Food + Drink Culture: Getting Caffeinated with Café Sepia

We're suckers for Japanese canned coffee. Every time one of the big Nippon beverage makers launches a new brand of sugar-dosed latte in a can, we've got to try it. And this is especially so when that new brand comes with an unusual screw-top aluminum can design that looks like it was dreamed up by an architect. The new Café Sepia from Ito-En is just the sort of stuff that works us into a frenzied, drooling El Nino of caffeine-jonesing desire. Even Cornelius, the official (living) cat-mascot of Air Massive, was intrigued by this latest beverage to emerge from Tokyo (as the picture above documents). But neither an eye-catching design nor a nuanced product name can make a can of coffee taste great. We're sad to report that Café Sepia tasted weak. It was too watery and diluted than we like. In fact, it lacked the coffee punch of even most established major brands of Japanese can coffee. (Personally, the Boss brand is our gold standard in this East Asian drinks sub-genre.) Café Sepia didn't taste "bad," mind you. It was actually pleasant to the tongue. But we expect more -- much more -- from anything that a drinks maker dares call coffee.

Posted by Supercore at May 30, 2006 09:21 PM