what is the best japanese canned coffee

http://i.imgur.com/mfnBh8u.jpg

DOUTOUR CAFE AU LAIT / MY RATING: *

ingredients are: milk, sugar, coffee, fat free powdered milk, powdered milk, some chemicals, modified milk ingredients, artificial flavoring.... it tastes like a gas station protein drink, like muscle milk mocha blast or something, dusty whey and artificial flavoring.

http://i.imgur.com/psnpGVM.jpg

BOSS WORLD COLLECTION COLOMBIA / MY RATING: **

only the finest colombian beans, ground and roasted to produce boss's world collection colombia. less sweet than other canned coffee? still tastes like a kit kat mocha.

xpost: that background is mysteriously suggestive :-/

http://i.imgur.com/Z0zoZtV.jpg

GEORGIA MAX COFFEE / MY RATING: *

i drank this in the basement of a sort of mall below ueno station, down ameyoko. the only time i go to drink coffee, it's usually at ameyoko, one of the coffee shops across from the station that i guess you could call kissaten but maybe they're cafes or just coffee shops-- i feel like the difference was explained to me once and i believe it had something to do with smoking? but like lots of the finer points of DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE, i might have missed the point or it might be bullshit, or maybe the difference had something to do with food being served, but again, i think i've smoked and eaten food in coffee shops and cafes and kissaten, but anyways. if you've never been to ueno and the ameyoko side... ueno station, all around it, it's kind of a commuter hub and sort of the first taste you get of the old city, the low city, or the last taste if, like me, you commute into the city, pop up at ginza or kasumigaseki or somewhere. there's the museums, the park, and if you wander away from the station, you're in the REAL TOKYO, DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE part of town, you could wander to nippori, yanesen, asakusa, iriya, and you could wander even further to less gentrified shitamachi neighborhoods, hour or so walk and you could be across the river to mukojima, right under the skytree, or you could get up to sanya and minowa. ameyoko is kind of a tourist trap now, i guess, and i love DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE shotengai like (near enough to ueno) joyful minowa, jujo ginza shotengai, irohakai shotengai at sanya, but they're dead zones, even the most vital shotengai run to 40-50% abandoned unless there's some anchor property like a shopping mall or a 100 yen store and those places always feel like the most lively. so, whatever ameyoko, it's going to be full of tourists, especially on a sunny day in june but on a cold morning in late october, it's pretty dead. but anyways, i'll go there in the morning, when i'm on my way into the city because the only coffee option near where i work are places with french names on gaienhigashi dori or starbucks. the coffee places in ameyoko, very old fashioned, i guess, in that they're like most of tokyo trapped in like 1986? no espresso but you can get pourover, actually, and i usually just get iced coffee and i actually drink it with syrup and milk, so i should be more into GEORGIA MAX COFFEE but i'm not. ameyoko is lively, ugly. even it's a sunday today, it's noisy and the train runs right through it and you see it reflected in the dark glass four storeys up a hostess club or some shithole irish pub and then it disappears in yellow stucco and grey tile and appears again on more black glass across the upper floors of a pachinko place. in a city that's pretty sedate and homogeneous, ameyoko is a nice break sometimes. i just flew back to japan yesterday and i was in hong kong and across the border in shenzhen and both cities have a certain energy, a certain, you know, they're brash and bright? and hong kong, even in the meaner quarters of the city feels more modern than tokyo does-- in the sense of like, "this is what cities will all look like in a few decades." i always have a crisis coming back to tokyo after going to especially hong kong. i know the problems hong kong has but taking the morningliner from narita to ueno yesterday-- actually, right when you land at the airport, you get this feeling of, like, landing at, i dunno, somewhere that's transitioning from a command economy and stalinist bureaucracy to limited capitalism, all the grey and the dated signage and the weird appeals to appreciate japanese culture (there was this big bank of gashapon with the slogan in large: WHY JAPANESE PEOPLE LIKE THIS! and then a smaller explanatory note: DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE, which is where i got that phrase i've been repeating to myself for the last day), and it just feels like entering a museum, tokyo does, coming in on the train and it's... you've come in from narita before, it's not the most scenic trip, especially after you've done it a dozen times. like a museum to japanese culture, which feels weird, coming from hong kong, which is multicultural and multiethnic and multilingual. girls in hong kong wear shorter skirts than girls in tokyo. or even loud, grimy shenzhen, feels more lively and liveable than tokyo, i think. or more like a place that you could call home. i mostly work with people with east asia and southeast asia who came to tokyo mostly for the opportunities. but i wonder about what appeals to japan for mostly white westerners that come here, all the tourists you see in ameyoko with, like, anime shit on their messenger bags. i think the weird purity of DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE or its imagined purity, if that makes sense, has to be part of the appeal. like, there's that thing about the hopes and dreams visa, japanophiles in their 20s that dream of coming to japan, i never got that at all but i don't want to be too judgemental BUT japanese culture and tokyo itself feels so conservative to me. i mean, i live here and i probably will live here for a while so what am i complaining about but whatever, it comes into focus after visiting a vibrant, politically active, multicultural but still wealthy and sorta democratic city not so far away. but i do appreciate it sometimes, those coffee shops at ueno, where i actually feel sorta unwelcome and everyone else at the bar beside me is at least 50+ years old, it's nice but conservative and museumlike. so, the ueno ameyoko basement is kind of a hopeful place, where you have all these people that have come to tokyo from other countries kind of showing themselves in a way that they don't usually in everyday life, chatting in tagalog, buying groceries, and upstairs, across the road, where i went to get a breakfast of liang'pi, i shared a table with hunanese girls walked over from yushima just off work maybe and eating suanla fen. there's that poem that they have on a piece of iron in front of ueno station: i slip into the crowd at the train station / just to hear the familiar dialect / of my faraway hometown. ameyoko is where the city feels least insular, most international, least grey. anyways, i ate my breakfast and went down to shop, bought a pack of rough ground pork to make lurou fan like i ate the last day i was in shenzhen. there's a spot at the end, under the stairs, where people eat their lunches and there's a few benches and ash trays and an antique empty coke machine and a coffee machine and a cigarette machine. i bought a georgia max coffee and enjoyed it while smoking a cigarette. it tasted the same as every other canned coffee.

