Tokyo Dad

Lipton Ice Chai

You may think that I am easily pleased after reading this, but it was wonderful news for me to find that Lipton have introduced ice chai here in Japan!

I love chai, hot or with ice, but I haven't seen it bottled before, so when I saw this in the shop yesterday (the day it was released) I had to try it. And I am happy to report that it tastes great.

Yeah, OK, I'm easily pleased...

Barley Tea for Baby

We are slowly but surely introducing our son to solid food and are now introducing other drinks into his diet. Yesterday, he ate a few mouthfuls of rice (ground nearly to a paste, naturally) and also quite happily drank some tea, much to our surprise.

The reason we were so surprised is that we put the tea in a bottle and he had previously shown an extreme dislike towards anything in bottles. Last night, however, he quite happily drank around 20ml of tea from his bottle, not once trying to shove it away or contorting his face and moaning.

We started him off with barley tea – known as mugi-cha (麦茶) here in Japan – as it is easy to drink, caffeine free and rather nice. My wife drinks gallons of the stuff (we buy an organic brand) and I am partial to a few glasses myself, especially cold mugi-cha in summer.He has also been drinking water recently, which is a good thing as Japan is incredibly dry during winter and he has trouble with his skin. Hopefully, adding more liquid to his diet will help his dry skin.

Chrysanthemum Tea

On a recent trip to Hong Kong I was introduced to a tea which I have never tried before - chrysanthemum tea. It has a light, refreshing taste, which was quite a surprise as I expected it to taste a bit like perfume due to it being a flower. I grew very fond of it over the few days I was there and when I got back to Japan I went out in search of it. Unsurprisingly, it is not available in supermarkets, but I did find it in a specialist tea shop near my house and bought some.

Apparently it is very good for your liver and contains no caffeine. Like a number of other Chinese teas, it is also good to drink with oily food, as it helps your body process the oil more effectively and thus you won't turn into a porker quite so easily (apparently). All the more reason to drink it, quite aside from the fact that it tastes very nice.

Ginger and Lemon Tea

Kirin have introduced a very nice new tea (pictured left) which, although I was initially a little bit reluctant to try, I now love. Being British, I'm pretty much a milk and sugar man when it comes to tea - although I no longer take sugar - so the idea of all these new fangled flavours like apple, orange and goodness knows what send a shiver down my spine. Earl Grey is wonderful, passion fruit a step too far.

But I digress. This new tea is very nice although there a two (and a bit) problems with it. I have long ago got over how weird it is to be drinking cold tea out of bottles, so that's not one of the problems. The first problem is that it is more expensive than most other bottled teas, yet there is less of it. That fancy bottle does not make up for losing 50ml of tea, thank you very much. The second problem is that these new fancy teas tend to have a limited run, which is annoying. The 'and a bit' problem is that it's a cold drink and the weather is now turning decidedly chilly.

But, I have started being inventive and I've found a way to (possibly) bypass all three problems. I bought some Twinings Ginger and Lemon teabags and mixed these - hot and in a cup - with some normal tea. Actually, the Twinings teabags aren't officially tea, but an 'infusion', whatever the hell that is. On their own, they're not really my cup of tea - literally - but combined with some normal tea, a very nice drink indeed can be made.

Now that I have a couple of jars of Branston Pickle and HP Sauce, a tin of rice pudding and a packet of custard in the cupboard, all I need now are a set of tweeds, a pair of slippers, some nice biscuits and an afternoon of cricket.