Asahi Blueberry Cheese Tart Bar

Though Asahi is best known for its beer, the "Asahi Group" makes other products including snacks, personal care products, and soft drinks. I don't drink beer, but, after tasting this bar, I think maybe they should stick to what they're best known for.

My expectations fo this were quite low considering that it's a nutritional bar/meal replacement type of thing. I didn't expect it to taste great, particularly since it's only 191 calories and a fairly dense bar. The information on the front tells me that this is 9% cheese and .29% blueberry. Though the picture on the package shows a ton of full berries lying around and embeddedin the bar, the flavor and appearance of them is completely absent in the actual bar.

The aroma of this is distinctly cheesy, and not in a good way. It is more like a heavily distilled processed cheese smell. Imagine what it would smell like if you boiled some plastic-covered slices until the odor intensified and you'll get a sense of it.

The taste is pretty funky. There's the odd discordant sense of sweetness mixed with a traditionally savory cheese (Gouda). The texture is crumbly and dense. It looks chalky, but it is more like a shortbread. The bar is very fatty and has 10 grams of fat. There is little to distinugish the "crust" of the tart from the filling in terms of taste or texture.

This is more of a cheese cookie thing that a tart or even a meal bar. It's the sort of weird food that people either have a taste for or they don't. I actually liked the texture, but I did not like the taste or smell.

Note: This was part of my free ZenPop snack box.

Mintia Rich Grapefruit

Prolific movie reviewer Roger Ebert once said something to the effect that what he wanted out of a movie was for it to be something that he had not seen before. Given how many movies he digested as a movie reviewer, this would become an increasingly difficult bill to fill. The more active experience you have with something, the harder it becomes for the next experience to impress you.

Note that I say "active" experience and not "experience". Most of us sleepwalk through our sensory lives. We wake up and barely taste the expensive coffee we pick up at the local coffee chain shop. Well, when I say, "we", I mean other people. I make an active effort to attend to the taste, smell, and texture of every food I consume. This is the gift and curse of being a food blogger, as I'm sure Roger Ebert can't watch a movie without attending to various details that most of us pedestrian viewers fail to notice (and therefore can just enjoy our movie without any extraneous nonsense).

In no way am I suggesting that my sense of taste is refined from attending to all that I eat, but rather that it becomes pretty jaded. Things that people who are not food reviewers enjoy will be those which I find lacking because I'm paying perhaps too much attention. One of the reasons that foodies, and I'm not a "foodie", but more of a "junk foodie", seek food further and further afield of their usual scope is that they're bored. They start to think that "different" is "better" because this is valuable to them personally, just as Roger Ebert embraced and endorsed movies which I found unappealing because, for him, "different" was "better".

That's a big intro for a review of the Japanese equivalent of Tic-Tacs, but I'm making a point about all Japanese food and snacks. These are awesome in part because they aren't the little smooth pellets that shook in ones pocket throughout childhood, though they do essentially fill the same niche. The main difference is that Mintia plays into the higher Japanese tolerance for sour things and a mixture of savory and sweet together. Tic-Tacs play closer to sweetness, which suits American palates better.  Mintia tends to reflect basic Japanese cuisine's flavors. Japanese people like things less sweet, more sour, and more bitter because they're used to it. Jaded palates like mine like these things a lot because they're bored.

That being said, I like Mintia because the flavors are usually pretty intense. Every tiny little sugar-free pellet of this "rich grapefruit" flavor is sour without making your mouth pucker and sweet enough for balance. It evens tastes like "real" grapefruit to a fair extent, though without any of the intense bitterness of the real deal. The first ingredient is "grapefruit sugar" followed by a scary cocktail of sweeteners that the likes of me does not mind but those that are sensitive to them may want to avoid. The packaging tells us that there are some sort of grapefruit chips in them as well as some sort of "grapefruit aroma" addition. They do smell good, though I doubt many people other than myself will be sniffing at them. You are, after all, normal rather than a bizarre junk foodie.

My only "problem" with Mintia, and I've never had a bad experience with them, is that I tend to want to eat a whole package at once. At 24 calories per 50 teeny tiny pellets, this isn't much of an expense calorically, and at around 100-120 yen ($1.23-$1.47) per pack, it's not hard on the wallet. It is, however, hard on the tongue as these are closer to the rough texture of a pressed powdered candy than the slick smoothness of a Tic-Tac and tend to be abrasive on your sensitive body parts. I'd definitely buy these again, but I'd have to wait until after my tongue has healed. 