http://i.imgur.com/xV166ao.jpg

POKKA COFFEE / MY RATING: ****

this is actually pretty good. ingredients limited to milk, coffee, sugar. tastes like coffee with milk. this is good.

http://i.imgur.com/fVH5HRx.jpg

CRAFT BOSS BLACK / MY RATING: *****

The resulting changes in how people work and take breaks has led to the diversification of the value consumers seek in coffee. These changes are typified by consumers who want coffee nearby during both work and breaks, people who prefer to drink coffee slowly while they work, and people who want to purchase their coffee in the morning and carry it with them all day. Amid such diversification of coffee consumption and desired value, we recognize the rise of a “3rd generation” of coffee consumers who don’t embrace canned or bottle-shaped canned coffee.

this launched at the start of the month and the latte version will enter the market in the middle of june. georgia's cold brew seemed to disappear within a few months of launch and there's a lack of premium canned coffee other than cafe chain-branded offerings. the georgia cold brew black was pretty good but i'd never had cold brew i guess until happening upon in shinagawa station the hundredth tokyo blue bottle outpost. it didn't taste like georgia. if i drink coffee at home, i usually get the liter bottles of dark roast by dydo, which has 3-fpm-like effects and tastes like sae 30. i actually prefer gritty kissaten coffee over ice. that's about what CRAFT BOSS BLACK tastes like. it tastes like medium strength donut shop coffee. it's in a bottle. it provides some of the values i desire in coffee.

like being nearby during both work and breaks

Nice! The question is how will Doutor counter this threat

I still have a modest contribution to make to this thread but how to post an original image on ilx is my Achilles heel. D, what's your process?

imgur link .jpg direct

try decaf

http://i.imgur.com/I3vFRaR.jpg

Sadly I've forgotten what was distinctive about this one but I believe it was the fact that it has condensed milk and was thus too sweet.

http://i.imgur.com/rI6Wo6X.jpg

This was less sweet and had a good amount of milk. Out of the limited selection I got through recently (short trip), this was the best.

