Lawson VL Marron Latte

There are always a lot of appealing looking coffee beverages on offer in Japanese convenience stores. Unfortunately, they're all also usually full of sugar. While I'm fine to eat a little sugar, I have a problem with drinking it since liquids spend a lot less time on the tongue that solids. Nonetheless, the idea of a marron (chestnut) latte drew me in and I decided that it was worth 158 calories to give this cold coffee drink a try.

This 300 ml. (10 oz.) cup cost 100 yen ($1.20) at a Lawson 100 shop. the ingredients include brandy, coffee, dextrin, sugar water, and sugar. The ingredients list didn't include "kuri" or "marron" (words for "chestnut") that I could find. I'm guessing that the chestnut part came under the catch-all umbrella of "flavoring". It did smell like both chestnut and coffee, but the chestnut had the same olfactory presence of the types of syrups that get squirted into your coffee at upscale coffee houses.

I tried to peel back the top to get a picture of the coffee, but the plastic inner seal thwarted me. Trust me when I say, it  just looks like regular coffee and nothing special.

This had a unique flavor blend. The strongest element at first was the sweet chestnut flavor followed the the brandy and then the coffee. The three flavors come together very well to create a unique beverage. All of them are strong, but not overbearing. This tasted nice, but really is a bit like liquid candy because it is so very sweet.

I liked this quite a bit, and felt that the way in which all of the elements were balanced "worked". That being said, this isn't for coffee fans so much as for people who want an aspect of Mont Blanc, a dessert which has a heaping pile of chestnut paste that includes sugar and brandy, flavoring mixed in with coffee. If that sounds appealing, by all means, give this a try. If you're big into coffee that tastes greatly like coffee, this probably won't work for you.