Quick Review: Japanese Green Apple Marble Pop

If you would like to read a more thorough review, please go here.
If you don't know what Marble Pop means, please check out this video.

I'm not sure the name of this soda because it is in Japanese. I got in an Asian food market in Boston, so you could look there I suppose. This soda is absolutely fantastic. The marble gimmick is super fun to play with and as a standalone soda it is absolutely wonderful. The flavor is very subtle and mostly defined by the citric acid. It's also healthy to boot! It has only 10 grams of sugar, 4 milligrams of sodium and 60 calories. I personally think it would go amazingly with a lunch, especially one featuring fruits.
If you happen upon this soda buy it on sight, it is really great although it will be pretty difficult to find.

Review: Japanese Green Apple Marble Pop

If you would like to see a shorter review, please go here.
To see what it looks like to use this "marble pop" gimmick check out this video.

Before Drinking

Background: During this past school year I went on a trip to the Boston Aquarium. It was purely for fun and after we finished up at the Aquarium we were allowed to wander the city as we pleased. My friends and I decided to just walk around and go down any street that looked interesting. We looked down a long street and saw a giant Asian gate. It looked cool so we went in and found ourselves suddenly plunged in to China Town. We went in to an Asian food market and I found all sorts of neat sodas. I got this one for $1.39 and I have no idea where you could find it or what its name is. So let's continue our streak of extremely legit foreign sodas!

Neat ribs

Bottling: The bottling is of course really cool. The whole marble pop gimmick is really fun and makes for a nice piece to put on a shelf after you are done. The interesting bits of this bottling is that for one it has some cool ribbing in the skinny part of the bottle. Very different from the other variations I have seen. The other awesome part is that absolutely everything is written in Japanese! It makes this a really unique find, I would definitely have trouble getting this anywhere but an Asian food market. Even the nutrition facts had to have an English sticker put over it to meet FDA requirements.

This makes it kind of hard for me to judge the font and logo. It's just really super Japanesey. It obviously has Japanese written all over it but it also has cute Anime-esque green apples will adorable little faces. One part of the writing that I quite like is the cool symbol put at the lip of the bottle.

Cool symbol in question

Nutrition facts are pretty interesting, only 10 grams of sugar! Most sodas are in the 35-40 range so this is going to not be very sweet at all. Additionally it has only 4mg of sodium and 60 calories. It's really quite healthy for you! I'm guessing almost all of the flavor will be coming from the citric acid. The other ingredients are pretty odd as well. It uses sugar and glucose to sweeten it, I don't think I've ever encountered glucose before in a soda so this should be pretty interesting.

During drinking

Soda everywhere

Got on my beloved keyboard

I popped the marble in and immediately tragedy struck. The soda really just exploded everywhere, it got all over my keyboard and basically made my entire desk a sticky mess. I had to pour water all over my $115 mechanical keyboard to save it from being a sticky mess and now it needs a day or so to dry out. So I'm typing this from a crappy Dell keyboard, with my keyboard wrapped in a towel behind me. Be strong, buddy!

The only difference I did this time was use the fleshy part of my thumb to push the marble in. I think this made it hit with greater force than the it created a seal on the top. This created a ton of pressure to build up in an extremely short amount of time, causing the explosion. I highly recommend you use the end of your thumb when pushing the marble in and do it over something you don't care about, like a sink or a counter top.

But the review must go on! I won't be judging the carbonation too harshly because the soda has been sitting out for a while now.

Nutrition facts laid over Japanese writing

Oh how utterly delightful! Wow, this is an absolutely amazingly subtle yet present flavor. It really does taste like green apple but it is not over powering at all. This is honestly one of the best flavors I have had in a very long time. It is so perfectly fruity without being over the top. The problem that most fruit sodas run in to is they start tasting like liquefied lollipops. This has very little sugar so the sweetness is not over powering and it really lets the appley flavor come through. It really does taste genuinely like taking a bite right in to a green apple.

Carbonation is not bad at all, the faster you chug the more carbonation you get because of the way the marble creates carbonation. The spout is a bit awkward to drink from, it's just really small so it feels strange to not fully wrap my lips around it. I also don't like the fact that the lip is made of plastic. I can understand why it has to be that way though. The carbonation is definitely much stronger than on the Americanized version that I had last time. This is definitely a good thing.

The amazing subtlety and simplicity of this flavor is awesome. It reminds me a lot of Cas Cal in that it is a nice, calm flavor that would go great with a fruit salad or really a lunch of any kind. I think the way that the sweetened it and the fact that it is high on Citric acid is what really made it so amazingly subtle.

The marble, fizzing away

One big downside is that there is not much liquid in here. I have taken maybe 4 or 5 sips and it's basically all gone already. I would love to see some bigger bottles of this, though that is most likely just due to me being an American and being used to the hugely gigantic cans we get over here. Ohhh the weird indentations on one side of the bottle make sense now. When you are low on soda tipping the bottle up can make the marble fall in to the cap, causing the cap to get blocked and stopping the flow of soda in to your mouth. The indentations hold the marble in place and stop this. Very clever!

