Vegete - A Fruit Juice, Vegetable Drink and Alcoholic Beverage in One!

Vegete... for when you're desperately thirsty!
A while ago I penned an article titled The Top Ten Weird and Bizarre Japanese Soft Drinks. It did not include Vegete, but that's only because this odd alcoholic beverage hadn't come out yet. Now that it has, the weird wide world of bizarre Japanese drinks is a little weirder.

Vegete is a collaborative venture between Kagome, one of Japan's leading vegetable juice makers, and Asahi, one of the "Top 4" Japanese brewers.

It contains a mixture of various fruit and vegetable juices spiked with a buzz-inducing 4% alcohol. That gives you the "what?", but I'm still working on the "why?"...

Is Vegete really so strange? I mean, mixed drinks like the Bloody Mary (tomato) and the Screwdriver (orange) successfully match alcohol with vegetable and fruit juices, and each is quite tasty - individually. Combining them to make a Bloody Driver or a Screw Mary, however, just doesn't work.

Vegete - Can't bear to drink it? Cook with it!
Japan's drinks marketers seem to use a "let's try anything" approach - a classic example being the revolting "Bilk" (yes, beer + milk) beverage that hopefully tastes better than it sounds. May the same be true with Vegete... and if you have a chance to try it, please leave a comment! (via Asahibeer.com)