Somewhere in the last decade, "kurang manis" stopped being a request and became a reflex. It gets said before the drink is named, in the same breath, with the same flatness as a table number. Nobody explains it. The uncle nods, or he does not, and either way the glass arrives.
It is a small phrase carrying a lot of weight — a national habit adjusting itself in real time, one order at a time, entirely outside any policy.
Which is the interesting part. Because policy did arrive, and it went somewhere else entirely.
The tax went after the bottle, not the glass
On 01/01/2025 the excise duty on sugar-sweetened beverages rose to 90 sen per litre, up from 50 sen — an 80% increase announced in Budget 2025 and reported at the time by The Edge.
The duty applies to manufactured beverages: carbonated drinks with added sugar, other non-alcoholic drinks above 5g of sugar per 100ml, milk-based drinks above 7g per 100ml, and fruit or vegetable juices above 12g per 100ml.
Read that list again and notice what is missing.
Your teh tarik is not a manufactured beverage. Neither is kopi peng from the kopitiam, or the sirap bandung at the corner stall, or the Milo dinosaur that arrives looking like a geology exhibit. The tax reaches the chiller cabinet. It does not reach the counter where most Malaysians actually drink.
So the price of a bottled isotonic drink moved, and the composition of the glass in front of you did not move at all.
Where the sugar in your glass comes from
Here is the thing people miss about a Malaysian drink: the sweetness usually is not sugar you can remove. It is the milk.
Condensed milk — sweetened, thick, shelf-stable — is not an addition to teh tarik. It is a structural ingredient. It supplies the body, the colour, the mouthfeel and the sweetness simultaneously. Take it out and you do not have a less sweet teh tarik. You have tea.
This is a colonial-era inheritance shared across the region: fresh milk did not survive a tropical supply chain, tinned milk did, and an entire drinks culture built itself on top of that constraint. Evaporated milk plus separately added sugar became the other common formula, which is the version where "kurang manis" genuinely works — the sugar is a variable, not the base.
Which is why the same two words produce wildly different results at different stalls. At one place kurang manis means half a spoon less. At another it means a different can. At a third it means a slightly offended look and no change whatsoever.
The Hokkien kopitiam vocabulary is more precise about this than Malay or English — siew dai for less sweet, kosong for none, gao or kaw for stronger — because the ordering system evolved alongside the drink. Most of us never learned it and improvise instead. Our explainer on what actually separates a kopitiam from a mamak covers how differently the two counters are built, and the drinks vocabulary is part of it.
What the numbers say
Data from the National Health and Morbidity Survey puts Malaysian adults at around 9 teaspoons of free sugar a day, of which roughly 4.5 teaspoons come from beverages. Half. From drinks alone.
The same survey found 54.4% of Malaysian adults were overweight or obese in 2023, up about ten percentage points over a decade, as CodeBlue reported.
And the tax? A 2026 assessment by ISIS Malaysia concluded the sugar-sweetened beverage tax has not meaningfully cut consumption — partly because manufacturers reformulated below the threshold rather than raising prices, and partly, one suspects, because so much of what Malaysians drink was never inside the tax's reach to begin with.
None of which is an argument for or against the duty. It is an observation that the sweetest thing most of us consume this week will be poured, not opened.
Why the phrase spread anyway
Nobody legislated kurang manis. It spread the way food habits actually spread here — sideways, through people ordering in front of other people.
Someone's father got a diabetes diagnosis. Someone read the label. Someone's colleague said it at lunch and the whole table said it the following week. Within a few years it had migrated from a specific request into a default setting, and stall owners adjusted because customers kept asking.
It also has a texture that a tax does not. Asking for kurang manis is public, repeated and social. An excise duty is a number inside a price you already paid.
There is a version of this that goes too far, and it is worth naming: a drink is not a moral document. The point of teh tarik was never nutrition. It is the reason to sit down, the reason the table is still occupied at 11pm, the thing your hands do while a conversation happens. The mamak table survived every other kind of modernisation — everything there went digital except the teh tarik — and it will survive this too.
The honest position is somewhere in the middle. Know that half your sugar is liquid. Order accordingly, most days. Then order the Milo dinosaur anyway on the days that call for it.
Kurang manis, after all, is not kosong. Malaysians negotiated it down. Nobody voted to give it up.
FAQ
Does Malaysia's sugar tax apply to teh tarik?
No. The excise duty applies to manufactured sugar-sweetened beverages — bottled and canned drinks meeting specific sugar thresholds. Drinks prepared to order at a kopitiam, mamak or stall are not covered.
How much is the sugar tax in Malaysia?
The excise duty on sugar-sweetened beverages rose to 90 sen per litre on 01/01/2025, up from 50 sen previously.
What does kurang manis actually change?
It depends on how the drink is built. Where sugar is added separately to evaporated milk, the barista can reduce it. Where the drink is built on sweetened condensed milk, the sweetness is part of the base — so the change is smaller, or the stall switches to a different preparation entirely.
How much sugar do Malaysians get from drinks?
National Health and Morbidity Survey data indicates adults consume around 9 teaspoons of free sugar daily, with roughly 4.5 teaspoons of that coming from beverages.
What is the difference between kurang manis and kosong?
Kurang manis means less sweet — a reduction. Kosong means without, typically no sugar and often no milk depending on the drink and the stall. If you want a specific outcome, say which one you mean rather than assuming.
