Green Tea Coca-Cola

I used to love lime coke when it was brought out in the UK. Do you remember? It came in an opaque, toxic green bottle, that - without the coke label - made it look like you were drinking toilet cleaner. But that wasn't the only reason I dug it: I love stupid flavour mash-ups of almost any kind. When I found the double-stacked vanilla-cherry coke in Cyber Candy Brighton years ago it blew my tiny mind. I love being in Japan where Kit-Kat is on a never ending mission to explore every possible flavour combination in existence. And in all of these cases the flavour is never really all that important, it's the thought that counts, the idea that some flavour scientists in a bunker in Olso have been toiling away trying to find a chemical compound that accurately reflects both Pepsi and "Wet Dog" or whatever.

This week saw the release of Green Tea Coca-Cola in Japan:


Disappointingly it's quite nice. That is, it doesn't really taste like green tea to me at all, althought it does kind of smell like green tea. If it had tasted like an actual mix of green tea and diet coke then it would probably have induced vomiting. It avoids tasting like swill by tasting less like like chemical run-off than regular diet coke does, but it doesn't really have the promised green tea after-taste. I would describe it more as foliage, possibly artifical leaves. The after-taste certainly sticks around though, I can still taste it now, and it's not all that pleasant... Hmmm, on reflection I'm gonna give it a thumbs down. Sorry Coke.

I wasn't so excited about green tea coke to start with, but apparently the end of the month will see the launch of something truly deranged - Shiso Pepsi. Shiso has such a strong, some might say pungent flavour, I can't imagine how it could be happily married to anything. That has a very real possibility of being undrinkable, and as such sounds a lot more awesome to me.