Mitsuya Cider All Zero

There's no way for my readers to know this, but I used to have an internet stalker. This person first discovered me via a personal blog, and followed me to this one. As this person's preoccupation with me started to ramp up, my stalker started to post comments under various made-up names. The main point of such comments was to post moderately critical or contradictory statements. If I said I didn't care for something, this person would say it was a favorite.

The reason this stalker (who I believe has since lost interest in me) comes to mind is that one of the sock puppets this party created asserted that I wasn't posting enough beverage reviews. This was despite the fact that I had posted about 25 drink reviews at that point in time. The main residue of my experience with this stalker is that my husband has moderated comments since that experience began so that I wouldn't have to think about them. That's right, my husband filters your comments, not me! A secondary one was that I disabled anonymous commenting (to make it more troublesome to post under fake identities). The tertiary one is that I always remember that person's phony baloney assertion that I don't review enough drinks every time I review one now. So, as I review this Mitsuya Cider, I remember that my stalker wanted more of these types of reviews, or at least pretended to.

The last time I reviewed what the Japanese call "cider" it was the Fanta Zero Cider. Mitsuya Cider has been around a lot longer and is a more popular brand than Fanta. I didn't know what to expect, but part of the reason for that was that I had forgotten what the Fanta Zero was like. That was an experience that floated back as I sampled this.

This smelled like bubblegum The taste was very hard to pin down. It has some vague elements of ramune with its lemon-lime notes, but it's very weak compared to something like 7-Up or Sprite. It's a light soft drink, which probably suits Japanese tastes with it's less overbearing flavors. It's very heavily carbonated so it really bubbles on the tongue. In fact, this is like a lightly flavored club soda. I can see how it would suit Japanese tastes since, by and large, they prefer subtle flavors.

The web site for this is here. The site recommends various drinks with this as a base including adding mint and lemon and honey and ginger. I think that this can certainly be enjoyed "as is", but may be seen as being a bit on the weaker side flavor-wise. It probably occupies a similar space in the market to ginger ale in the United States (though it is weaker in flavor than that beverage).

Though this was fine, I wouldn't buy it again because the experience lacked a strong impression. On the bright side, it doesn't taste as strongly of artificial sweeteners as the Fanta Zero Cider. If I had no other option, I'd drink this without hesitation, but I wouldn't seek it out.

Fanta Zero Cider

My husband has been a fan of Fanta flavors since before he came to Japan. I, however, grew up too poor to buy the fancy Fanta fruit flavored drinks. My family always bought the sort of store brand sodas that you could find for about a dime or less a can. When Fanta flavors started showing up in Japan, my husband got excited and I just sort of shrugged my shoulders.

At present, Fanta grape is stocked in most stores as is the odd orange. Neither of these come in the "Zero" calorie-free variety. Recently, a lemon zero -calorie flavor showed up which my husband has become a big fan of and I think is pretty good, but it's not the sort of thing I really crave. Since we had good experiences with the lemon flavor, I decided to try out this zero variety of "cider".


I should make one point clear, however. I did not expect this "cider" to be actual "cider". In fact, I had a suspicion based on the bottle design that this was going to be one of the ramune flavors that makes the rounds every summer. The fact that the soda is completely clear is a bit of a tip-off to the fact that there are no apples in it.

When I gave the open bottle a sniff, it smelled like bubble gum. In fact, it was very much like the ramune KitKat from an olfactory viewpoint. The first taste was actually pretty good. It tasted like bubblegum-flavored candy in liquid form. There was a bit of a weird aftertaste though. Unfortunately, the aftertaste grew in strength the more I drank. By the end of half a bottle of it, I was finding it hard to ignore what I believe is the erythritol flavor. Since this is the first ingredient, that's not much of a surprise.

I went from having a "happy sumo" rating in mind after the first sip to an "indifferent" one by the end because of the artificial sweetener aftertaste. I wanted to like this more than I did. In fact, I wanted to find it appealing enough to revisit it since there are so few zero calorie sodas in Japan. While the bubblegum flavor is nice, the aftertaste kills it.