The Last Zima

I drank the last Zima I had. Now it’s all gone, maybe forever.

Randomly, in my local supermarket back in May 2022, I found a bunch of Zimas in the discount food section. They were buried under all the chuuhais and highballs nobody wanted, just sitting there for me to enjoy. Zimas, and Zima Limes, too. Dozens of them, all half-off. I didn’t remember ever seeing them before, but I knew I had to seize the opportunity, and bought almost all of them. For less than 100 yen per can, too.

All I knew about Zima was that it is the preferred drink of any true Auralnauts Jedi Party fan. I had never drank one, and never even seen one for sale until now.

What I didn’t know was that these were among the last Zima cans in the whole of Japan.

Zima was discontinued in America, then brought back later, then discountinued again. This happens a lot to nostalgic reboot beverages. But Zima stayed strong in Japan for years after that. They stayed active, in fact, until the end of 2021… When they shut down the factories. No more Zimas would ever be produced.

And I just happened to get the last of the last Zima cans to ever exist. The end of the warehouse shipments, out in an extremely remote corner of Japan.

It sucks, then, that I actually really liked it!

The lime ones were good, but the original Zima flavor was genuinely quite good. It’d be my drink of choice for low-percent stuff if, you know, it still existed. Once I found out that I had the last Zima cans I’d ever get, I spaced them out as much as possible. One a week, even less.

The very final, very last Zima I had, I put off until the end of July 2022. Just before I moved out of my house. With that gone, the drink was extinguished from existence throughout the world. And for something I actually quite liked, it left me feeling sad. A meme drink I discovered randomly just 2 months prior, and now it was already gone forever.

Darn it.