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We came, we saw, we tasted. On Saturday, everybody who had reserved for the week before's Miracle Berry tasting party finally convened at The Lab on Jiaozhou Lu. Before us was a spread of everything from bittermelon to beans, tomatoes to tabasco sauce... and of course, lemons. Lots of lemons.
For 100RMB, we were given a Guinness Foreign stout, free run of the food table and two tiny little red berries which were supposed to change our lives.
True talk: they didn't really change our lives. Some of us had to chomp down both before it would actually get our flavor buds tingling. When it did start working, it wasn't quite the drastic taste altering we were hoping for. Lemons started to taste like lemon candy, bittermelon lost its bitterness and Guinness hit our tongue like a mix of Tsingtao and watered down coffee (blegh). Vinegar still had a kick, tequila was still gross, and Tabasco sauce was still spicy (which made us wish we'd thought through that more before chugging it). Goat cheese was delicious, but we couldn't remember if it was just because we always find goat cheese delicious.
The organizers said that the berries were from Southern China and they weren't sure when they'd get their next shipment in. Too bad, we would've liked to experiment more - maybe the life-changing part of this electric miracle berry acid test would've hit us if we'd had more to coat our tongues. We guess we'll have to wait until friends from the U.S. come over with some of these miraculin tablets.
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The organizer told me that this batch was notably weaker than previous batches they'd received. So I bought some extras and ate 4 berries at once -- that made for a much more powerful effect. :)
Besides the lemon, the goat cheese was definitely different -- tasted a bit like cheesecake -- and the cherry tomatoes were much sweeter. I didn't notice a big difference in much else.