{"id":363,"date":"2006-08-27T07:23:15","date_gmt":"2006-08-27T12:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/?p=363"},"modified":"2009-03-18T18:36:01","modified_gmt":"2009-03-18T23:36:01","slug":"japanese-snack-food-review-ramune-strawberry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/?p=363","title":{"rendered":"Ramune (strawberry)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/boo\/images\/StrawberryRamune.jpg\" alt=\"StrawberryRamune.jpg\" border=\"0\" height=\"400\" width=\"300\" \/><br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nI&#8217;m beginning to believe that Ramune is the liquid Pocky, except not as good.  And much wetter but certainly as chock full of different flavors as the king of stuff on a stick.  Just the other day I noticed that they had repackaged the plain Ramune in Hello Kitty wrapping (which I was tempted to buy but didn&#8217;t since I&#8217;ve done plain already) so I thought I&#8217;d throw another Ramune up for the Blogaversary All Liquid August Review.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve previously done <a href=\"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/?p=334\">Orange<\/a> Ramune, <a href=\"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/?p=287\">Blue Hawaii<\/a> Ramune, <a href=\"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/?p=284\">Kiwi<\/a> Ramune and of course <a href=\"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/?p=281\">the Original flavor<\/a>.  Not one of them has been super stellar but I seem to have developed a compulsion to continue trying Ramune in hopes that at least one will be a nice, zesty and tasty carbonated treat.  Thus, I bring you Strawberry.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d also like to apologize in advance because I totally forgot that I <strong>hate<\/strong> the taste of Red Pop, which is artificially flavored strawberry soda.  I have no idea where my head was when I picked this up, other than &#8220;Oooo!  Shiny!  Strawberry!  The Japanese can do the BOMB of strawberry flavoring when they set their mind to it&#8221;.  What I should have been thinking was &#8220;Wait&#8230;this has artificial strawberry flavoring.  Red Pop has artificial flavoring.  Red Pop is the worst tasting thing on the face of this earth next to artificial banana and isopropyl alcohol&#8221; (don&#8217;t ask) and then picked up a different flavor.  I didn&#8217;t on both accounts and now I have to be impartial to a flavor that tastes like a half and half cocktail of ASS and Sudafed liquid syrup.<\/p>\n<p>Before I review (which I&#8217;m doing real time BTW and also doing my best to procrastinate because it whiffs like a half and half cocktail of ASS and liquid Sudafed) I wanted to point out a couple things.  The entire ingredients list is: grape sugar, Artificial flavor, citric acid and FD&amp;C Red No. 40.  Notice the lack of sugars stacked on top of each other?  THAT&#8217;s a first for Ramune.  Either grape sugar (and What?!??) is the king daddy of all sweeteners or they have decided to cut back on the sweety-sweet.  I&#8217;d say bravo that as Ramune has always been a tad on the sugary side but why did they have to do it for Red Pop?  Today of all days I could have used the sweety-sweet to drown out the Half and Half ASS and liquid Sudafed cocktail.  The other packaging note is (are?) the directions.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.quirkspace.com\/boo\/images\/RamuneDirections.jpg\" alt=\"RamuneDirections.jpg\" border=\"0\" height=\"431\" width=\"250\" \/><br \/>\nLook!  Finally, a how to for the Ramune clueless.  THANK YOU!<\/p>\n<p>OK, it&#8217;s time for the inevitable.  Down the hatch!<br \/>\nOh.<br \/>\nWell then.<br \/>\nRight.<\/p>\n<p>1.  Still hating the bottle construction.  Although if I drink enough Ramune I might just adapt or get used to it.<\/p>\n<p>2. It&#8217;s&#8230;nicely not so sweet.  That&#8217;s refreshing.  I&#8217;d say this particular Ramune is sweeter than a flavored soda water but not quite soda pop (pop, soda, cola, whatever) sweet.<\/p>\n<p>3. Damnit, I just dribbled Strawberry Ramune all over my chin.  Stoopid bottle drinking platform.<\/p>\n<p>4. The carbonation, which has been Ramune&#8217;s big hang up so far, isn&#8217;t stellar but it&#8217;s bubbly enough to barely make the cut onto the soda pop team (pop, soda, cola, whatever).  I think the Strawberry is similar to the orange but a tad tinier with the bubblation (new word!) and a bit more with the fizzy bite.  It&#8217;s really working that line between flat and carbonated though.<\/p>\n<p>5. I&#8217;ve decided to try Ramune with ice this trip out &#8211;<br \/>\n5a. Have I mentioned yet that I HATE the gerbil ball drinking platform?<br \/>\n5 cont. -and I&#8217;d recommend against it.  I think I poured off what carbonation it had when it went from the bottle to the glass and now it&#8217;s gone unappetizingly flat.  The cold has really brought out the Red Pop flavor too.<\/p>\n<p>6. Finally.  The flavor.  It tastes much less like an ASS and liquid Sudafed cocktail than I expected it to, given the smell.  It has one pow&#8217;ful chemical strawberry odor to it but only a mild chemical strawberry taste.  If they suddenly stopped making every single flavor of pop but Red Pop, I&#8217;d actually drink Strawberry Ramune.  That&#8217;s got to be plus pea points there.<\/p>\n<p>Wow.  I&#8217;d say this was every bit as good as the Orange, if you are a Strawberry pop lover, and probably better given that I can actually drink it without gagging.  I&#8217;d usually knock pea points off for the presence of CHEMICAL STRAWBERRY 512 but to me, all strawberry pop tastes like various nasty chemical strawberry flavorings so I can&#8217;t really tell.  Strawberry Ramune was acceptably carbonated, barely, and it was much less sweety-sweet, which was rather delightful to experience, and then there was the decent chemical strawberry ASS and liquid Sudafed cocktail thing going on.  I think I&#8217;m going to go with a middle of the road rating and add that you might think about adding a half pea or maybe even a titch more (if your pea system fractionalizes down further than mine) if you like strawberry flavored pop.  That leaves Strawberry Ramune with a<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/?page_id=2\">Rating<\/a> of <strong>3 Wasabi Peas<\/strong> out of a possible 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,17,31,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-30-peas","category-beverage","category-ramune","category-sweet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quirkspace.com\/jsfr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}