I really love the aesthetics of the design of coffee cans there, no matter what they taste like.

http://imgur.com/lB3LJoB.jpg

YAMAZAKI CAFFE LATTE / MY RATING: ****

daily yamazaki has the most range from store to store--the one i used to work across from sold ben&jerry's and swisher sweets but the one at the bottom of my building despite being actually in the same building i'll usually walk over to any of the other convenience store chains nearby. run by an elderly couple that immediately come from behind the counter to guide the customer. i grabbed this terrible sandwich. white bread, salt, egg. a potato salad sandwich. ham and lettuce. they close on sundays. they close at 9 pm. a selection of mostly yamazaki-branded beverages. including this yamazaki caffe latte. pretty good, actually.

I wonder how these things compare to the milk based iced coffees that are ubiquitous in Oz. I imagine I could try at least Pokka from an azn supermarket.

you have a duty to the thread

That sandwich does indeed look horrible.

I kind of wonder about what health food lunch looks like in the big cities in Japan. What are the options? I imagine a yoshinoya, an issaken or izakaya, a convenience store.

Tully's Demitasse FTW - only one that doesn't make me gag

i dunno: 7-11 salad, teishoku fish + veg + soup japanese food or kitchen origin, and like actual cold pressed juice quinoa salad places?

http://i.imgur.com/3gd5tUq.jpg

GEORGIA AEROPRESS CAFE LATTE / MY RATING: ****

strong contender for best canned coffee.

Aero Presso! Would try
Also, nice shoes

thanks, bud. give er a try if u get the chance.

https://i.imgur.com/vquq4AV.jpg

that's printed on the can and not actually embossed, right? still looks pretty imposing

emPRIDE OF BOSSed.

otm

Nice

Would guzzle

I just had the coca cola coffee limited can the other day, ISO dylannn's review of it.

i haven't seen it in machines around here yet. i have never really enjoyed a coffee cola.

PRIDE OF BOSS just in case anyone is rushing out to pick it up is one of the worst canned coffees i've tasted.

damn i was about to get a PRIDE OF BOSS tattoo, thx for info

the coca-cola coffee plus is probably the finest coffee cola ever formulated. i'm comparing it to pepsi kona, mostly. i never thought coffee worked with pepsi's formulation, which is heavier on citrus peel flavors, but it works with standard coke, which is heavier on vanilla, baking spices and a rounder sweeter orange flavor. it also works because it dials back the cola flavor so that coffee plus mostly works as a sort of syrupy sweet canned coffee cut by the bite of carbonation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfTnvslZuF4

check out my unboxing video too

agree strongly re: pepsi vs coke w/r/t combining w/coffee

fuck

where are these coffee colas

coca-cola blak, i saw that in canadian discount supermarkets within the last five years. it wasn't great. pepsi has always been willing to experiment, though. pepsi jazz had a coffee and cream version. parts of eastern europe and central america got pepsi cappuccino and pepsi tarik, a milder formulation is still available intermittently in southeast asia. a sugarfree version of coffee plus is coming to australia soon.

FWIW I find the nu-premium American canned/cartonned coffees from companies like Stumptown and Blue Bottle to be pretty disappointing too, not as bad as some of the cheaper options but hardly worth their premium prices. Canned coffee is just not a good thing in general. Especially if you're used to having the milk and/or sugar amount exactly to your liking.

yeah stumptown is good coffee but the canned stuff is $5 worth of garbage

Thank you for your long-awaited review & unboxing dylann!

Here's my review:
https://i.imgur.com/tJ3q9xT.jpg

Coca-Cola Coffee Plus
3.2/5.0

The nose was what you'd expect from this Frankenstein monster: equal doses of roasted coffee and kola bean cherries.

