Which, incidentally, is also back on shelves. Fans would soak Jolly Ranchers and Skittles in the bottles for interesting fruity variations. Not that we would know. We just turned 21 yesterday. It got a little annoying after a while.
People were picking up a six-pack to relive their 90s memories, to stock up for theme parties, or to just see what all the fuss was about. The brand officially died in in the United States, but it never left Japan. According to MillerCoors, the brand still does extremely well there. Summer of is your chance again. It came in two versions. The first was clean, crisp, slightly tart, and high in alcohol. Then they reformulated it with more sugar and less alcohol. I drank the original too regularly, hated the reformulated sweet remake.
Hope they bring back the original. That stuff was SO goooooood! When is it coming out in Pennsylvania. Good grief. I met a girl long ago who prepared me an Amaretto and Fresca. It surprised me. It was actually tasty. Your mix could be tasty, too, but just like hers it sounds horrible. When it first came out it tasted like someone made alcoholic sprite. Now, it tastes and smells like beer. It changed… A lot. Fuk yea.. Your wrong. It IS the original formula.
I am a die hard Zima fan and the newly released one OS the original. I drank original Zima from to but then they changed the formula and made it too sweet which gave me a headache after just one.
Nice try Coors but this new stuff is NOT the original. Never tried the stuff. I was always into the hard stuff. Just seen ot today, and drinking one as I type. Loved the taste——beats the hell out of all beers. I knew I should have bought cases instead of a couple 6 packs.
Thanks so much for bringing it back! As we've discussed, they wanted to project a masculine image, but they even more specifically wanted to target Gen-X consumers, who were young adults at the time. The generation that gifted us with slacker culture and Nirvana were the alternative cool kids of the '90s, and Coors thought they would be open to Zima's radical reinvention of beer. You can clearly see Coors' strategy at work in Zima's first round of ads, which you can watch in this Metro collection.
The pitchman is dressed in a Madison Avenue executive's version of a '90s hipster outfit, with a pork pie hat and a thrift store suit, and he quirkily swaps his s's for z's. The settings of the commercials reinforce the alternative vibe, dropping the pitchman into a metal concert, a backyard barbecue filled with pretentious people, and a smoky bar. Although these ads failed at their main job, making people like Zima, their surreal vibe and stylish aesthetics feel prescient.
In subsequent years, many brands have used strange pitch-people with random quirks in ad campaigns, from Orbit Gum to Starburst to Old Spice. Once it became clear no pun intended that no amount of marketing could make up for Zima's lackluster flavor, Coors scrambled to rectify the situation by messing with the drink's formula. The first attempt at course-correction was Zima Gold, which was amber-colored, boozier, and allegedly whiskey-flavored.
It was a last-ditch effort by the boy-crazy brewery to make Zima seem manly, and it was discontinued less than six months after its release via Slate. After that, Coors decided to switch course, changing Zima's recipe to make it more soda-like and marketing it as a cool refresher for hot days. This approach was moderately successful and propped up the brand's sagging sales.
Zima morphed yet again in to compete with its more famous little sibling Smirnoff Ice, rebranding as Zima XXX and pairing the extreme name with more assertive flavors and a higher ABV. On the eve of its retirement, it transformed one last time, switching to a low-alcohol, low-calorie formula that executives hoped would appeal to women, who had been some of the drink's most faithful customers throughout its run.
Despite embracing Zima's real fanbase for the first time, this experiment didn't prevent the drink from getting axed in Women weren't the only Zima fans that Coors was dismayed about. Teenagers also loved it, and its popularity with underage drinkers became a scandal.
A Washington Post report from quoted several health officials who had concerns that the beverage could promote underage drinking because it tasted more like soda than beer and it didn't obviously look like alcohol via Orlando Sentinel. Since Zima didn't have a strong alcoholic odor, teens and concerned parents thought that it might not show up on breathalyzer tests. This rumor was so widely-believed that Coors rebutted it in a letter to police departments and school districts stating the obvious fact that since Zima contained alcohol, it would trip a breathalyzer.
This reminiscence in Gothamist from Jen Carlson, who was a teenager in the '90s, attests to the popularity of Zima among high-schoolers from a first-hand perspective. She says that her peers made it taste even more like candy by dropping Jolly Ranchers in it. One poster in this Reddit discussion also mentions the Jolly Rancher trick, and another says it was popular to put a shot of fruit-flavored schnapps in each bottle.
Sounds like a recipe for a hangover to us, but young people are able to tolerate sugary concoctions like Boone's Farm and wake up unscathed the next morning. A cocktail of unrelated events combined to finally strike the death blow against Zima. For one, California, a very large market, sharply raised taxes on sweetened malt beverages in The huge tax increase cut into Coors' profits from Zima, and it died soon after the law passed.
The last call came in October , when Coors announced it was ceasing production and would sell out its last remaining inventory by the end of the year. The company wrote in a letter to distributors that falling demand for malternatives was to blame via Chicago Tribune. Ironically for those who were concerned about Zima's association with underage drinking, the brewery encouraged retailers to replace Zima with Sparks, a caffeinated alcopop.
Newsweek's tribute to Sparks, which was killed off later in , says that teenage drinkers were big fans of this malt beverage too. It was a sort of proto- Four Loko , combining potent malt liquor with sugary flavors as well as caffeine, guarana, and ginseng. Zima looked positively meek in comparison. While Zima constantly tried to reinvent itself in the U. Japanese drinking culture doesn't have a strong gender prejudice against choosing a fruit-flavored beverage over beer, and Zima is a popular choice among drinkers of both genders.
Once distributed in the U. You can imagine my surprise when I began stumbling upon multiple Reddit threads showing Zima being marketed it Japan. And people literally visiting bars in Japan because of Zima signs. This photo was posted by Imgur user CorneliusR2D2 on April 3, , it was posted on Reddit, with the caption "My brother and I went to a bar in Japan just because they had a Zima sign. Zima lives! By the looks of their website , Zima is marketed to Japan's night life and social crowd.
There's even a Zima Black. For me, this is significant because I still think about Zima constantly. I even ask my friends if they remember Zima. And most of them don't really care. I thought rediscovering Zima's existence would be more eventful. I had to know more. I knew the truth was near when I found Zima's Facebook page.
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