Asahi Ultra Fiber + Vitamin C

 I'd been seeing this "ultra fiber" drink in Lawson 100 (where most goods, including this drink, are 100 yen/$1.13) for quite some time and wondered how one gets fiber into a carbonated beverage. I also wondered what it would taste like. Given the color of the beverage, I thought it might taste like orange, but you just never know what evil lurks in a Japanese soft drink.

This is made by Asahi, which is better known for its beer. The marketing information for this talks about how irregular eating habits can cause problems. It isn't overtly stated, but I'm guessing they mean hassles with your plumbing which cause you not to be able to... well, you know what one needs added fiber for. It talks about the "clean sweetness" of the taste and says that besides promoting regularity, it gives you 7,500 mg of Vitamin C.

Before I get to the actual description of this drink, let me say that it has the worst color choices for its label. It's white lettering on orange and hard as hell to read. I had the worst time finding the URL for their web site because it was so tiny and difficult to read. It didn't make the ingredients list a picnic either, but this is a zero calorie drink and had a lot of the expected chemical components like dextrose, Sucralose, and Acesulfame K. The orange color comes to us courtesy of paprika. The flavorings are not specified so I'm flying by the taste buds only.

The smell of this is slightly medicinal. It reminded me of a fruity Alka Seltzer scent. I had a lot of trouble pinning down the fruit it vaguely reminded me of. It's either peach or apricot, but probably closer to the latter. The taste isn't like the juice of that fruit though. It's more like (vigorously carbonated) seltzer water with a few twists of fruit juice and a Vitamin C tablet dissolved in it.

This was just plain weird. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't good. It really did feel like I was drinking some sort of relatively inoffensive medicine. I certainly wouldn't recommend it as something one might drink for the sheer enjoyment of it. However, if your pipes are clogged and you don't want to keep scarfing down bran or you want to try to drink something with a chance of making you feel full for awhile, it wouldn't hurt to give this a try.