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Clever design lets you easily prepare a cup of tea just before you drink it.
Any convenience store in Japan is well-stocked with bottles of green tea, and some brands are extremely tasty. Still, there’s no escaping the fact that these bottled options don’t represent a freshly made cup of tea, as their contents were mixed days ago at a bottling plant before being shipped to the store where they wait for thirsty customers.

But as of March 29, shoppers at Natural Lawson, the ever-so-slightly more refined sub-brand of convenience store chain Lawson, can have the best of both worlds with Haruka, a unique bottled tea product that lets you easily prepare a cup only moments before drinking.

At first glance, Haruka looks more like a spray bottle than a beverage, what with its unusually shaped cap and its glass covering.

 

What’s more, the liquid inside is entirely clear. This isn’t the Crystal Pepsi of teas, though, but actually water that flows from Mt. Ibukiyama in Kyushu.

But before you think that Haruka is out to dupe customers into paying bottled tea prices for bottled water, take a closer look at the cap. It has two sections, and hidden away inside the top portion is powdered green tea.

 

Twist the top part of the cap, and the tea drops into the water.

Not only will you have a freshly made batch of tea, it’ll also have the sort of enticing froth that sits atop the whisked matcha used in tea ceremonies.
Getting back to the glass cover mentioned earlier, it’s not there just to make the package look classy. It’s actually a compact drinking glass that you can pour the tea into, so that you can better appreciate its deep color as you leisurely sip it.
 

 

Haruka is available in two varieties: matcha, with its deep, bitter notes, and the slightly smoother, sweeter gyokuro, made with delicate tea leaves grown in the shade. Both are priced at 500 yen (US$4.50), which is more than what you’d usually pay for convenience store tea, but when you take into account the freshness (and drinking glass) you’re getting, that seems like a fair price for an elegant beverage.