Mintia Summer Powerful Plum

Beavis and Butthead is coming back to MTV, and this may seem like a strange association, but I sampled this Mintia in honor of their return. If you weren't around during this particular era, the dynamic dimwits used to hawk Mintia in Japan. I'm not really much of a mint fan, which is odd since I've become such a gum fan and the two tend to go hand in hand and I never tried Mintia before this. However, I do like Beavis and Butthead, and you can reach whatever conclusions that you like about me as a consequence of that admission. I'm secure enough in my intellect not to feel that liking really dumb comedy reflects poorly on me. Really. I'm not insecure. Nope.

I chose this flavor because it's about as Japanese a flavor as one is going to get. There are little blobs of what look like umeboshi (pickled plum) dancing over a Hiroshige-style wave. The little banner on the right is reminiscent of those that hang outside of shops, particularly when they advertise Japanese shaved ice (kakigori). I found this at Family Mart convenience store for 120 yen ($1.54) and snapped it up in a rush before heading back to work.

Plum can be a bit of a risky flavor in Japan, as I learned when a student once gave me a hard candy flavored with "ume". It was a horrendous mix of sour vinegar flavors and sweet sugary flavor with harsh plum. When I popped the top on this, it smelled funky, but also familiar. I recognized it as a scent reminiscent, but far from identical to umeboshi. This was worrying, but I gamely tried them anyway. Each mint is extremely tiny. In fact, I'd wager they are 1/3 to 1/2 the size of a Tic Tac. I had to eat about 3 at once to get a sense of the taste.

As for the flavor, it has the slight tang and sour flavor of pickled plum with a decent level of sweetness. It's an odd combo, but it works. In fact, it worked so well that I rubbed a sore spot on my tongue sucking on these things repeatedly. They're pressed powder and a bit abrasive so if you stupidly overdo it, like I did, then you're going to regret it. I was surprised at how much I loved these, but they may not "work" for everyone.

Asahi 9 pm

It seems that "night" and "adult" are themes for marketing products for late in 2010. I think this is because early in the year tends to be a focal point for selling things to young folks as they study and gear up for taking entrance tests. This is the reason why so many KitKats are released in the first part of the year and so few at this point in time. KitKats are mainly seen as something for kids or as special souvenirs.

This is my second "evening" themed food to review. Asahi recommends that you enjoy an "adult themed soda". That doesn't mean that you tipple from a beverage composed of gladiator sweat with a rich pheromone-based blend that only someone who has made it beyond puberty can appreciate the nuances of. It means you should kick back and enjoy this calorie-free drink after dinner or a bath. Yeah, I like the gladiator sweat idea better.

I first saw this beverage at AM/PM for 147 yen ($1.76), but being an incredibly cheap person, I waited for it to show up in my local Lawson's 100 for 100 yen ($1.20) for a 500 ml. bottle. It was sitting next to the Asahi Ultra Fiber Vitamin C that I tried before.

The advertising for this says that it includes orange and curacao. Curacao is a liqueur flavored with a citrus peel. It's also supposed to smell like vanilla and oak. To me, it smelled very faintly of orange and tasted like weakly carbonated club soda with a twist of orange. There is a little hint of bitterness, but not enough to put off someone who isn't incredibly sensitive to bitter flavors.

This is marketed as a soft drink, but there's really not much to it. If you like club soda with a bit of ever so slightly bitter orange, then this will fill the bill. The flavor is light and there is almost no sweetness to it (despite having artificial sweeteners). I think this would be best used as a mixer for alcoholic drinks or to mix with juice. It's not bad, and I'd buy it if I needed a bottle of water and this was the same price and I wasn't in the mood for plain water. The chances that I'll buy it again though, are exceptionally low.

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.

Asahi C's Case Fruit Nodo Ame

The Japanese market is nothing if not flooded with well-meaning products that are meant to improve your health through candy and cookies. The two big nutritional supplements are foods with Calcium or Vitamin C. For quite some time, Asahi has offered a little plastic container with tiny lemon-flavored pellets called "C's Case". Since its original inception, the brand has branched out to many products including drinks and these throat drops.

I found these at Summit supermarket in an area adjacent to my neighborhood. If you don't think that is a sacrifice, keep in mind that I had to listen to their inane ditty singing "once a week at Summit" (sung in English, no less) about a million times during my short shopping journey. They cost 198 yen ($2.13) for a 79-gram (2.8 oz.) bag. There were about 20 drops in the bag. Each candy is 9.2 calories and sugarless. Summit carried an array of sugar-free hard candies that I had never seen in my local markets so I snapped up three bags of them. You'll see the other reviews in the future at some point. I insist on sugar-free for something that I'm going to be keeping in my mouth for a prolonged period of time. My teeth really don't need a long, luxurious sugar bath, even when my throat wants something to keep it from going dry.

