Japanese Beverage Report: Unknown Asahi Tea

I’m writing this on an express train we boarded in Okayama, bound for Matsue. It’s not as smooth as a shinkansen but it’s roomy and comfortable. Since this will be a 2.5-hour ride, I grabbed a bottle of tea from the nearest vending machine. It wasn’t stocked with teas with which I am familiar, so I chose this bottle somewhat at random:

To paraphrase one of the great lines from The Raiders of the Lost Ark movie series, I chose unwisely. I don’t think I could acquire a taste for this one. Tracie grabbed the camera to capture a visual record of my reaction:

It reminded me almost immediately of something, but I couldn’t place the flavor at first.

Then it hit me: it tastes like wet wool. It tastes very much like wet wool, in fact. If you know the taste you get in your mouth when you have a wool scarf wrapped around your face because it’s cold and damp, or if you remember what it was like to be a kid and suck on the damp ends of your wool mittens after playing in the snow, that’s what it tastes like. There might be a hint of graphite in the flavor also. I wonder whether there’s a traditional Japanese tea that involves steeping tea in a pot with wool socks and broken pencils.

Looking around the train car, I see three kinds of bottled tea in posession of locals. None of them are drinking the kind that I have. That’s probably significant.