Teh Botol The National Drink of Indonesia

Teh Botol, the national drink of Indonesia, comes in a bottle, sold by the roadside, contain so much sugar, and is drank from a plastic bag mixed with dirty ice cubes and cost around $0.50.

Teh Botol Sosro

I started drinking Teh Botol in high school. It was a perfect drink to quench the thirst after eating Mie Bloon, the roadside noodle which my then Math teacher claimed used rat meat as its toppings.

Diabetes inducing sugar and rat meat diet, your stomach can take anything when you are just 15yo, I guess.

I loved it then, and I loved it more during my Uni time. Almost any food I ate outside would be accompanied by Teh Botol Sosro.

My love for it continued well into my office cubicle life but stopped when I moved to Singapore. I thought this was it. A big sacrifice (in the form of a bottle) to pursue a better life.

All Curing Power

My cousin Wani and I also believed that Teh Botol had curing power. Then, we, the intellects, suspected this might be just us being doozies. But it didn’t stop us from ordering Teh Botol as the first step of curing anything from headache to heartache.

I lived for months without it and made sure I drank plenty of it whenever I visited home, but then one day, I saw it in Singapore. In a sushi-train restaurant of all the places, being sold for $3. That’s at least six times I used to pay for the same thing in Jakarta. Gah!

These days it’s easy to find The Botol outside of Indonesia. Even some Malay restaurants in Singapore stock it. For a marked-up price, of course. But I am no longer the 15 years old who could live only with high-dose sugar intake and ate questionable meat by the roadside.  So I kept Teh Botol (or sometimes its’ substitute, Teh Kotak) as a weekend treat, especially after a shitty work week.

When Fafa came into my life, I introduced him to Indonesian food, which he loves and Teh Botol, which he is now addicted to. It’s a part of Indonesian culture to drink Teh Botol. You haven’t tasted Indonesia yet before you drink this sugar-loaded-ache-curing bottled drink.

Follow me on Instagram @KultureKween for more recent updates.