There are three flavors - peach, grape, and orange. I don't ask much of this type of candy except that it be sugarless and preferably have some edge to the flavor. Fruit candy is best when it has a nice little citrus bite. Here is the breakdown of these candies.

Grape: This is like the grape lollipops that you got from the doctor when you were a child (and when you were lucky that he had grape and not some gross flavor like lime), only lamer. This reminds me of when I was a child and put my lollipops in water in order to see what the water would taste like when they dissolved into it. This tastes a bit like that water. It's not bad, but it's not much of anything.

Peach: Fortunately, peach was a more flavorful offering. It was intense and had a little mouth-puckering sourness in the background. It did taste of artificial sweetener, but that's a price you pay for sugar-free candy. It actually did taste like peach, fake peach, but at least it was what you might expect.

Orange: This was my favorite of the three. If I could get a bag of only orange, I'd be happier with the whole package. The orange flavor is your classic fake candy flavor. It also had just a bit of an herbal, almost medicinal edge. One of the ingredients is "herbal extract", and I'm guessing it is only used in the orange or is most potent in this drop. 

The interesting thing about the nutrition information on this is that they tell you the numbers for the entire bag rather than each candy, as if you're going to put away the whole thing. In the 20 candies, there are 3000 mg of vitamin C (in the entire bag), .82 mg. Vitamin B, 2.7 micrograms of B12, .29 mg. of B1, .65 mg of B2, and 4.3 mg. Vitamin E. To get all of those good things, you've got to deal with Sucralose, Aspartame, and Acesulfame K.

I liked these just fine, but I wasn't crazy over them. They're definitely the sort of thing I would turn to if I had a cold and wanted to suck on something for a sore throat and give myself some extra C along for the ride. I find it hard to assign a rating because I can't say I enjoyed these enough to revisit them without a cold motivating me to do so, but I would definitely get them again if I was infected. I'm wondering if Asahi should use that as part of their marketing campaign.

Asahi Reset Body Bar (chocolate and orange)

Before I make my final review of a health/diet food for this week of such products, I'd like to say that there are tons of things which I didn't review, but many of them are very similar to what I've already mentioned and each other. One of the most common types of these foods which I passed on was granola bars. There was a cavalcade of them in a variety of flavors, including chocolate, vanilla, maple, and various fruits, but they all are essentially the same thing; that is, they are small portions of a standard granola bar fortified with certain minerals and vitamins. I skipped them because I didn't expect they'd be vastly different from any other candy bar parading as health food that you'd buy anywhere in the world.

I chose this bar mainly because it had a goofy name and was made by a company better known for its beer than its health food. Perhaps this is a little karmic balance for the good folks at Asahi. They destroy your liver on the one hand and then try to fix you a bit with a "diet support" bar with the equivalent of a multi-vitamin in it. Note that this is part of Asahi's "Slim-up" line of products.

I picked this up for about a hundred yen ($1.12) at a drug store not too far from my home called Tomod's. Tomod's is a chain so you're not unlikely to see them sprinkled all over Tokyo. They have quite a big display of health food bars including wafer, protein, granola, and meal replacement bars like Calorie Mate. Many of them aren't low calorie despite being marketed overtly as diet foods. I go to Tomod's mainly for the cheap toilet paper, and it was walking past their health food snack display that inspired me, at least in part, to do this week of reviews.

The bar is about 60% the length of its total package size.

When I opened the package, this smelled like a brownie with a chemical mixed in with it. It smelled good for a brief moment, then not so great. I think what I detected as "chemical" may have been the orange flavoring. I noted that the packaging is incredibly misleading in regards to the size. The calorie information also is for one of the two bars, not for the whole package. I think this is meant to make people think they're going to get more for the calories than they do. The size is about the width of one finger of a KitKat bar, though this is a bit longer.


Unsurprisingly, this has a cocktail of sweeteners and chemicals. The first ingredient is flour and the second is Polydextrose (a sugar substitute). Shortening, Erythritol, and Maltitol also appear high in the list of ingredients and Sucralose makes a guest appearance near the end. The only surprise is "coconut milk powder", though I didn't taste or smell any coconut.

In terms of taste, it's okay. It's like a low quality chocolate brownie with orange mixed in, though I did experience a strange metallic aftertaste in my mouth after eating one bar. The main problem is the texture which is tough and chewy. It reminded me of the evil spawn of an unholy coupling between a Tootsie Roll and a brownie. It was just weird and brought home the fact that this was something no one would ever eat for pleasure, but only in some vain attempt to get nutrition from some food-like substance. Of course, if you're an Asahi beer customer and are drunk enough, you may not be able to tell the difference.