Suntory Surfers Soda Review!

What a great concept for a drink! It's essentially marketed as the perfect drink to kick back with after a long hot day at the beach catching some serious waves on your surfboard. As you lie back and observe the awesome surfers and gorgeous babes around, you can sip on your Surf Mode Soda for the ultimate refreshment under the beating sun.

To reinforce the message of summer sun, sand and waves, the drink comes in these beautifully designed bottles you can see below which are the colour of crystal blue waters on a perfect day.

And here you can see a close up of the beautiful beach babe motif that adorns the Surf Mode Soda surfboard and no doubt indicates the type of people you are expected to associate with whilst enjoying your Surf Mode Soda.

We also had a lot of fun shooting this review as we got dressed up in our best surf gear and donned our sunnies for a real beach style review. Heck we even featured Keanu Reeve's classic line from Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Adventure which consists of exactly one word "Woah...".

And of course since it is produced by Suntory we featured a little Bill Murray too "for relaxing times make it Suntory time".

Overall this review was a lot of fun to produce, although I did struggle a little with my geography in the middle of it. As Arne was careful to point out (and later to subtitle in the video) after I made the rather ludicrous statement of "I can taste the Miami Sun, Hawaii here I come" , Miami and Hawaii are in fact nowhere near each other. Then he reminded me of my equally embarrassing mishap with our Pepsi Baobab review where I mistook the giraffes on the bottle for camels...

Sadly as we drank more and more of the soda it actually became rather less refreshing and started becoming a bit too dry, losing sweetness and with a slightly odd aftertaste. I presume this is probably a result of the use of artificial sweeteners since it's supposedly a zero calorie drink. I never drinks with artificial sweeteners by choice and I rarely if ever am able to enjoy them for long. Still it was a fun review over all and the drink certainly has potential. If you are a zero calorie drink person then you'll probably love this one, as it's one of the best I've had in that group. 

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!

And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass

Hakodate Wine Caramels はこだてわいんキャラメル and Nanae Sweet Apple Wine Caramels 七重スイートリンゴワイン キャラメル

Hakodate is a city in the South of Hokkaido that is apparently famous for making wine and Nanae is a small town nearby that is apparently famous for it's sweet apple wine. 

I saw these wine flavoured caramels in my local 7 Eleven and thought they might make quite an interesting snack for young +Joe Fiorello and myself. To make things even more interesting after looking at the packet I found out that they actually contained a certain amount of real alcohol from the addition of actual Hakodate Wine to the sweet mixture. All of this had me quite excited! 

Unfortunately my dream of getting drunk with Joe in the middle of the afternoon by consuming delicious wine caramels was not to be... Turns out that the caramels did not taste of wine at all, just mild grape and to make matters worth there was nowhere near enough alcohol in them to have even a mild effect. 

The only consolation was that the Nanae Sweet Apple Wine Caramels which you can see below, where deliciously sweet and fall of apple scent and flavour. 

Sadly this disappointing review went on to become our least popular of all time, despite the fact that Joe references it in a whole bunch of our future reviews. Perhaps you could watch the video below and help his dream of it becoming our most popular review come true! 

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!
And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass

Enormous Filet-O-Fish Burger from McDonalds!

The Sakana Supreme Burger was one of the early special limited edition burgers released by McDonalds in 2010. According to Wikipedia "Sakana" written in Japanese as さかな means a snack or food to accompany alcohol. This certainly seems like an odd name for McDonalds to choose for one of it's burgers, though the burger itself is also pretty odd, but in any case it also goes on to explain that fish or dried fish have long been the most common accompaniment for alcohol, so Sakana often just refers to fish. 

A rather boring conclusion to a situation where I was thinking that McDonalds might be about to offer me a shot of Sake to go with my special burger! And boring is a very relevant word for this review. You see Arne and myself (Spencer) had recently reviewed two other Hong Kong specialty burgers from MickeyD's, namely the Ebi (Shrimp) Burger and the Wasabi Burger (basically a Wasabi variant on Fillet-O-Fish) and both had been absolutely excellent. With these superb burgers still in recent memory, expectations were high for the Sakana Supreme and as always seems to be the case when you are expecting something great, it did not deliver. In fact as I declared in the video "The predominant flavour I'm getting in my mouth is boring". 

It's basically an oversized fillet-o-fish fried to much less crispy consistency than normal and yet much more oily, all packed into a super soft and tasteless bun. There was way too much decaying old lettuce and overall the burger was just way too big. The only redeeming feature was that the sesame sauce was quite good. However, they did away with this in future versions of the burger opting to combine the flavours of the much more delicious "Wasabi Burger" with the perhaps more interestingly named "Sakana Supreme" and started making this giant fish burger with wasabi mayonnaise instead as you can see from the picture below: 

So overall a pretty rubbish burger of which the only thing I can say I'll miss is the special Sesame Sauce they created for it which was pretty good and I don't think I've seen it in another burger since. 

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!
And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass