Kimura Drink company has launched a, somewhat tame in comparison, new flavor to their unconventional “ramune” beverage line-up: green tea. “Ramune” is a beloved sweet lemon-lime flavored soft drink consumed mostly in the summer months in Japan.
The green tea flavor, made from Shizuoka prefectures’s famous tea, joins the already existing wasabi, curry, and annin doufu (Chinese-style sweet tofu dessert) flavored novelty drinks sold at Tokyu Hands.
According to the press release, the green tea meets sweet ramune was inspired by sweetened ice tea drinks popular outside of Japan. While Kimura’s drinks have in the past come in plastic PET bottles, the new green tea flavor (¥160) will come in the original ramune glass bottle, which fits in nicely with the retro trend still pervasive in Japan.
Last month we reported on CIC Co.’s instant fresh tea drinks that contain a capsule of fresh tea that is released into the bottle with a turn of the cap and it occurred to us later that this might be a riff on the original ramune bottles, which are opened by pushing a marble at the bottle’s mouth into the beverage.
In other do-it-yourself drink news, until the end of the month, Nihombashi Mitsukoshi will be offering packages of freeze dried fruits intended for adding to champagne. Created in collaboration with French chef Kiyomi Mikuni, who has a boutique in the department store’s food basement, the ¥840 kit contains strawberries, kiwi fruits, and apples, all grown in Japan.
With Japan’s week long Golden Week holiday just around the corner we are trying to decide if this champagne set was designed with picnics in the park or the shinkansen ride back to the countryside in mind.
