Koatji review

My week with the snobbiest high-priced luxury milk

The algorithm did it. This all started when a piece by tariro on quiet luxury milk appeared on my timeline. Let me caveat this whole thing by saying I’ve shied away from the product review category of content creation because don’t we have enough strangers on the internet telling us what to eat and drink, where to shop, and who to be? We do.

However, when a talented writer requests a review of a purchase you made inspired by an excellent piece they wrote, who am I to decline?

Also, you should know I’m a soft Southerner who eats everything. I’m lucky in that I have no food allergies to speak of or none that I pay serious enough attention to that prevent me from eating or drinking ANYTHING. The blessing and the curse.

Thick thighs save lives

Don’t nobody want a stick but a dog

You need some meat on ‘dem bones

^^^ a collection of Southern sayings that were repeated to me unironically for the entirety of my youth.

We’re raised different in the South and that’s just how it goes. But I’ve traded my southern comfort for the slick city and the first thing I noticed upon arrival was how skinny and hard-working everyone is. The legs on the women in particular are skinnier than what seems humanly possible. But I guess that in part can be traced to ozempic, sooooo much running, and quiet luxury fake milk.

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I like that GenZ Substack has their finger on the pulse. My god, y’all are lightening fast at picking up trends, processing, and composing thoughtful commentary. As an aging millennial, I feel nothing but pride seeing the digital foundation we laid for the kids translate into smart, thoughtful, oft-sassy opinionated takes. It’s my sincere hope this year for all of you that your efforts lead to real monaaaaay, it’s only right. While I will still bemoan your generation’s fashion choices (we did it first in ‘92), your politics (y’all have your whole lives to be conservative, why now?), and inability to do anything without your phones, I have a deep affinity for my kid siblings in internet obsession.

I’m not so into designer labels or expensive clothes but fancy water from the French Alps? A $20 chocolate bar wrapped in gold encasing from Ghana? Sign me up. Overpriced consumables are my kind of carrying on.

I got on the tech carousel several years ago and was thrown off against my will with many of my compatriots. But I bounced back on another tech carousel which is actually a nearly defunct version from the 70s that recently installed a new engine and repainted the horses in hopes of attracting a new crop of “kids” who are into vintage things.

All this is to say, I’ve got some tech money to blow. And what could be a better use of all those zeros and ones than dipping my toe in the quiet luxury pool of high-priced fake milk. So here’s my review.

As a lifelong 2%er and a living, breathing dairy queen who did a proper spell in Berlin, I KNOW good dairy. The Europeans do dairy better than anyone else on the planet and if you don’t believe me, you should go to Europe to learn for yourself. There is NO substitute for real milk, cheese, and butter no matter what the vegans tell you is possible with cashews and almonds.

So for this review to be worth anything at all, I needed to judge the milk in the following categories on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being, burn this and 10 being, I will live my life lactose-free for the foreseeable future:

• Stand-alone strength

  Milk does a body good and if you’re going to be bold enough to openly drink any kind of milk in the year 2025, it has to be good enough to pour a glass and drink straight on its own.

• An add-in for cereal, oatmeal muesli, and granolas

  Can I splash this over my weekend Fruit Loops during Saturday morning re-runs of A Different World?

• Smoothies and shakes

  Self-explanatory

• Cooking and baking

  I’m a shit baker but a very good cook. Most people are either or and I guess as far as life skills go, I’d rather be able to cook myself a meal than to bake myself a cake to celebrate. While I couldn’t commit to baking anything with this “milk” for this review, I can whip up a decent batch of pancakes so that’s what I went with.

Ready for the results? Drop down and get your eagle on:

Koatji review

Stand alone: 7/10

This must be what it feels like to be Gwenyth Paltrow, when every bite and sip you take just feels clean? This is a new sensation to me. I’m healthy-ish and eat a good measure of greens mainly for the purpose of countering butter and fat.

I wanted this to taste “off” so that I could complain about the scam of overpriced awful- tasting designer milk substitute, but such is not the case. Y’all it’s really good.

There’s no sugar in it so it’s not sweet. But it does taste deliciously clean with the slightest hint of oat flavor. I don’t know what kojic acid really is or tastes like extracted out by itself, but if I had to rate this as a drink I would drink stand-alone when I wanted a glass of milk I’d give it a 6.8/10. It’s not milk milk, nor do I think it was invented/intended (?) to be consumed as a drink on its own. But let’s say my lactose-intolerant little nephew was over for a sleepover. I would 100% serve this to him spiked with a little organic honey because he’s TT’s baby.

Add in for cereal: 5/10

On their website, Koatji has a bunch of recipes for you to try. Most of the recipes are drink mixes, so again…my understanding of this milk substitute is that it’s really made to stand in for your typical oat drink or almond milk that in most cases has a bunch of crazy ingredients that render it almost as upsetting to your system as regular dairy would be. Anyway, this is a real test taste and it’s 2025 now, so eating and drinking whatever you want however you want is squarely in the “in” category.

I tried this out as milk for cereal. I was fresh out of fruit loops this week but did have a morning granola on Tuesday before work. It was fine as a stand-in for milk, but I probably wouldn’t use this as my primary cereal milk as I personally prefer the taste of 2% in cereal/granola grains mainly for the effect of the leftover milk in the bowl once the cereal is finished. If I had to give Koatji a rating for this purpose I’d give it a 5/10. This would probably be a second or third choice if I discovered I was out of regular milk and needed something in a flash. For transparency’s sake I did pour some regular milk into this bowl which produced the desired result.

Post-workout protein smoothie: 10/10

I skipped the workout due to the snowstorm. I thought it was the thought that counts? Anyway, this is the best use case for this milk. 10/10 no notes.

Yes, I have the old Nutribullet because it still works, and do not tell Nene Leakes I have a white refrigerator, please. This is a rental and is what came with my new spot but you can help me buy a new one by pledging some cash for when I turn on paid.

Mix in for cooking: 8/10

Milk and butter give baked goods a certain richness that is actually not that hard to substitute with plant-based versions. I whipped up this recipe and swapped out the milk but kept everything the same and could not taste the difference. The pancakes were deliciously fluffy and soft and whatever healthful benefits the Koatji provided were most certainly canceled out by the butter and sugar that the recipe called for. I didn’t give it a 10/10 because that feels a bit too earnest. This is still kojic acid oat milk to the tune of $8/QT (by comparison a half gallon of 2% organic milk will run you about $6).

Overall score: 7.5/10

I don’t know if 7.5 is a compelling enough result to RUN out and buy this but I enjoyed this Koatji experience and will definitely finish the additional 5 cartons that arrived in my first order (at present you can only buy a 6-pack on the site). And there you have it folks!

This post was unfortunately not sponsored. But brands do feel free to send me any free product. I’m still on the corporate hamster wheel, so happy to exchange words for funds. Chow for now.