Heating up the carbonated drinks category?

World’s first hot carbonated drink to go on sale for Y130 (76p) from October in vending machines across Japan. The innovative new product produced by Coca-Cola in Japan will be the first carbonated drink to be served hot.

The self-heating product is called Canada Dry Hot Ginger Ale and, though some of us may balk at the idea of a hot fizzy beverage, the producers say the result is “an intensely spicy, cinnamon and apple-flavoured drink”.

Those with residual knowledge of school chemistry may choose to busy themselves this weekend with a simple experiment to prove that dissolved gas comes out of solution faster from warm water than cold. The reverse is also true: Dissolved gas tends to stay dissolved better in cold water, thus showing why five years of research have gone into the technology behind successfully containing heat and bubbles in a can…. (The article also contains a download giving the full chemical background)

Incidentally, those who are interrupted in the assimilation of their heated carbonated drink may regret that evolution has moved us on from that stage when our former gills would have allowed us to copy our fishy cousins in absorbing miniscule amounts of residual gas from cooled liquid…