Hata - 4 Reviews

Chili oil. Natures gag gift. Oh, is this regular oil? Uh, no. It's chili oil and you just got pranked. Now your mouth is on fire and I'm sitting back laughing. Now, so that everything is out in the open, here I give to you chili oil Ramune. Now you can know what you're getting into. Is it hot like that prank chili oil? Hardly, bro. Hardly. It is a light tickling and, if anything, kind of a refreshing burn similar to one you would get from a light ginger beer but with a fruity pop instead of a...well...ginger. This is a mix between a kids party pop and "I'm an adult and I'm too old for fun and I like to feel pain when I drink" drink. Where are you on the teeter-totter of life. Whatever spectrum you identify with, this has your bases covered. I just wish there was more pain. I guess I know what side I'm on.

Now, listen. You will be happy to know that this is not only a review for a strange and odd drink but it is a milestone. No it's not a sweet sixteen or a sweet sixty. That stuff is for the birds. This review that you are reading right now is, get ready for it. This review is Thirsty Dudes' 4,000th review. That's right. Four thousand. This is not Europe or whatever where they use commas for decimals points and we have reviewed four and no thousandths drinks. This is America and we idiotically use the standard system of measurement and that comma denotes that we have reviewed four thousands drinks. To celebrate we have provided you with a video that we blew our entire marketing budget on. Our marketing budget is, but should not be, zero dollars.



Thank you to all the fans and if you see us, shake our hands. We have done a lot of drinking and it wasn't all for us. It was for you, the people. The fans. The groupies. The dedicated followers of us, the Thirsty Dudes.

I wanted to share this with as many people as I could in the case that it actually tasted like kimchi. Within the last year or two I have really gotten into kimchi from, somehow, never having tried it for thirty years. Now any time it's on the menu I'll try and get it; that is if udon isn't on the menu. There is a restaurant not far from where Jay and I live that has kimchi udon and it is far from terrible. There is a kimchi soup called kimchi jjiGae that just rules. Tofu, pork, kimchi, spice, noodles and rice cakes: the whole thing.

So now you know my recent new love. Big deal, right? Well it's important to have an appreciation for kimchi before you drink this because it tastes just like kimchi. I'm not kidding. It tastes like someone juiced kimchi and added a sprinkle of sugar and carbonated it. It's frighteningly accurate. It's good in that it tastes like what it's supposed to but what it is supposed to taste like is not a carbonated, sweetened drink.

It is what it is but what it is just shouldn't be.

What we have here is the most unfortunately accurate tasting soda I have ever come across. I know I complain a lot that most pops don't taste anything like the flavor they are named after, but I kind of wish this didn't. Actually, no I don't because there was no possible way that a teriyaki flavored beverage could be good. At least it's accurate and true to it's self.

Let me paint this image for you. You pick up some takeout on the way home from work. Once you get home you pull out your fancy pants bullet blender and dump your teriyaki chicken in along with a heaping cup of sugar. Once you have blended the living hell out of it you mix the remaining liquid into some soda water and viola you have this Japanese “treat.”

I want everyone in the world to try this. I want to watch as they make a disgusted face and then sit there because they can't complain about it. They knowingly tried a teriyaki soda and it turns out it tastes exactly like the meal they would have preferred to be eating. Dumb dummies.

Jimmy was a kid growing up in the 1920's who lived in a one-bedroom basement apartment with his parents and 5 brothers and sisters. Unable to afford anything and unable to get to school, he spent his days roaming the streets looking for something to do. He once came across some kids on a stoop playing marbles. He had never seen marbles before and they intrigued him. He was timid, but he managed to ask them if he could join. They were reluctant, but said he could play with them if he brought his own marbles.

This proved to be a challenge to Jimmy, as he didn't have any money to buy marbles. Just then he stumbled upon an empty bottle of Ramune in the trash. He had seen them many times before while he went looking for cans and bottles to return. The one thing he never noticed was the marble in the neck of it. His face lit up as he rattled the marble around the bottle, but slowly faded as he realized the marble was stuck in there.

His initial thought was to smash it on the ground, but he was afraid of cutting himself, causing a scene, and possibly losing the marble. He then notice that the top of the bottle was plastic so he found a sharp rock and started prying it off. It took some work, but he finally did it and retrieved his first marble. But this was only one marble, how was he going to get enough for a whole collection?

Just then he remembered that the karaoke bar down the street always had a lot of empty Ramune bottles in their dumpster. Sure enough, he was right and he found over 30 bottles he could pry the marbles out of. As he was going through one, he noticed a raspberry bottle still had some soda left in it. He had never had soda, and was afraid of his parents catching him drinking it. He hid behind the dumpster as he took a sip of the fizzy beverage. It tickled his throat, but was much too sweet for him. The most sugar he has ever had was a small piece of cake on his birthday last year. To his family, sugar is "not-essential" so he has learned to live without it.

Within a couple hours he had a couple dozen marbles and returned to the kids on the stoop. They were impressed with his collection and promptly punched him in the face and stole them all.

Moral of the story: don't play marbles with randoms on the street.