The 'Mystery Blue' Fanta flavour has been confusing the hell out of other countries for a while now. Finally, the Coca-Cola Company decided to bring it to Japan. Along with the #WhatTheFanta hashtag.
Here, before even opening the bottle, is where I made my first mistake. Originally, I thought that this mystery fruit flavour was going to be one fruit. Spoiler alert for later: it is not just one fruit. Everything I did trying to work out this taste was based on expecting to only taste one fruit. My bad.
To make things easier (or so I thought), I poured some of the Mystery Blue Fanta into a handy paper cup. And holy wow, it is very blue. Here's a closeup:
It's like gazing into the deep blue sea...
I approached this like I was doing some kind of fake wine tasting. First, a nice big sniff. Swish the liquid around in the cup a bit, get the top notes out there, take a deep breath.
I was getting... well, not much of anything. No hints of zingy fresh citrus, so maybe we can rule that out. No strong berry notes. Maybe peach? Or nectarine? Or maybe it's apple?
I was going to end up drinking the stuff either way, so I did.
And that, dear reader, is where I got completely lost.
If you ask me, this stuff doesn't even taste like fruit. It tastes blue. Completely blue. Like that blue slush ice drink you can get at the cinema, that's half-heartedly meant to be 'raspberry flavour' but is purely fake sugar and food colouring. That kind of blue.
Okay, so Fanta wanted to make things difficult (read: make people buy more than one bottle of this stuff), but my tastebuds were finding this impossible. As I tweeted at the time: "Curse you, Fanta. Sugar is not a fruit. This is cheating."
The mystery of Fanta Mystery Blue isn't which fruit it tastes like, but who on earth can find a fruit flavour in the mix at all. Checking the #WhatTheFanta hashtag revealed plenty of people who'd had the same problem.
On the official website, you can select up to 7 fruits to guess. There are 54 options. It's obvious that Fanta wants you to second-guess yourself. It can't be orange or grape, 'cause those are normal Fanta flavours, right... right? Wait, fig is an option? Fig... did I taste fig... I can't remember...
That's right, folks, you're being gaslit by a fizzy drink!
I made 7 guesses: dragon fruit, plum, yellow peach, lychee, cherry, white peach, and passion fruit.
The website told me that I was wrong - but not how wrong. Because it's a fruit mix, I can't tell if every single guess was wrong or just my combination of picks. I didn't try again.
The only way I'll ever learn the truth is when Fanta publishes the actual answer. Update: Fanta released the answer. It was strawberry, grape, and fig. First of all, grape is a standard Fanta flavour here so that shouldn't count. Second, who the hell knows what fig juice tastes like? I feel cheated.
I'm not drinking Mystery Blue ever again, because the combination of overthinking and sugar gave me a headache. Not worth it.
Verdict: 2/10. The main thing we learned here is that I'm a sucker for mystery flavours.