On July 30 this blog wrote that I rode the Tozai Line from Takebashi for drinks in Kagurazaka and found Awa Odori there. This weekend, the 24th and 25th, “Koenji Awa Odori” is held in Koenji (Suginami), which I called a Tokyo mecca (?) of Awa dancing.
This is not about the dance, but cider. There is a local commemorative cider, Koenji Cider (340 ml, 200 yen) = photo above. The mark is a blue label with two dancers in silhouette. Sweetness is held down; the aftertaste is clean. To look cool, the drink itself is blue too.
It is sold at three 7-Eleven stores at the south exit of JR Koenji Station, near the venue. In late June they developed Koenji Minami Cider = photo right to “PR Koenji with an original drink”; it has “Minami” in the name and one dancer on the label. That did well, so they improved taste and label and released this Koenji Cider in mid-August — no “Minami,” two dancers, the Awa Odori version. A limited 2,400 bottles; besides the shops they plan a booth on festival days.
This kind of local cider is actually everywhere — maybe “all over the place” is righter. Seeing local beer do well, people say, cider spread fast because it is easier to make. For example the Shinjuku shopping-street union sold “100,000-Horsepower Shinjuku Cider” (220 ml, 150 yen) with Astro Boy art in 2012. In 2009 “Yokohama Cider Premium Clear” (330 ml, 180 yen), labeled with the harbor symbol Nippon Maru, marked Yokohama’s 150th port anniversary. In Ibaraki the gold hollyhock-crest “Mito Komon Cider” (340 ml, 190 yen) dazzles; I remember buying it at Tomobe SA on the Joban Expressway when I lived in the prefecture. “Omiya Bonsai-da!!” (a pun, of course; 335 ml, 200 yen) is sold mainly around the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum shopping streets, opened March 2010.
Among newcomers, “old houses” still stand. “Tokyo Cider,” launched in Mukojima in 1947 just after the war, vanished in the late 1980s and was revived in 2011 before Skytree opened (340 ml, 250 yen) = cider photos below, from the left.
Search a net mall and local ciders line up; two-by-eight sets are sold too. The site Actiz, which claims to “offer every kind of regional information,” has a “gotochi cider feature” (http://www.actiz.jp/cider/index.html).