Asahi Mitsuya Cider Candy

Mitsuya Cider is one of Japan's most enduring soft drinks, a sweet, lightly fizzy beverage that has been a fixture of Japanese summers and convenience store fridges since 1884. Someone at Asahi looked at that legacy and decided it deserved to exist in candy form as well, which was an excellent decision that has been validated by everyone who has ever opened a bag of these and found it empty twenty minutes later.

The candy delivers that distinctive Mitsuya Cider flavour with impressive accuracy, bright and sweet with a subtle effervescent quality that makes each piece taste faintly like a carbonated event even though it is, technically, just a hard candy. The flavour is clean and refreshing in the way that the drink itself is, which is a harder thing to translate into a solid sweet than it sounds and which Asahi have managed with characteristic precision. Mitsuya Cider Candy sits in that proud Japanese confectionery tradition of taking a beloved drink and making it chewable, pocketable, and shareable, or not shareable, depending on how attached you have become to the bag by the time someone asks. Japan has been drinking Mitsuya Cider for over a century. The candy makes that century available in your pocket. This is progress.