Category: Reviews

Being the adventurous type, I recently grabbed a few very different types of drinks to try out. I wouldn’t want anyone to be bored just because I decided to stay safe and only pick drinks that I might actually enjoy.

Which brings me to the topic of today’s review, a collection of three different drinks that (spoiler alert) were not very good. They all share in the dubious honour of being equally horrid (to me, your mileage may vary) and not at all to be recommended. As I say, you might like them, but I *really* did not. If you read this and then go out to try them, then you have no one to blame but yourself and your morbid curiosity.

Oh and since I know my family is reading this blog, no I did not drink all of these at once. These were all drank responsibly over a number of nights and I ate all my greens and I’m honestly not turning into an alcoholic. Not yet anyway.

Ahem. Anyway, the first cab off the rank is Orion draft beer from Asahi.  It is labelled at having 5% alcohol, so this should have something going for it. Turns out, no, no it doesn’t. This is the most insipid beer I’ve tasted in a good long time. More tasteless than even the most mainstream of lagers, this beer tasted like it had heard of the term flavour from a friend, but wasn’t about to get into such sordid business itself. If this is “widely loved as an Okinawan original” then I’m seriously concerned about that island’s population’s lager sensibilities.

Okinawa can do better than this, surely…

Next up we have an experiment of sorts. The hypothesis we are testing is: can sparkling rosé be any good when you put it in a bottle made out of aluminium? In short, “no”.  The longer version is “maybe, but based on this sample, not really, no”. This Sparkling Wine – Rosé from Monde Wine is a sparkling wine with a mild flavour.  I’m not normally a big fan of rosé wine, but since this was an after-dinner treat, it seemed appropriate to try it out. It has 12% alcohol, so it does have a little bit of kick to it, but not all that much. I was hoping for something like a sweet version of a Prosecco, but instead has a somewhat uninspired flavour.  Overall, not recommended.  There are perfectly good alternative wines in normal glass bottles that are only slightly more money and worth every yen in my opinion.

Finally, for a bit of fun, I bought a plum flavoured liqueur.  Specifically, the Rakuen Umeshu Plum Liqueur.  This one appealed to me on two levels: 1. It was 100 yen (70p) and 2. It comes in a god-damned sippy packet.  You know, like the ones you drink juice out of at school.  There was absolutely zero chance of me not trying this bad-boy out.

Sippy container!

Sippy straw!

Kind of wish I had given it a miss though. Apart from the (expected) sickly sweetness, the flavour is the most synthetic thing I’ve ever tried in a good long while.  Unless you want your cherry flavoured liqueur that tastes like it was made out of actual decorative plastic cherries, I’d give this one a miss.