty for a while. I only drank it on the weekends when I was climbing but after a while I got tired of the taste. It was too strong. I wanted something simpler. My favourite drink now is very simple but before I tell you what it is, I have to explain why I had to find it.
It wasn’t long before I found powdered iced tea. This was wonderful. Since it was a powder I could add a little or a lot and make the taste just the way I like it. The flavour was much simpler, too, and there was no choice of flavour. Just iced tea. The problem was that it had a lot of sugar in it. Then after a few years, I couldn’t find it in the stores anymore. But by then I have moved on to a very surprising simple drink.
I was climbing in the high mountains regularly. Sometimes I did not have the iced tea mix with me, so I began to drink the fresh water running off the snowfields and glaciers. I discovered this was truly the best drink there was. Soon I stopped using the iced tea mix. I only drank the water I found in the mountains. It was truly delicious. But after I moved to Japan, I discovered a problem with the fresh mountain water.
I had moved to Japan, and I wanted to get a refreshing drink. I went with some friends to the convenience store. There were drinks in Japan of course. They were pretty good, too and they were very interesting. There was Calpis water (a milk derivative drink) and Pocari Sweat. Then ilohas drinks came out with several flavours. I enjoyed them… they were better than green tea, which is okay but not that great in my books. But my search for a drink in Japan showed me the problem with Fresh mountain water. You could only get it in the high mountains in Canada! I had to make due with artificial flavours for a few years but… Do I still drink them?
I was drinking these bottled drinks to quench my thirst. Then I noticed something. One bottle is not that much but two or three a day began to look expensive to me. My wonderful wife came to the rescue one day, introducing me to Barley tea. Barley tea is perhaps the best drink there is outside of the fresh mountain water from Canada. You can make it strong or weak. You can buy it ready-made. You can drink it hot or cold. And the best part? You never get sick of it. It is basically calorie free and rich in antioxidants which are associated with good health.