Wednesday, August 21, 2024

experimenting with drinks

pozdrowienia


well, no. this is perhaps not going to be as exciting as the title suggests, look you see. an implication of the chosen title would be drinks as in drinks, you know, booze. perhaps sadly not. it may well be that i have a reasonable track record in that form of experimentation over the years, i write thinking of that time i finally got my hands on absinthe. also in recent years, i suppose, but only when my chums Butch and, as the central protagonist, Eddie Baby have insisted. maybe another time, another place.

so this is all about non-alcoholic drinks, then. or "soft" drinks, i suppose, as some call them. never really understood that, as there are plenty of alcohol based drinks one could get and be called "soft" for drinking, at least in some circles. to further limit (or dampen) any excitement you have about reading this, well, i am not sure that much experimentation has happened. 


recently i found myself in a provincial town, or if you will hamlet, of the flatlands of Lincolnshire. no, i would not care to name the specific one, and i am not at all sure why you would wish to know. from a mixture of boredom, necessity and curiosity i took a stroll around my (then) new surroundings and found one of them 'Eastern European' shops. which, if you don't know, does what it says right in the name given, as in is a shop what sells products imported from nations to the east of Europe. alas not all that far east, for i really do fancy giving Russian fags (as in cigarettes) a try one day. 

perhaps to my shame, but ultimately i would hope seen as innocence not ignorance, i had an idea that it was either a Czech, Polish or even perhaps Lithuanian shop. so as to avoid any unnecessary suspense, turned out to be Polish. the proprietor clocked that i was trying to work out what was what from images on packaging (mostly) rather than reading, so greeted me and asked if i was checking out some Polish treats. which i was, although i did not know the specifics of that until he said. 

as it happens i did try some of the sweets, and they were quite class. but title of the post refers to drinks, which was mostly what i went in for. it was quite hot, so it was, what with us getting a few really, really hot days of summer as July became August. 


no, i suppose, to be fair there wasn't all that much experimentation with drinks, for the names of the ones i tried all had the names of them on the labels in English. indeed, or for the record, i did try a few types of flavour of this "Tymbark" i found, but i believe two (2) shall suffice to showcase here. 

yes, as is so often the case with decisions i make, the pricing of these was attractive. quite exotic sounding flavoured drinks, in glass bottles with an unusual, intricate yet simplistic ring pull cap for 59p a go? i shall have some of that, thanks. 

for a sort of quasi review type thing, which (granted) some of you may be expecting, well. they were all really good - lovely, as point of fact - but all appeared (or seemed) to have the same taste. or flavour, if that's a more appropriate word. this flavour was distinctly and most decidedly of the apple which i  believe all of them stated they contained. maybe this is due to my natural sense of taste being if not destroyed then battered by cigarettes, but overall it was all apple. 


it was with a measure of disappointment that this was the case with even the "apple lime cactus" one, with me being quite excited by the cactus element. no, i had no idea that Poland was a home to such a level of cactus (cacti?) that they made drinks out of it. if it is so, then it is that they make apple flavour drinks from it. now that i think i seem to remember (or recall) a "cactus" drink off of Lidl that was alos not really as exciting as it sounded. still, you have to have a go. 

quite a good year it has been, for me, in discovering all sorts of different, or new to me, drinks that are not of an alcohol based nature. earlier in the year, regular readers shall recall, i embarked on quite the odyssey to the other side of the (known) world, where i experienced the merry delights of L & P. i do indeed look forward to having more of it, one day. 

right, well, i am sure you have things to do that are not reading this, and i probably have something or other to do which is not writing this. 




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





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