Sapporo Mini Beer Review - A Deliciously Tiny Can of Beer!

There is an old saying across many places in the world and especially in America that "bigger is better", but the reality is that this is just often not true! Sapporo Mini Beer is a perfect example of this, where one of Japan's most delicious and refreshing lagers is condensed into a tiny little can perfect to give you instant ice cold refreshment at lunch or whilst on the go somewhere (or perhaps if you want to tell your friends that you drank 10 cans of beer without getting drunk...).

For a quick history lesson, Sapporo Breweries was established in 1876 and has been producing Sapporo Lager since that time, though both the brewery and the beer have been through considerable changes since that time. The current Sapporo Black Label Beer was launched in 1977 and is also known as Sapporo Bottled Draft Beer, because it is bottled in it's freshly brewed state. A replica of their original style of beer is produced under the Kaitakushi label and is sadly only available at the Kaitakushi Sapporo brewery.

In general the Japanese make excellent quality lagers and Sapporo, which is one of my personal favourites is no exception! And in addition to great beer, they are also famous for producing some great adverts such as this one featuring mega-famous Japanese actor Toshiro Morifune (三船 敏郎) which literally says "Guys! Just shut up and drink Sapporo Beer!"

As well as this incredibly popular television advert from two years ago, which is a sort of epic short film in itself showing the history and developing culture of Japan from through the brewing of a giant glass of Sapporo beer that starts in 1876 when the brewery was established and finishes in the present day.

Well after all that excitement and history of Sapporo Beer I know that the question which must be on everyone's minds is "but how did Spencer Douglass and Arne Venema react to this mini gem of a beer?". Well to find the answer to that, you'll have to watch our Crazy from Kong review below and make sure to take note of our awesome matching Aphex Twin shirts!

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 Blog

McDonalds Wasabi Fish Burger - This Limited Edition Specialty Burger Packs a Punch!

This is an AWESOME Burger!!! I just have to say that up front. What a great idea of McDonalds to start combining spicy wasabi sauce with their traditional Filet-O-Fish Burger to create this fantastic variation on a long time classic Mickey D's offering. 

As it says on the packaging "It Packs a Punch" though I didn't find it too spicy, in comparison to my fellow Crazy from Kong reviewer Arne who was a touch overwhelmed by wasabi-ness at one point. In fact there is a rather entertaining blurb on the side of the box which actually tells you to "man up and take the challenge" - we found it pretty hysterical that McDonalds was daring us to eat their product. Well we steeled ourselves for the experience, took a deep breath and dared to take the challenge. 

The burger came in both a single fish patty and a double fish patty version and both were accompanied by both interesting and odd advertising campaigns. This clean image from Singapore below, gives a pretty good indication of what the double wasabi burger looked like: 

Well, all in all we enjoyed this burger a lot. It was definitely one of the best and most successful specialty burger from McDonalds we'd tried by that time and if memory serves correctly, I think it would hold up pretty well against the many more specialty burgers that have come out from McD's since then. 

To see our full thoughts on this fun creation as well as our reactions to the "challenge" to "man up" from McDonalds, check out our review below: 

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 Blog

Valentine's Day Kit Kat - A Raspberry & Passionfruit Flavoured Kit Kat for Your Loved One !!!

And here we have the extremely romantic specialty Kit Kat released for Valentine's Day by Nestlé Japan. The flavour they chose to represent this most lovey-dovey of days is the rather random Raspberry & Passion Fruit and as you can see the Kit Kat comes in a very romantic package with lots of pink hearts stamped around the place.

You can also see the alternative and perhaps even more romantic pink packaging below:

Inside the main package the Kit Kats are also wrapped in two individual packets of two Kit Kat bars. This is pretty typical of Japanese produced products, they really put a lot of effort into their packaging and it almost always leads to a really gorgeous result.

Perhaps one of the most entertaining aspect of the packaging of these particular Kit Kats is that they come with a lined space on the back for writing a note to your loved one to go along with the special Valentine's Day gift. We had lots of fun reading off the special notes that each others loved ones had written to the camera as you'll see in our video.

For the Kit Kats themselves, they were surprisingly made from a milk chocolate base, as I had been expecting them to be a white chocolate base with pink colouring in line with the Valentine's theme and also more similar to most of the other raspberry and strawberry Kit Kats released by Nestlé Japan

As far as flavour goes, there was a strong raspberry smell as soon as you opened the packaging and the Kit Kat itself had a prominent raspberry taste too, but the passion fruit flavour seemed to have gotten totally lost in this product. Anyway, check out our review below to see what we thought:

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 Blog

No Smoking Candy - Quit Smoking NOW !!!

Well this review was a lot of fun for many reasons! Firstly the idea of a "No Smoking" candy seems like fun to me. Rather than a candy for quitting smoking, it sounds more like a candy that forbids or stops smoking from happening, the candy equivalent of the smoke police!

