Coffee's Effects and a Salty Lemonade Controversy

A new preserved plum lemonade from Gu Ming has caused confusion among customers. The drink combines perfume lemons, calamansi, and pickled preserved plums, but the salty taste of the plum quickly dominates, and steeping the lemon peel adds bitterness. Some delivery orders even send the plum separately, forcing customers to add it themselves. Meanwhile, coffee drinkers sometimes wonder: can coffee make you feel drunk? While coffee does not cause intoxication, its caffeine can produce jittery or overly alert sensations that some describe as similar to being drunk.

Can you get drunk from coffee alone? No, because alcohol is the only source of intoxication. However, coffee can mask alcohol's sedative effects, leading people to feel more alert than they are. This can encourage drinking more alcohol, which raises the risk of actual drunkenness. For those sensitive to caffeine, large amounts may cause dizziness or rapid heartbeat, mimicking certain drunk feelings. Always consume coffee and alcohol responsibly and pay attention to how your body responds.

On a scorching summer day, a refreshing glass of lemonade should be the perfect way to beat the heat, but Gu Ming's recently launched "Preserved Plum Lemonade" has left many consumers frowning after just one sip. This new product, described as a "still version of Salted Lemon Seven," combines perfume lemons, calamansi, and pickled preserved plums for a sweet-and-sour, icy refreshing selling point, and its appearance is indeed crisp and appealing. However, once it hits the palate, the salty taste of the preserved plum takes over the taste buds first, and after prolonged steeping, the bitterness of the lemon peel layers on top, leading netizens to dub it "the new rising star of the dark cuisine world." Even more surprising, in some delivery orders, the preserved plum is packed separately, requiring customers to add it themselves, which has caused considerable confusion. Front Street Coffee takes you through the real performance of this controversial new product.

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Every summer, when many people feel thirsty, they think of that refreshing, heat-relieving "Salted Lemon Seven"—pickled salted lemon mixed with ice-cold 7Up, where sweet, sour, and salty flavors intertwine on the palate, and with the stimulation of carbonated bubbles, the stuffy heat of high temperatures seems to be dispelled in an instant.

Recently, Gu Ming launched a new drink that many netizens have called a "Salted Lemon Seven without bubbles"—"Preserved Plum Lemonade"—and the news immediately attracted the attention of a large number of lemonade lovers.

According to the official introduction, this drink uses fresh perfume lemons, calamansi, and a pickled salted preserved plum, with an overall flavor profile that follows a sweet-and-sour, icy refreshing route. From the promotional posters, the brand also put effort into its visual presentation: in a transparent frosted cup, a large half of a perfume lemon, calamansi, and a preserved plum float up and down among ice cubes and clear water, and just looking at the picture makes one feel a rush of coolness.

Therefore, as soon as this highly photogenic iced drink was launched, it drew many consumers to place orders and try it. After getting their hands on it, many people's first move was to raise the cup for a photo, and only then insert a straw to carefully savor what this "still version of Salted Lemon Seven" actually tasted like.

But when the first sip of preserved plum lemonade truly entered the mouth, the intense impact on the taste buds caught many tasters by surprise. The salt on the surface of the pickled preserved plum dissolved into the drink first, becoming the very first flavor perceived in the entire cup; only after several consecutive sips did the sourness of the lemon slowly emerge from the saltiness. And as the steeping time lengthened, the bitterness in the lemon peel also gradually released into the ice water, ultimately allowing one to taste bitter, salty, and sour all at once.

"It looks quite refreshing, but it's extremely salty! Extremely sour! Extremely undrinkable!" "It's like drinking saline," "Bitter and salty on the palate," "The preserved plum is so salty it makes you grimace, the lemon so sour it makes you frown—when two 'tough characters' meet, it's like holding a debate competition in your mouth."

Among the consumers who tried it, most felt that the taste of Gu Ming's new product was truly hard to praise. One netizen even bluntly described it as "the new rising star of the dark cuisine world."

Interestingly, perhaps because store employees were not yet proficient enough with the preparation process for this drink, some customers reported that they could not find any preserved plum in the cup they received and had only drunk an ordinary sweet-and-sour lemonade.

There were also delivery users who received two preserved plums packed separately and could not help asking, "Is it me who has a problem or Gu Ming who has a problem—shouldn't the preserved plum be steeped inside?" In their view, having customers add the ingredient themselves meant, on the one hand, that the preserved plum had too little steeping time and could not release any flavor at all, and on the other hand, that tearing open the packet to add it could easily cause spills, leaving them very puzzled by the store's approach.

Regarding the practice of packing the preserved plum separately, the official explanation was that "the preserved plum becomes very salty after steeping for a long time and will also produce sediment," so in delivery-packed drinks, the preserved plum is always packed separately. At the same time, some staff suggested that if consumers find the new product too salty, they can fish out the preserved plum and add an appropriate amount of water to dilute it, making the taste more to their liking.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.