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Japanese convenience stores and vending machines seem to be embracing a slew of "drinkable" versions of foods you would normally take a utensil to. Between drinkable canned 10-spice curry and cheesecake in a carton, there's a lot of adventurous concepts for drinks to keep you on your toes.
The latest in that category of unusual "drinkable foods" is popular Japanese convenience store FamilyMart's "The Butter Drink." If you're wondering about the name, it pretty much is what it says it is! The Butter Drink is dessert drink meant to taste like a melted stick of rich butter. As you can imagine, the idea has been raising quite a few eyebrows online, so we had to pick ourselves up a cup (well, carton) to find out exactly how drinkable butter tastes.
The Butter Drink bills itself as a milk-based dessert beverage with the rich and creamy taste of melted New Zealand grass-fed butter.
Like a lot of this style of convenience store drink, The Butter Drink comes in a miniature cup-carton with a plastic lid (that reminds you you are about to drink The Butter Drink) that can be punctured with the accompanying straw. While that's how we had it, we removed the lid to check on the appearance of the buttery drink that has so many perplexed.
As it turns out, the beverage itself is basically pure white in color (after all, it's milk-based) but with a particularly thick consistency that was closer to yogurt.
As for the taste? The Butter Drink definitely lives up to its name, delivering a rich but slightly salty rush of buttery flavor. However, it's not as bold as drinking a melted stick of butter. The milk-based sweetness combined with the butter resulted in a taste more similar to butter cookies than butter itself. We actually found it quite similar to another drinkable food found at Japanese convenience stores--drinkable soft serve ice cream.
Overall we found The Butter Drink to be surprisingly more pleasant than we had expected it to be, but were thankful for its smaller size as it's a pretty heavy drink. It might be best to pair it with something bitter, or use as a topping for another dessert like coffee jelly.
If you're looking to take a dive into the bold uncharted waters of The Butter Drink, it's currently available at FamilyMart convenience stores throughout Japan. Alternatively, you could try out using Japan's popular butter ice cream bar as a butter substitute.
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You are what you consume.
The foods you eat, or the liquids you drink, the air you inhale, or the substance you shoot up your arms! it doesn't matter how you consume it, the outcome is the same.
I cannot imagine a worse drink.
Indians would enjoy it in their tea.
I decided to give this a try today; it was surprisingly tasty and quite drinkable. Fire in the hole in the toilet shortly afterward but that could have been the curry I had for lunch.
On my trip to Mongolia, I loved Yak Butter tea. I wonder if this is as tasty.
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