Taste-Test: Girl Scout Cookie-flavored milk from Nesquik
Now you can have your cookies and drink them, too, on account of Nesquik's glorious partnership with Girl Scouts of the USA: behold, Nesquik Girl Scouts Thin Mints-flavored milk and Caramel Coconut-flavored milk. Yeah, your favorite ephemeral cookies are being bottled up with chocolate milk to create what's basically the one-stop shopping of dairy treats.
But do they actually taste like the real deal? To find out, we tasted them. And then got our hands on some Girl Scout Cookies and some milk, mixed them together, and tasted that. It was a rough day.
Thin Mint Milk
This milk, which -- like its brother -- is low-fat chocolate milk-based, tastes very much like a mint chocolate chip milkshake (with no ice cream) instead of a cookie, in that the mint taste is pretty dominant. It definitely lacks the interesting bittersweetness that characterizes a Thin Mint, but it's got the same cooling mint flavor with an undertone of chocolate syrup.
Overall, a bit gummy and artificial-tasting, but it's still a relatively satisfying drink.
How does it stack up against our cookie-milk concoction? Much better. Turns out soaking Thin Mints in milk for a few hours makes the cookies taste delicious, but the milk kinda bitter.
Caramel Coconut Milk
Aside from the fact that this flavored milk doesn't carry either of the widely used names of Girl Scouts' #2 most popular cookie (Samoas or Caramel deLites), it actually does taste pretty strongly of caramel -- but the coconut flavor isn't as present. In fact, the flavor it resembles the most is butterscotch, which is a bit of a far cry from the cookie's humble origins as a purely coconut, caramel, and chocolate number.
So the echoes of the Samoa are there, but mostly this just reads as a melted butterscotch milkshake with chocolate on top.
How does it stack up against our cookie-milk concoction? Also better. Samoas don't really impart a lot of flavor due to the fact that half of their ingredients don't break down in milk. So it kinda just tasted like milk.
Verdict
While there's a lot to be said for the convenience of having two of your favorite things in the same bottle, it unfortunately doesn't translate that well to a final product here -- both of the milk drinks are a bit too sweet, and they lose the nuanced flavor of the cookies by just layering on the artificially-flavored syrup. If you like your milk with a healthy(???) dose of sugar, by all means, have at it.
But for those of us who prefer the texture of crisp cookies, chocolate melting on our tongues, and a cascade of thirst-quenching plain milk -- we'll stick to the real thing.
Nesquik's new milk products retail for $1.99 a pop and are available until December, or until supplies run dry.
Adam Lapetina is a food/drink staff writer, and probably won't eat cookies for a while. Read his musings on Twitter at @adamlapetina.