Despite my bad experience with the only drink I've ever purchased from Ito En, I decided to give the company's pink guava a shot. This is part of their "Aloha Maid" series which features tropical fruit flavors sodas in a low calorie soft drink. Besides this pink guava, there is also a lemon ice tea and a fruit mix that includes pineapple, orange, mango and lychee.
Though this is made with both aspartame and sucralose, it has 60 calories per bottle because of the guava juice that has been added to it. This makes for a somewhat mixed taste experience. There is a light guava flavor and this is generally quite refreshing, but there is also a clearly detectable taste of artificial sweetener. Since this is more of a flavored water than a strong soft drink, the sweetener taste is not masked as well as it might be in a drink like Coca-Cola. One interesting point about this is that it has been naturally colored with purple potato rather than artificial coloring.
This was okay. If I wanted a lightly flavored carbonated water, I might even consider buying this again, but ultimately it's just not that impressive. Considering the experience I had with their salty lemon, this is actually a step up in my experience with Ito En's beverages.
4 comments:
Aloha Maid is a brand here in Hawaii. A few months ago they came out with a Guava Soda and an Iced Tea soda in can form. Both of them are quite disgusting.
For some reason I'm not surprised this is available in Japan because Ito En has a big presence here and people in Japan love things from Hawaii.
I didn't know that Aloha Maid was a brand elsewhere, though I guess I could have figured it out had I not been so slack about checking it. ;-) I did check Ito En's site, but looked no further.
So far, Ito En doesn't have a very good track record with me, so I'm guessing it's not a big hit with you either?
Actually, I do like Eto En products, but mostly their bottled teas.
We got Aloha Maid in the can a few times, not too bad but generally we just buy the Hawaiian Sun. Have you had Ito En's green tea in teabag form? Not too bad, sorta light and refreshing. Actually Costco carries it, they brand it as theirs (Kirkland)
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