After drinking

Almost no sugar and very little calories!

Overall, this is just a really nice tasting soda. The flavor is very well done and it is not overpowering at all. If you somehow happen to get a chance to try this out you definitely should. It tastes great and it's not bad for you. I would recommend this as a gimmick to hand around at a party, or to be had with an afternoon meal or even just to be hand on its own. It's just simply an awesome soda, I highly recommend it.

Marble Pop Original Flavor Review

Background

I actually have a bit of a history with Marble Pop. When I was in middle school there was a spot downtown called Digital Ops and I would go there with friends all the time to play games on their computers. Naturally we would want food and drink and there was an Anime store next to it that sold all sorts of Japanese stuff like Marble Pop and Pocky. I would get Marble Pops and play games a lot so it has some fond memories for me.
Marble Pop is also the Americanized version, this was originally a Japanese treat by the name of Ramune. Ramune was introduced back in 1876 and has had many different versions. In modern times Ramune is seen as a symbol of summer time and is a popular drink. Here's the full Wikipedia article if you are interested. I can't remember where I bought this but my dad bought me a bag of 4 or 5 various flavored Marble Pops so plan to see some more of those fairly soon!

Review

Here's a short video explaining why Marble Pop is so unique:

You push down on this bit

I really do like the mechanism a whole lot. Of course it is a gimmick but it is a really cool one and something that is completely unseen in other sodas. I like it as it adds a certain level of interactivity with what you are drinking. It really does take a lot of effort to pop the marble in, much more than I expected which is why I needed a second take when making the video above.

It is very pretty!

I absolutely adore the bottle design. It is called a "Codd-Neck" bottle because it was named after the inventor Hiram Codd. It was designed for the specific purpose of holding a marble and rubber top. Interestingly enough they don't have to use any machine to force the marble into the cap, the bottles are filled upside down and then the pressure of the gas forces the marble into the cap, making a tight seal. The bottle design is also strangely humanoid, it has 2 indentations that look sort of like eyes and I like it, it's so different.
The labeling is interesting from a marketing standpoint. It uses a robot which is sort of rounded and bubbly looking which is obviously trying to emphasize that this is futuristic in the way it does bubbles. There are also some bubbles come off of him and an eye in the O of Pop. I quite like the lettering on Pop but all the other typography is pretty dull, then again what can you really ask for?

All the frilly bits of this soda are very good, but unfortunately it falls very flat when it comes to the actual soda inside of the bottle. Upon first tasting it I could not place the flavor at all, it honestly just tasted sort of sugary and then the after taste was somewhat like Cotton Candy. I really like Cotton Candy but it is not what I was expecting. It's definitely very sweet and I think that the HFCS is well placed because otherwise this would taste so bland. At the moment the flavor is sort of not there besides just sweetness. It also isn't very thick which makes me want to drink it quickly and also indicates there isn't much flavorings in it. I also really don't like that the top is plastic. When you are drinking from a glass bottle it feels weird to have this plasticy feeling against your lips. Glass bottles just have much more of a presence than this did. Also the opening was strangely placed. I didn't know whether to put my lips all the way around or drink it like a normal soda with more of a waterfalling action.
The carbonation is lackluster. It is a cool gimmicky way to deliver the carbonation but it ends up being pretty weak overall. It had me burping at the start but that was at it's peak and now that I am halfway down it really has almost no carbonation at all. The thing is it gets bubbly as it washed over the marble and the marble just simply can't do all that much. It has carbonation in it but it just simply doesn't get bubbly.
It is only 90 calories unsurprisingly, it also only has 19g of sugar so my ideas are confirmed. This is just a weak soda. There's some Iron in there as well which is sort of perplexing. I hate that they can list "Artificial Flavorings" as an ingredient, I understand that they have to keep their recipe secret but it still sucks from a reviewer and consumer standpoint. There is no artificial coloring at all which I quite like, I am scared of a lot of those extremely vibrant sodas. There is also very little liquid in the bottle. I was drinking away while I was thinking of what to type next and I ended up downing half the bottle. It has only 6.76 fluid ounces which is significantly less than the typical 12 ounce soda can. I suppose this is just meant to be a quick treat and not a drink, which I quite honestly became the norm for sodas.
I also took the time to chill this one more, I usually drink it at the temperature of my basement which is pretty cool. I figure that soda is usually drunk colder so I tried this out, it ended up not really making a huge difference so I'm going to ignore it for now.

Overall, I fell like it's underwhelming as far as a soda go, the bottling is cool, the gimmick is really really awesome but the actual soda is so meh. This is a great soda to show your friends because of the way that the marble works out but if you are just alone and want a solid soda I'd pass. I think just having it once to try out the gimmick and have some fun is great but I would not recommend this as a drink with a meal or to buy like it were other sodas. This really is a candy treat much more than any other soda I have encountered, which I really like conceptually it's just that the flavor isn't enough like candy to justify it.