Ramune, the Kind in the Blue Bottle

Something about the illustration on that bottle makes this feel
reeeeeaaaaallllll natural in my hand.

At first I couldn't place the taste. It was a very dry but still sweet faux fruit flavor, but painfully familiar. After some squints and contemplation, I think this is the taste of Crystal Pepsi. It's hard to remember a flavor from so long ago, but I'm pretty sure this is it - though my wife disagrees. But that's her job. Maybe Crystal Pepsi with a touch of bubble gum flavor. But wait, the real adventure was in getting the bottle open.

I pull of the cap... What? No soda? What sort of trick is this?


After four hours of fiddling with it, I break down and read the instructions.

Okay...

I think I see...

This video is called "We need to tidy up our kitchen"

Okay, so the marble seems to be wedged into place by the pressure of the carbonation. You break apart the cap and make the little plunger which you use to push the marble loose. The cool little marble rolls around, making a pleasant glass on glass noise. It's fun to see a marble rolling in liquid, makes me feel like I'm visiting an electronic novelty store in a mall in the 80s.

Makes little pieces of wasteful plastic.

Finally, the moment of truth.

My god, what did the stuff do to my moustache?

The sickly sweet smell of fruity bubble gum betrays the passable taste of it. The stuff is very bubbly-dry, leaving a clean feeling in my mouth and on my lips. And there's no high fructose corn syrup taste to plague me.

Not bad stuff, but the real kicker is the novelty marble. Those wacky Japanese and their gimmicks. Sadly, the marble backfire towards the end of the bottle, tilting the bottle all the way back results in the marble rolling back into the mouthpiece and blocking the liquid. Duh. I'm forced to drink my own back wash in a slow drip as opposed to the quick toss back to which I am accustomed.

(Note: I picked up a second bottle of this, in the off pink flavor, and figured out that the two little dimples in the neck of the bottle are supposed to hold the marble out of the bottle of the mouth. They don't do a very good job, if you tilt it back to a comfortable degree the marble jumps loose and blocks the flow again.)

Here's another close up of the dimples in the bottle neck, for no good reason.