AFAIK Japanese Coke still uses cane sugar rather than HFCS, but Coca-Cola Coffee Plus was definitely that numbing chemical fructose sweetness that you get back home.

The back end was a better balance of the two beverages playing hard against each other. I've been known to add cold brew concentrate to Topo Chico (ed note: as of recently also a Coca-Cola product) and I was getting a touch of those bright and smoky roasted notes here, with obviously much more sweetness.

Also worth noting: holy fuck does this jack you up. I was doing pushups around 3am trying to ward off the after-effects of the caffeine.

In summary, probably more of an energy drink than a refreshing beverage. Worth trying for the novelty, will not buy again.

lol at that unboxing video. More like a molestation film! Anyway happy to see this thread revived. Need more jap coffee in my life for sure. The selection at the locals is restricted to 2 or 3 standbys: that 12 oz kona shit and some random 8 oz black.

Will ask wife to re-patriot a couple when she travels over there and back later this year

hey guys thanks for the support on the unboxing video i'm just getting the hang of things so i shot a new one today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjixmlid8hk

Definite articles: big in Japan

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Ohio gozaimasu

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<a href="http://www.imagebam.com/image/d4b56b956284304"; target="_blank"><img src="http://thumbs2.imagebam.com/38/82/da/d4b56b956284304.jpg"; alt="imagebam.com"></a> <a href="http://www.imagebam.com/image/0fcae7956284364"; target="_blank"><img src="http://thumbs2.imagebam.com/0c/62/df/0fcae7956284364.jpg"; alt="imagebam.com"></a> <a href="http://www.imagebam.com/image/376355956284614"; target="_blank"><img src="http://thumbs2.imagebam.com/ad/f8/1b/376355956284614.jpg"; alt="imagebam.com"></a> <a href="http://www.imagebam.com/image/e91473956284744"; target="_blank"><img src="http://thumbs2.imagebam.com/37/e0/6a/e91473956284744.jpg"; alt="imagebam.com"></a>

I knew that wouldn’t work

http://www.imagebam.com/image/d4b56b956284304
http://www.imagebam.com/image/0fcae7956284364
http://www.imagebam.com/image/376355956284614
http://www.imagebam.com/image/e91473956284744

https://image.ibb.co/mbO3Q9/1_ED3_DBA7_4_D52_4020_BAFF_EF022_CBC061_B.jpg
Best can award

森彦の珈琲　cafe au lait. I’ve finally found a can coffee with milk and an acceptably tiny amount of sugar.

Decent and cheap
https://i.imgur.com/1rHbDlE.jpg

http://imgur.com/s6h8LKC.jpg

two nights ago, i wrote a lengthy examination of starbucks' first ready to drink canned offering in japan, then got self-conscious, trying to figure out why i had written eight hundred words jargony and insipid enough for a trade magazine. i thought about passing it off as a gag, undercutting it somehow, but i couldn't bring myself to do it. i shouldn't have deleted it. but my conclusion, anyways, was that it was head and shoulders above anything else on the market, precisely because the goal despite it being made in japan for the japanese market (the copy on the can assured me that i was holding nippon steel) was to have it taste like starbucks coffee instead of making an attempt at localizing to the japanese canned coffee average. well. this is interesting, looking at the bts coffee from hy. this also tastes like something different from the usual. maybe i'm losing my mind. the flavor profile—artificial vanilla so dominant, a toastier coffee note—does stand out, as well as, like the starbucks, a less syrupy texture. i might buy this again but the branding does put me off. i don't want to make a bold statement about my connection to korean pop music.

aw would've enjoyed that

yeah that HY i had was real good. I don't typically drink fancy Starbucks type stuff but it seemed on par with what I've tasted fresh from there.

seconded - always happy to read your writing Dyl

re Starbucks -- I have a similar aversion to the brand but the fact is that their coffee is pretty consistently great imho

knowing i can't delete it an hour later, i always overthink. that was not always the case. but i'll try my best.

