Dripdash is a recently launched ready-to-drink coffee that is marketed as a traditional Kyoto-style coffee. The product is available in a single SKU and is packaged in a 6 oz. glass bottle that requires refrigeration.

If you aren’t familiar with Kyoto-style coffee, it’s typically produced using a glass tower (a device that’s specific to this task) with a top chamber of water that drips slowly through a center section of coffee grounds and then into a bottom holding chamber. The process is quite slow and, much like cold brew, delivers a smoother, more intense but less acidic cup of coffee than traditional hot brew.

As far as what Dripdash has put inside the bottle, it’s both smooth and intense; each bottle has 225 mg of caffeine. It largely tastes similar to what you’ll find in a high quality cold brew, which is a good thing. Then again, it’s hard to say that using a Kyoto-style method delivers a clearly superior coffee experience. In the end, to us the liquid is simply on par with regular cold brew.

To that end, the cold brew category has largely moved on from brands that only offer an unsweetened black variety as their only SKU. That’s a challenge that we think Dripdash will face as well, especially since the cold brew set has gotten quite competitive in terms of the variety that’s offered.

When it comes to branding, we’d describe Dripdash as minimalist but clean. The label is blue with a large white drop shape for its center portion. From there, the Dripdash logo (which is all lowercase and features an upside down “i” to create an additional drip image) and four lines of text is all that they’ve placed on the front panel. Turning the bottle to the left, you’ll find a paragraph of explanatory text that describes what Kyoto-style coffee is all about.

While all of this is reasonably intuitive, we feel as though Dripdash needs redesign the product  to give it a stronger presence. In addition, we think there’s some work to do to better tell the story of Kyoto-style coffee. As it stands right now, if a consumer isn’t in the know, it would probably be easier to just pick up a cold brew.

Overall, we like the idea of taking Kyoto-style coffee to the ready to drink space. Dripdash has definitely done this in a quality way, and, with some additional work on the branding -- and perhaps an expansion of the lineup -- this might be something with legs.