My husband has been a fan of Fanta flavors since before he came to Japan. I, however, grew up too poor to buy the fancy Fanta fruit flavored drinks. My family always bought the sort of store brand sodas that you could find for about a dime or less a can. When Fanta flavors started showing up in Japan, my husband got excited and I just sort of shrugged my shoulders.
At present, Fanta grape is stocked in most stores as is the odd orange. Neither of these come in the "Zero" calorie-free variety. Recently, a lemon zero -calorie flavor showed up which my husband has become a big fan of and I think is pretty good, but it's not the sort of thing I really crave. Since we had good experiences with the lemon flavor, I decided to try out this zero variety of "cider".
I should make one point clear, however. I did not expect this "cider" to be actual "cider". In fact, I had a suspicion based on the bottle design that this was going to be one of the ramune flavors that makes the rounds every summer. The fact that the soda is completely clear is a bit of a tip-off to the fact that there are no apples in it.
When I gave the open bottle a sniff, it smelled like bubble gum. In fact, it was very much like the ramune KitKat from an olfactory viewpoint. The first taste was actually pretty good. It tasted like bubblegum-flavored candy in liquid form. There was a bit of a weird aftertaste though. Unfortunately, the aftertaste grew in strength the more I drank. By the end of half a bottle of it, I was finding it hard to ignore what I believe is the erythritol flavor. Since this is the first ingredient, that's not much of a surprise.
I went from having a "happy sumo" rating in mind after the first sip to an "indifferent" one by the end because of the artificial sweetener aftertaste. I wanted to like this more than I did. In fact, I wanted to find it appealing enough to revisit it since there are so few zero calorie sodas in Japan. While the bubblegum flavor is nice, the aftertaste kills it.