Secondly and much more interestingly, through some bizarre coincidence of circumstance, our friend Michael Chan who was the main face of all of the Hong Kong Government's Anti-Smoking Adverts for years, happened to arrive at our place to play Gears of War 3 on the X-Box just as we were about to film our review of Okuda No-Smoking Candy. This is doubly amusing because Michael is in fact a hardened smoker and so we immediately decided to pull him into our live filmed review.

To set the scene properly, here is first the official Hong Kong Government Anti-Smoking Campaign Video featuring none other than Michael Chan:
And now that you've enjoyed the HK Government's amusing official effort to prevent smoking, it's time to compare them with the much more unofficial efforts of the Okuda Candy Company to get you to stop smoking with their specially designed sweets.

Check out our review of the product here to see what we thought and whether or not it got Michael Chan to finally give up smoking (don't worry they are not the same videos despite the cover image):

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 Blog

Dried Squid - One of Asia's Most Popular Snack Foods!!!

This snack is one of the most popular snack foods across the entire of Asia, variations of it are eaten across Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore and this particular famous brand is from Thailand! I grew up eating this version of the dried squid snack in Hong Kong in the 80's. And to be accurate this particular variant is Dried Cuttlefish, a species similar to squid, which is equally common here, but might not be so well known in the West. Both are pretty damn ugly as you can see here: 

The number of different dried squid snacks and the different styles in which they are prepared is many and often depends from country to country. Here are a couple of different examples: 

Typically the squid is seasoned and then dried and sometimes also barbecued after being dried. Typically the flavour is sweet, sometimes with a hint of spice and the texture is very very chewy! Everyone seems to love this snack across Asia and you can find it in kids lunch boxes, on desks at work and served on occasionally on tables in bars instead of peanuts. This used to be one of my favourite snacks as a kid, but to be honest it must have been somewhere between 10 - 20 years since I'd eaten it last before opening this packet for Crazy from Kong. 

To see what I thought, check out our review here: 

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 Blog

Lotte Black Black Strong Type - A Highly Technical Candy from Area 51 !!

This tiny little package certainly appears to showcase a very special candy - first of all the double name "Black Black" certainly seems to imply something meaningful (even if we don't know exactly what) as the candy is obviously not just black, it is "Black Black". Secondly it specifies various strange and special things on the packet, although you can't see them from the picture above. The first of these is that it specifies that this candy is "Strong Type" obviously implying that this is no pushover candy, but rather something strong that you had better take seriously. The second and even more interesting statement on the package is that the candy is "Hi-Technical Excellent"!!! Now that certainly sounds like quite the statement, no? And it could be interpreted various different ways... One possible meaning is that the kind has been made to an excellent standard using highly technical means. Another meaning could be that the candy itself is highly technical and excellent because of that! 

Once you open up the packaging, you will find that each piece of candy is wrapped up tightly in very high quality metallic paper. The sweets themselves are completely jet black once you open the wrapping paper. Combining all these factors together and the fact that the outer packaging is very high quality metallic wrap and looks very advanced and technical in itself, we have decided that this candy must be the produce of the famous Area 51 manufactured from alien technology discovered after the first flying saucer crash landed there. 

To see what the candies actually tasted like you will have to check out our review here: 

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 Blog

Lotte Specialité Salt and Caramel Chocolate - Famous Korean Chocolate Maker Jumps on the Salted Caramel Bandwagon!!!

Ok, the first thing that annoys me about this product is that the rubbish quality screengrab from our own video is the best picture I can find of it on the whole internet - in fact it is the only picture! The second thing that annoys me about this product is that it sucks. I mean it really sucks. It's worse than the rubbish picture above. It tastes terrible, the texture is terrible, the consistency is terrible, basically it's just a terrible product.

Credit to Lotte for being ahead of the curve by a few years with the whole Salt and Caramel in everything trend (you can see from our reactions to the salt component that this was something very new and unlikely to be good sounding to us), but the product is just incredibly poorly executed.

Now I want to balance this review by stating clearly that Lotte are a great company with a long history and a tonne of great chocolate products and snack products. They were established in Japan in 1948 and South Korea in 1967 and have been going strong since then. It is unfortunate that the second product we reviewed from them was so bad! They do have a whole range of other unusual chocolate bars under their specialité such as:

Lotte Specialité Rum Cake Chocolate

Lotte Specialité Marron Glacé Chocolate

But sadly I've tried none of them and none of them seem to be available in Hong Kong anymore, so I'll never be able to find out if they were any good or not. I hope we'll be able to review Lotte's standout product "Koala no March" sometime in the future. In the meantime here is the review of the Lotte Specialité Salt and Caramel Chocolate:

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 Blog