The Ramblings of Guise Dugal

NaBloPoMo: Day Three (Delayed to 05/07/09)

Summer is the time to cool off and chill out, while simultaneously burning up and looking hot, and there are few better ways than refreshing drinks in the sunshine. I’m not talking about the traditional summer drink of Pimm’s, although if I can I will get around to that before the summer is out, because this must be shared with my American friends who are sadly missed out on this wonderful pasttime.

The best way that I could imagine cooling off with a drink is to be sat with a cool milk tea (pearl tea, bubble tea, boba, whichever you prefer to call it), especially with a sweet flavour. It was having blueberry milk tea that led me to desperation on returning to the UK. Boba hasn’t really started out here, so I can’t just pop out and get one, and I can’t really make one as I lack large tapioca pearls (hard to find over here) and a blender – our last blender sadly died from too many milkshakes. So, instead, I looked to the milkshake places in my home town.

I’ve always loved milkshakes since I was a kid, from the many flavours of Crusha syrup (lime milkshakes for the total win) to the Nesquik rabbits call of “Have another Nesquik and blame it on the bunny” beginning the slippery slide to paying attention to secret messages from rabbits. Sure, it starts innocent enough with powdered milkshake flavourings but soon you are looking at stopping a bringing about of the apocalypse.

These milkshake places are not few and far between, in fact they are few and right next door to one another. Shake King and Shake Shack, are one either face of a street corner, sitting opposite the town centre’s McDonalds. They both have the same schtick, about 150 flavours of milkshake based primarily on what they can shove in a blender with milk and ice cream. These blendings range from fresh fruit to chocolate bars to cookies and cakes.

Shake King and Shake Shack (the orange-coloured) shop in Weston-super-Mare

With as much similarity as the two places have, there are some subtle but noticeable differences that lead to people choosing loyalties. For the sake of transparancy and honest disclosure, I admit now that I frequent Shake Shack a lot more than Shake King, but I’ll try to be justifiably so. This is slightly experiment based For SCIENCE, but it’s a rather biased experiment.

When I first went for a milkshake, I was desperate for blueberry, but neither place did just blueberry or had it in stock for smoothies, so I was told that Blueberry Muffin or Nutrigrain would have the same taste, and this brings us to the question: I’m going to drink a milkshake made with a base ingredient that is already a solid object, how will this work? In all honesty, for the nutrigrain and muffin, it didn’t, and for a lot of products that are very solid it has a great degree of variation, some chocolate bars will blend easily whilst others will leave chucks, but some cookies will just becomes specks amongst semi-liquid in seconds. Sadly, I’m still lacking my blueberry to this date.

This actually lead to the following conversation a few days later:
Milkshake Maker: Why not try the nutrigrain blueberry shake, it’s pretty much the same thing…
Guise: No it’s not. I’ve tried. It’s about as much the same thing as being able to give yourself head or getting head from a cute girl. Sure it’s kinda satisfying for the moment, gets the job done and you can maybe convince yourself it’s the same thing, but at the end you come to terms with the fact that you are left feeling disappointed and with a scuzzy taste in your mouth.
Milkshake Maker: O_O
Guise: I guess I’ll just go for Oreo shake then.

The first aspect to look in to is the milkshakes themselves, as there are indeed subtle differences between two exact same products. Oreo shakes are actually really good and, being a milkshake needing a solid object to be completely broken up properly, is a good basis for comparison.

It may be a very simple difference, but Shake Shack blends a scoop of ice with their milk shakes which thins the ice cream to a more drinkable solidity and also further chills the drink out, they also have the thought to ‘double blend’ the drinks more often, adding in extra milk or shifting the contents for breaking up in blending. As a result, the Shake Shack tends to offer a colder drink with a flavour spread more evenly, and with usually less chunks throughout (though for the Oreo, both reduced the cookie to powder in seconds).

The next aspect is where they put the milkshake, seeing as you have to drink it from somewhere and you probably want to be walking around in the sun enjoying it. This is where the places stand out from one another. Shake King opts for the more fast food style lidded cup, with their name and logo printed on the side, whilst Shake Shack go for the clear plastic cup with the dome on the top. I’m not sure if Shake King may have paid more for branded goods and ability to show their logo, but I happen to think the clear pastic is, ironically, more aesthetically pleasing. Besides, isn’t it one of those marketing mantras that if people can recognise a product without seeing the brand, then it’s a success?

Maybe it’s just me, but I know which I prefer the look of. Volume wise, they actually take about the same amount to fill, though I’ve only tried comparing with the regular size drinks.

Finally, Price wise, Shake King charges 40p (60c) more for their drinks at each size than Shake Shack, both places offer loyalty schemes for free drinks after a set number of purchases.

The first of these to discover boba will, quite likely, rule the chilled milky drink part of my soul for eternity though, regardless of any other factor.

TL;DR Changing the question of “will it blend?” to include “…with milk and ice cream?”