Review: Rude Health Dairy-Free Milks

New vegan organic plant milks: oat milk, rice milk, almond milk. Organic producer Rude Health has had a rebrand (looking good) and have expanded their range. These dairy-free milks are available from supermarkets and independents, in the ambient (long life) aisle. They have some stiff competition though, so how do they compare?

The almond milk tastes excellent... the only trouble is, it's not almond milk. We hate mislabelling, so the idea of selling rice milk as almond milk raises our hackles. Sure, this stuff has almonds in, at 1%! With at least 10% rice solids in rice milk though, we reckon the rice to almond ratio is about 10 to 1. Not good. It does taste of almonds, because rice is so neutral.

The rice milk is made with whole brown rice (and no almonds...). Brown rice doesn't sound appealing, but this is 'A' grade rice milk. We've often bemoaned the fact that nobody else makes rice milk as good as Rice Dream, but now somebody has! This is delicately sweet, smooth, neutral and has the perfect amount of body - it's a tiny bit thicker than Rice Dream. 

Rice milk doesn't get better than this! (Greg Wallace will probably never utter these words...)

The oat milk is also first class. No porridge taste, not grittiness or flouryness, not too thick or too gloopy. It's not as neutral as the rice milk - you can taste the oats, but the flavour is mild and mellow. This oat milk is also mildly sweet. We wonder if they've germinated the oats to achieve this, in the way rice milk is made. This is definitely one of the best oat milks we've tested.

We tried the oat milk in tea. It whitens well, doesn't need so much it cools the tea, and doesn't taint the tea flavour. All good. You can taste the oats, but it's not off-putting.

This would no doubt be a 5 star review but for the fact that Rude Health blew it on the almond milk trick. It's rare that a new range of plant milks arrives that is this good - as good as the established top brands that have been refining their art for years. Put some more almonds in the almond milk and they could be dairy-free champions.

The Good: First class plant milks
The Not-so-good: The almond milk is rice milk

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Veganoo Score: ★★★★☆
Rude Health - Dairy Free Milk Range - Oat / Almond / Brown Rice

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Footnote: Ingredients

Here are the ingredients panels from the packs we reviewed.

Almond Milk

Brown Rice Milk

Oat Milk

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