The Alcopop Experiment: Part Deux
A comedy article
by Luke McKinney  1,902  5
01/21/2010 11:49 PM 5364 views
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Last time, on "Why Livers Attack", Wallybob and I set out to buy the very worst sweetened alcoholic beverages (read Part 1 here), drinks that look like a bag of Skittles lost their jobs and became alcoholic.
And now, unfortunately, it was time to drink.
1. Rockstar+Vodka
Rockstar+Vodka (real drinks included in background to bring the average above zero)
Appearance: We pre-emptively winced when we realized Rockstar was an energy drink -- "energy" on an alcohol bottle is the equivalent of being stabbed in the tongue with a sharpened battery. Rockstar doesn't help by dedicating most of the label to advertising "6.9% alcohol!" (i.e. "Look, there's alcohol in it so you can't complain about anything else!")
The rest of the can is an ingredients list that looks like an ancient Chinese doctor trying to reanimate a corpse he hates: ginseng and guarana (always advertised as "medicinal" because they taste like plants had asses), caffeine, tartrazine and sodium benzoate (both linked to hyperactivity) and dimethylpolysiloxane (because nothing says "good idea!" like drinking chemicals which won't fit on a Scrabble board).
On first pour, Rockstar looks like urine, but under bright light it's revealed to be incandescent Terminator urine. This is what would happen if Zeus pissed lightning instead of throwing it, or if there was a radioactive fluid leak -- basically nothing has this color without at least three superhero origin stories.
Taste: Drinking Rocktsar+Vodka tastes like taking a course in Synthetic Chemistry. The only natural components of this were the ones tarmacked over to build the factory, which employed the Borg to scour the grounds of every single weed. You taste it more on the roof of your mouth than the tongue, because the latter was designed when we ate things that existed on Earth. The palate, on the other hand, starts sobbing and demanding to know why you let it taste, only to suffer this pain.
Doing It Yourself: Mix three parts battery* to one part water and dilute with acid rain. Paint yellow.
* That's "battery," not "battery acid" - removing the metal would lose the distinct "that which flesh was not meant to try to consume" factor.
Alcoholic Effect: 6.9% of 493 ml is a decent 34 ml of alcohol, but it's like finding 34 dollars in the crashed plane which just destroyed your house. My headache set in with alchemical pickaxes before I got halfway through the can, while Wallybob refused to drink more than a mouthful, on the grounds that he wanted to live. In conclusion: the other 93.1% of the drink is specifically designed to prevent relaxation, or the understanding of joy.
2. Vodka Mudshake Chocolate
Wallybob looking so unimpressed he's actually desserpmi.
Appearance: In a world where branding dominates even the most abominable energy drink, "Vodka Mudshake Chocolate is a collection of vaguely drink-like words. There's no brand name. There's no company name. When you finally find the makers on the back of the bottle, in small print, wedged between "MONOGLYCERIDES ET DIGLCERIDES" and the bar code, we got the distinct impression you could blackmail the company by proving you know they made it.
Taste: "This tastes like spoiled chocolate milk," announced Wallybob, and he was right. It's as if the near-anonymous makers didn't trust themselves to add alcohol and just left a few gallons to ferment by itself. It's a horrible crime against all its ingredients: if you can put vodka, cream and chocolate together in a way that sucks, you're the Anti-Barman (here from the Nega-Universe to destroy happiness). The "creamy" drink pours like water with fat in it, which according to the label is exactly what it is. Protip: if "vegetable fat" is the fifth ingredient after "cream," you were lying about the fourth.
Do It Yourself: Pour some spoiled milk and vodka into a river and collect it downstream. Leave in an uncovered container on a farm for a while and strain out the larger or more flavorful lumps.
Alcoholic Effect: 5% of 270 ml isn't much, especially when we refused to finish it. That means we got one-twentieth of a mouthful each and had to buy other drinks to take the taste away, giving this drink an alcoholic efficiency of negative one thousand percent.
Honorable Mention: Clamato
Despite being clam juice mixed with tomato and rubbing alcohol then stuffed in an unrefrigerated can by the lowest bidder (which sounds like a ritual to summon Ugh'Kaff'Spit, the God Of Foul Tastes) it's actually not the worst thing we tasted. Please note that our definitions of "bad tasting" have been so radically re-adjusted by this point, we'd probably give warm gravel a C+.
3. Blackfly
Appearance: Protip for Marketing: don't name your drink after a plague vector, especially if it's the same color as clotted blood serum. By this point we were cursing ourselves for our dedication to duty in finding terrible things: the energy drink, a cheap cream, and now a cranberry concoction. Where did marketers get this awful misunderstanding that cranberry tastes good?
It looks like you just squashed a housefly in a blood bank, and tastes about as nice as that idea.
Taste: Blackfly is an awful alchemical concoction -- they poured in every "natural" thing they could think of to try and kill the awful chemical taste they'd created. This is revealed by the hilarious bullShakespeare blurb "Made with real cranberry and wild blueberry juice. No artificial colour." -- clearly intended to mislead people into thinking there's no artificial flavor. Reading the ingredients list reveals that there are, and that they even added elderberries without advertising them. That's how desperate they were to destroy this taste: they added even more "natural" ingredients and forgot to try and take credit for them.
Do It Yourself: Find a fruit patch, build an industrial estate around it, then try to save the fruit by dumping the three cheapest berry bushes you can right on top of it.
Alcoholic Effect: I actually sobered up while drinking this, possibly due to all the exercise as my facial muscles involuntarily contracted. Wallybob declared that did better advertising for Greenpeace than they ever did for themselves, violently proving that artificial things are worse than natural ones.
Little did we know that this was a light shower compared to the tongue-trashing thunderstorm to come.
Please continue to Part 3: The Final Showdown!
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Like This? Rate It!
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Hilarious
12 votes
4.3
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0 votes
0.0
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Ravos iz in ur dreemz 34,368  10
01/21/2010 11:56 PM
The rest of the can is an ingredients list which looks like an ancient Chinese doctor trying to reanimate a corpse he hates: ginseng and guarana (always advertised as "medicinal" because they taste like plants had asses), caffeine, tartrazine and sodium benzoate (both linked to hyperactivityThat's bad) and dimethylpolysiloxane (because nothing says "good idea!" like drinking chemicals which won't fit on a Scrabble board).
Fix'd!
But I actually like rockstar, as long as it is suplimented by something stronger.
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Hilarious
4 votes
4.2
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UnderWhere? 72,856 16
01/22/2010 12:05 AM
LOVED THIS, and I wrote it in all caps so you know I'm serious.
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Funny
2 votes
3.5
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Dogs Akimbo 158,687 11
01/22/2010 12:06 AM
When I want something girly with alcohol, I call your mother. BOOM TISH!!
Seriously, though, when I want something girly with alcohol, I drink Mike's Harder Lemonade.
Then I call your mother.
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0 votes
0.0
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Thud 53,119 10
01/22/2010 06:00 AM
Looking forward to the next part in this series.
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0 votes
0.0
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Just Plain Jeeni 11,032 10
02/13/2010 01:41 PM
I really didn't want to read this article because of it's length, but I'm damn happy I did. I was laughing my ass off. I especially loved the "Do it yourself" sections & of course, the images. Thanks again for a great article, Luke.
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