the aversion was for bts branding. no feelings on starbucks.

i'm going to post an image here just to see what it looks like with a different size.

http://imgur.com/Gw59lMJ.jpg

Today I learned that Boss coffee is available in the US

https://www.amazon.com/BOSS-COFFEE-Suntory-Japanese-Original/dp/B07PMNB62N/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=YOPS77FL20L8&keywords=boa%2Bcoffee&qid=1659093467&sprefix=boss%2Bcoffee%2Caps%2C69&sr=8-1&th=1&psc=1

http://storage.googleapis.com/urbo11/urbo11/cofsaru.jpg

as a rule or this is what i have found to be true discount grocery stores have better sushi, since they usually maintain a fish section, by which i mean they bring in fish and cut it there, which is perhaps for labor savings or because they can't count as a larger national chain would on a distributor to provide cut and wrapped fish. this means that freshness is guaranteed if not the quality of the rice. down the street, the shitamachi staple supermarket patronized only by the elderly is on its way to putting out of commission a takeout chain sushi operation that opened up next door. the fish is better at the supermarket. given that they need to keep prices down, they also emphasize seasonal and sometimes quite peculiar fishes (they also sell shark and whale, i should note, although not to be consumed raw). now, the local branch of national chain maruetsu has to compete against the takeout shops and the discount supermarkets... they couldn't compete. that's clear. their fish was second-rate. their rice wasn't particularly good. their selection was limited. this seems to be why they have revamped their ready to eat sushi selections, which is presented under the uoetsu brand. i think the fish being sourced is probably the same, but its freshness and shelf appeal reflects a refinement of shipping and packing processes. perhaps suppliers have changed. variety is still limited. seasonality is limited. but it's better. i am still too loyal to the discount supermarket. this tray was not eaten by me. i will admit that. i drank the coffee posed on top.

Excellent reporting, always nice to hear from you d
Is there much talk of over fishing or seafood stock heading downhill?

no. i never hear anything about that. there is much excitement these days over sustainable development goals. but they are applied even to whaling. overfishing is not mentioned. i know other countries have labeling for sustainable fish or encourage long line whatever, but that simply doesn't exist here, as far as i've seen.

japan feeds itself on american meat and grain imports and unsustainable fisheries, sadly. rice is the only thing truly protected. it gets fed to pigs.

https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/japan's-food-self-sufficiency-alarmingly-low-72-mil-could-go-hungry-magazine-says

even japanese beef and dairy cows are fed on imported hay (american, australian, chinese), a fact i found hard to believe when i first read it. it's not that they can't grow enough but that nobody will grow it and if they do they have nobody to cut it for them. that is a simplification but about the state of things. as the japanese diet over the long postwar years shifted to wheat, self-sufficiency has become harder to accomplish. this is the key to all geopolitical questions concerning japan, more than microchips or thinking themselves still honorary aryans or wanting to defend taiwanese democracy. they can say eff it (or get the permission of america) and buy gas from russia, as they just did, but they need american food imports.

but to return to fish, with that dire level of self-sufficiency, there's no way for anybody in charge to start pushing a line on not eating tuna. i'm sure most people compared to average american are eating somewhat sustainable fish too. little oily fish as a staple, top of the food chain as a luxury (or in your grocery store sushi as maguro).

but enjoy your unagi now because in a decade you will only be able to get an artificial version shipped out of a factory in tsukuba.

sup dyl.

Kindai University funds a few 本マグロ farms that have been harvesting off the coast of Wakayama for about 20 years. Most of it is for the domestic market but some of it goes overseas (weirdly, as Mediterranean farms in Croatia, Spain/Balaerica & Turkey are the biggest global producers).

hey steve shasta

i knew maguro could be farmed but i've never considered the extent of it. i should pay attention to the labels on the packs of maguro tataki next time.

https://i.imgur.com/qLRA3B8.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/kRbVlzf.jpg

Couple of new label designs