Monster Energy

I don’t know if this is luck or not, but I managed to find another “Dragon Tea” from Monster, so of course I just HAD to try it. I still really hate the forced Chinese style dragon motif on the cans – I mean, white tea and China? Sure. Dragonfruit though?? That’s a stretch, guys…

And leave it to Monster to bring fucking virgins serving tea to Chinese Emperors into their copy writing. That honestly got the biggest eye roll from me.

All of that said, this actually is the best tasting flavour of the three though. It’s sweet and fruity, and more like a lightly tangy dragon fruit flavoured punch than a tea but at least it doesn’t taste like ass or cigarette ash. There was something a little uncomfortably familiar and not entirely normal tasting about it though, and it certainly took me a while to land on WHAT that thing was but eventually it clicked to me that some aspect of this flavour tasted really heavily like some type of lipstick that I’ve owned in the past. Not BAD, but cosmetic for sure…

Still probably preferable to me over something like a coffee if I’m in an energy pinch but otherwise this is a pass from me.

I thought the Green Tea flavour of Monster was bad, but this one is much worse…

It tastes thin and watery, but with a weird sourness to the top of the sip and a finishing note and aftertaste that reminds me too heavily of cigarette ash. Don’t think I can finish this one.

Also, is it weird to anyone else that they chose to STILL use the stereotypical Asian dragon motif even though Yerba Mate isn’t Asian? Or just me?

Saw this while grocery shopping today and couldn’t resist picking it up.

The marketing is just… yikes.

It looks like a very stereotypical Westernized take on something “Asian inspired”. Plus, the other flavour they’re carrying as part of this line up is a yerba mate blend, and it uses the same weird dragon motif. When I looked this up on the Monster website, to add it to Steepster, I did the BIGGEST eye roll because the copy writing for the product description references the tired “Shennong discovered tea with a leaf blew into his cup” myth. Ugh.

Flavour wise, this is unsurprisingly not good. You know when you get “green tea” scented perfumes/body washes and things of that nature? There’s a very specific kind of scent that those products usually have that isn’t really accurate at all the the real flavour of green tea; it’s hard to describe but if you’ve ever smelled one of those products I feel like you probably know EXACTLY what I mean. This tastes like how that fake sweet/floral and cosmetic green tea smells. Like, fake green tea…

It’s actually a LOT more light and refreshing that I would have ever pictured a Monster energy drink to me – and if you’re not a green tea drinker and you’re sort of wanting that idolized commercial green tea type of profile I imagine this could be dangerously chuggable. Especially because so many energy drinks just taste like ass. That was the primary reason I stopped drinking them years ago – they just NEVER tasted good.

I picked up the yerba mate flavour too – so I’m very curious to see how they approached that flavour profile…