Drink up and smile with this cute limited edition line of tea from Kirin!

Can you guess whose cute little bottoms these are? If you’re a Disney fan, chances are you already have a good idea. Well, I chanced upon these bottles recently in a convenience store, and they were so cute I just had to buy them all! And if these adorably packaged bottles just happened to contain a nice cool drink, so much the better, especially since the drink was a unique type of tea I had never tasted before.

But first of all, let’s take a look at the face of the characters who are showing their lovable derrieres for all the world to see:

Yes, it’s Mickey, Donald, Pooh, and Chip ‘n’ Dale making an appearance on the packaging of Kirin Beverage‘s Nippon Kome-cha (Japan Rice Tea).

Rice tea is exactly what you would imagine it to be — tea made 100 percent from rice. In a country where vending machines and convenience stores usually offer an abundance of tea beverages to select from, ranging from Japanese green tea and barley tea to Chinese oolong or jasmine tea, rice tea is actually not a standard tea drink by any means, despite the nation’s well-known obsession with rice. According to Kirin’s special Kome-cha website , the tea is made from a blend of three different types of rice, all grown in Japan: kinme-mai (lit. “golden embryo rice”), a kind of semi-milled rice that combines the taste of white rice with the health benefits of brown; hatsuga genmai, or sprouted brown rice; and kome-koji, or malted rice.

To make the tea, the rice is first immersed in water, which allows the brown rice to germinate. Next the rice is steamed as if it were being cooked regularly, then carefully roasted to dry the rice and heat it thoroughly and evenly. Finally, the rice goes through an extracting machine and the actual tea is obtained. The resulting tea is completely caffeine-free, which may be good news to health-conscious consumers.

And now, some photos of the bottles for your enjoyment!

▼Of course, there’s Mickey in all his magical cuteness:

▼ Donald’s looking spiffy in his usual marine outfit

▼ Pooh looks sublimely happy snuggled up with his good friend piglet

▼And my favorite … look who’s stuffed their furry little cheeks with rice! And see that stray piece of rice on Chip’s bottom? Simply Adorable!

Ah, but I got so caught up with the cute packaging that I almost forgot to mention how the tea tasted! The rice tea didn’t have any of the characteristic slight bitterness (shibumi) of regular green tea, and the flavor was a bit like roasted green tea (hoji-cha), except richer. It was quite refreshing and probably a drink you could easily consume in large quantities to quench your thirst on a hot summer day. The special Disney packaging is available only for a limited time, so if you’re in Japan and see one of these, you may want to get your hands on a bottle when you have the chance.

By the way, you can also win an original Disney T-shirt from Kirin when you buy the Disney packaged drinks. Each bottle comes with an entry ticket you can send in for a chance to win one of 3,000 Disney T-shirts they’re giving away. If you live in Japan, why not give it a try?

▼ The original Disney T-shirts you can win from Kirin

Source: Kirin Komecha website (Japanse)
Kirin news release (Japanese)

Disney T-shirt photo: Kirin news release
All other photos: RocketNews24

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