Journal of Contemporary Comparitive Snackology: Corn Tea Field Notes

I have been looking for ginseng tea, but I can never find it anywhere. It has dropped out from the top ten tea drinks to somewhere below the top forty, with lots of English teas and herb teas covering the shelves of the stores. I couldn't find ginseng tea, even in the Korean stores, so I decided to settle for corn tea -- also a yellow vegetable -- and try that. It's cheap, too.

Corn tea is nothing like corn soup. It has a roasted toasted flavor, but isn't like corn flakes or doritos, either. It tastes a lot like mugi-cha 麦茶, roasted barley tea, (which is a popular summer drink in Japan) but with a naturally sweeter, corn-like flavor after the first mugi-cha-impression.

It's no substitute for ginseng tea, but not bad. I wonder if the ancient civilizations of central america also discovered this drink.

The Korean name for it is oksusu-cha 옥수수차. The packaging you can see has added Japanese to the Korean for marketing to the one or two million Koreans in Japan and anyone else in Japan who might like to drink it.