The kind people from Japan have listened to fans’ demands and decided to collaborate with a brewery to make a special mead for a special fox-based goddess. Tentaka Shuzo is a Japanese brewery company that specializes in sake. The company is collaborating to make a special mead to promote the Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf anime airing in Japan. The mead is a fermented beverage made with apples and honey as ingredients. The alcoholic beverage is called “Holo’s Apple Mead,” a reference to the ingredients and Holo’s affinity to alcohol and apples in the show. Crunchyroll vouches for Tentaka Shuzo’s validity as a high-end brewery, citing how the company became the first Japanese mead brewery to win a medal at the world’s largest mead competition, the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition, in 2019.
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The company has also worked with other anime properties and VTuber in the past, making it the ideal corporation for cross-promotion. “Holo’s Apple Mead” is meant to represent something Holo would come up with herself, offering fans a drink that the character would love. The beverage can be served either cold or hot or can be enjoyed straight from the bottle, on the rocks, or with soda. People can pre-order the mead on the company’s official store starting December 18th, and remain available for pre-order until January 21st, 2025. The mead is priced at 5,500 yen (35 USD) per 720 ml bottle and shipment is expected to begin on January 15.
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The Role of Food (and Alcohol) in Spice and Wolf
The entire concept around the Spice and Wolf franchise stems from a traveling merchant selling ingredients throughout the country, so a cross-promotion with a real Japanese brewing company feels appropriate. The series follows a wise fox goddess named Holo, who hitches a ride with a merchant named Lawerence to travel the lands. While Lawerence carries other goods besides food, Holo acts very aloof and often eats everything she can get her hands on.
The series features plenty of topics besides food, including action, romance, and slice-of-life. Nonetheless, food still plays an important role in the narrative. Holo is a harvest deity who looked over a small village before the villagers began not believing in her. A running gag in the series is Holo’s love of alcohol, which constantly leads to amusing situations in the story. She would also often give insight into life, traveling, bartering, and, most importantly, food. Apples and, obviously, different spices are recurring imagery throughout the anime adaptation.
Even though the original anime series ran between 2008 and 2009, the series has continued to endure with light novels and spin-offs. One of the spin-offs, Wolf and Parchment: New Theory Spice and Wolf, revolves around Holo’s daughter Myuri. The Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf anime is a remake of the original anime, re-adapting the light novel series with more modern animation. The first season of the remake finished airing in September, but a second season has already been confirmed. No release date has been revealed for the second season at this point. The mainline light novel series remains ongoing, with the most recent volume launching in 2023.
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