Today's Review: Ramune

I went to London today to plead Apple to not make me buy a new iPhone. Surprisingly I was successful, so it's official everyone, Apple are awesome. They give you brand new iPhone 4s if you drop yours in a cup of tea (they probably don't do it every time).

But while I was passing time before my appointment, I took a wander down the street to an old favourite store of mine, Cyber Candy. I used to buy the shit out of that place a couple of years back, tasting all the foreign delicacies on offer, buying up masses of Nerds. But now the prices are a bit too high, and I've tasted pretty much all I want to in there. But I'm always open to some of the various awesomely flavoured drinks. I was making a toss up between Wild Cherry Pepsi and Grape Fanta when a strange little bottle caught my eye.

Asian soft drinks are always a bit hit and miss. They have all these types of tea, and other crap made from plants, I don't care for it. But fruity soda I can get along with. I like fruity stuff. Plus the bottle had a cool shape and was made of glass, so off I trotted with my purchase. 

Weird bottle top though. You take off the plastic wrap and a whole chunk of plastic came off the top. Disposable, I thought, swiftly chucking it in the bin. Then I was confronted with the top of the bottle itself. Underneath that green bit on top of the neck was some glass. How to get the drink out? I didn't really know. Couldn't twist the cap off, that's for sure. Thankfully, we had YouTube on our phones, and you can find out anything on YouTube. Turns out I needed the plastic bit I threw away.

I did what any perfectly sane person would do and immediately attempted to fish my piece of plastic out of a Central London bin. It was just beyond my reach, sadly, so I attempted to use a discarded McDonald's fries packet to scoop it up. That only pushed it down further. Much sadness flowed within me. But we were only a street away from Cyber Candy, so I went back and bought another flavour. I would've gone for the Octopus flavour but I didn't have enough cash. Oh, and also that sounds fucking disgusting.

So this is how it works. You take your plastic top, snap out a little puncture tool. You then place this on top of the spherical glass thing in the neck, and whack it into the bottle. Turns out it's a little glass marble. It keeps the drink vacuum sealed and carbonated, and is held in place by the pressure from the gases. The two are co-dependent. How deep, especially for a fizzy drink. So after a satisfying pop I started to glug. 

It was good stuff. The strawberry tasted like strawberry and the melon tasted like melon. There was a nice fizz to it too, not too much, not too little. It also leaves the little marble rolling around in the top half of the bottle, which makes a cool little jangling sound when you drink, or an annoying jangling sound if you're easily annoyed by them. I came away from the ordeal satisfied. The bottle design may be unorthodox and difficult to work out, but it's cool and quirky. Those crazy Japanese, eh?

My rating: 4/5

It lost a point for making me go through a bin.