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I know that tea connoisseurs are probably aghast at how tea is packaged for the masses these days - in bottles, powder, and now in single-serving sachets. Maybe this is me just being a total cheapskate but I like tea in its instant, cheap, mass-produced form. I used to subsist on bottled milk tea and cookies from a nearby 7-11 when I still had a day job. Sure, mass-produced tea probably no longer has any of the health benefits that “real” tea has, and it probably doesn’t contain any real tea leaves either. But I’m not about to spend over a hundred pesos on a cup of tea. Besides, I like smothering tea in lots of milk and sugar, even the expensive kind. So the “common” tea suits me just fine.

Today I saw that we had some of the new Lipton milk tea somewhere in the house and I got to try them out for the first time. Well, I only tried out two of the three kinds we have - the Gold one and the Vanilla-flavored one. I tried out the Vanilla-flavored tea first, thinking that I would like it better than the others. While I’m a sucker for anything vanilla, I found the tea a little too sweet and the vanilla flavor a little too overpowering. I could barely taste the tea. I liked the Gold one more because it reminds me so much of the black tea I had in Bangkok and Laos; drinking it almost made me feel as though I was there.

In any case, I love how they come in convenient little sachets that you can carry around with you just in case you ever come across a styrofoam cup and hot water somewhere. Highly recommended for cheapskate, occasional-tea lovers.