We have seen many viral coffee drink trends come and go over the past few years here at Sprudge, amd despite their seeming incongruity, most of them have been, dare I say, good? Everyone remembers dalgona coffee’s moment, but then came espresso and orange juice and watermelon iced coffee, all of which were certifiably delicious. The avocado latte and the scallion latte had mixed results. And the espresso martini is objectively terrible, and you’ll never hear me say otherwise.
Even so, coffee’s track record with playing well with weird ingredients punches well above its weight class. But the latest trend finds a bedfellow for coffee that is a little more familiar: tea. The drink of the summer in South Korea is called Ashotchu and it combines espresso with iced tea.
It’s perhaps not the most inspired pairing and maybe it’s a little on the nose, but good is good. Coffee and tea are traditionally seen more or less as equals much in the same way, say, whiskey and gin are. They’re “base spirits,” used to build a variety of drinks. You can sub out one for the other—using tea instead of espresso make a London Fog, for instance—rarely do they mingle in the same glass, though. But split-base cocktails can be a delicious thing, and so too can coffee and tea find common ground.
Ashotchu seems like an easy win. As reported by The Chosun Daily, the drink pairs a shot of espresso with iced tea, often with a fruit flavor like lemon or peach for a nice caffeinated summer refresher. The drink itself isn’t entirely new. Ashotchu first started appearing online back in 2018, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that it really picked up steam, piggybacking on the “modisumer” trend—a portmanteau of “modify” and “consumer”—whereby customers would create their own off-the-menu concoctions.
Due to its popularity, a handful of Korean coffee chains like Mega MGC Coffee, Paik’s Coffee, Compose Coffee, EDIYA Coffee, and bakery Tous Les Jour all added Ashotchu to their regular menu. Another coffee chain, A Twosome Place, added the drink to its menu in June, selling over 900,000 of them in just two months, making it “the fastest-selling item in the brand’s history,” per The Chosun Daily.
Not everyone is sold on the pairing, though. Some have called it “the worst combination, ruining both coffee and iced tea” or “a strange concoction with mismatched flavors.” But it’s hard to see how Ashotchu could actually be bad. Maybe it’s not exactly mind-blowing, but the floor seems pretty high.
A lemon iced tea with a nice washed Ethiopia seems like a perfect pairing of like-minded floral and acid-forward components. Or maybe a peach iced tea with a deeply fruity anaerobic fermented, natural processed jammer could be truly transcendent. Frankly my only complaint is that I’m just now finding out about this trend. Peach season is wobbling on its last leg and they’re pumpkin spicing pretty much everything already, so it’s just bad timing. I mean, I’m still going to drink them, because my own personal hell (read: Texas) still probably has a few 100+ degree days lurking around the corner for me. But for the rest of you moderately climated, you may just have to wait until 2025.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
