What happens when your teeth and liver engage in a suicide pact? That's what Wallybob and found out by buying the worst alcoholic soda pops on the market (Part 1) and then drinking them (Part 2). I don't want to ruin the surprise, but this isn't Part 3 -- this is Part Worst Drinks Ever.
1. Rev Guarana
Appearance: Alcohol is awesome. It's self-selling. From whiskey aged in ancient Scottish cellars for years to hobo-fuel distilled over an engine block for up to forty seconds, everyone loves it, so when a drink advertises something else instead of alcoholic content it's guaranteed to suck enough to open a portal through time. We looked at "Rev Guarana," and our hopes were not high.
"New, LARGER Rev" is like advertising "The Plague: Now with ADDED IMPOTENCE!"
Rev's ingredients list is a crash-course in artificial additives. They stuffed everything they could find in there, including vanilla, cherry, pineapple, citric acid, raspberry, caffeine, cola nut, and various spellcheck-busting concoctions including Potassium Metabisulphate (which I'm fairly sure gave The Flash his powers.) And the fruit flavors are listed as "Natural AND Artificial," meaning they kept trying to kill the taste even after finding that nothing growing on Earth was up to the job.
Taste: Amazingly, the taste of this infinity of chemicals can be summed up in a single word: ass.
Specifically, Doctor Manhattan's ass when he was still flashing with lightning and hadn't put his skin back on yet.
Remember Blue Raspberry sodas? This tastes like a crack team of Candy Commandoes saved the world by sealing that abomination away, but Rev stole the lead-lined flask they buried it in. When you drink some, and you won't because I'm telling you right now DO NOT, it somehow skips over the actual liquid feeling and hits to the "rancid chemical residue around your mouth" stage while the fluid is still in your mouth. It's like someone turned the chemical scum on a half-scrubbed bathroom into a flavor.
Do It Yourself: Drain run-off from the radioactive fields around Chernobyl and sell it to fratboys. Tap the urine outflow from the dorms and, once the Institute For Chemicals That Might Kill God are finished with the samples, add Guarana.
Alcohol Content: It feels like a dentist's trying to escape from my head and Wallybob is demanding to know what happened to the last two drinks' worth of buzz. This is actively antiholic.
2. Twistee Sambuca and Banana
Appearance: There is nothing about this drink that isn't a bad idea. It's a twenty percent alcopoppy drink so its sole function is to get underage girls drunk, and where I come from good things doesn't share their modus operandi as child molestors. It's clearly labeled as "Sambuca and Banana" flavor, and if that's not clear enough it's in a yellow and black striped bottle. This drink could not more clearly warn you that bad things are about to happen if it sounded an air-raid siren while that trailer voiceover guy ominously whispered, "It started as an ordinary evening..."
Taste: It smells like Sesame Street the morning after the cast discover binge drinking and projectile vomit. It tastes like cream wants you to die in pain.
Do It Yourself: Befriend a cow who's found out where beef comes from, and wants to revenge herself on humanity. Feed her licorice soaked in battery acid, then persuade your bovine friend to hold its udder over a radiator before being milked.
Alcoholic Effect: It's 200 ml of 20%, but claims that's four shots so you're only getting 10 ml of alcohol each -- and you'll need ten times that to cancel the horror of drinking the first, starting a cycle of chemical misery which makes Trainspotting look like a Disney movie. This is a worse drink than the Cement Mixer, because at least the person who gives you that has fun.
3. The Worst Alcopop Ever: Bud Light Lime
Appearance: We'd technically drunk (better verb: survived) all the awfulpops we'd bought, but banners advertising "Bud Light Lime" hit us like the Batsignal hits the Caped Crusader: the knowledge that somebody was committing an incredibly-stupidly themed crime and we'd have to deal with it. Because we had sworn to drink the very worst in sugary drinks this day, and mixing lime cordial with Bud Light is the worst use of bottles since people stopped saving samples of diarrhea.
Because I resolutely refused to have any of this crap in the house, we had to have some in a local bar patio. We were horrified to discover that our enhanced alcoholic metabolisms had betrayed us by drinking quickly -- we'd just drunk the entire Fluffy Sugar Kingdom's effluent outflow, and it was still daylight. We'd have to endure the sugar migraine for a full day, and we weren't finished yet.
If it gets this close you're too late -- bite down on your tongue and try to drown on the blood instead
Even the title is a triptych of terribeer: "light" is mass-market speech for flavorless, "Bud" actually means "contaminated water" in several cultures, and nothing says "Even we think this is piss" like stuffing it full of lime cordial to cover the original taste. And when even Anheuser-Busch admits a drink sucks, there's a serious threat of it vacuuming up the Earth's atmosphere.
Taste: We apologised to the barmaid for ordering it, begged forgiveness from our bodily fluids, and drank it.
This was a mistake.
And not just for us -- this drink is a terrible mistake for everyone involved, from the marketers to the people who built the roads which eventually led to the breweries. I'm not saying we should collapse civilization because of the drink, but I do know Mad Max doesn't have to put up with this Shakespeare.
The first thing that hits you is a hideously chemical crime which the bottle insists is "natural lime flavor." It's like they engineered the lime without ever having access to one -- they were just shown videos of people biting into limes and their faces screwing up, and they thought "We can do that!"
The second thing that hits you is nothing. At all. After the agonies of the artificial flavor it's like drinking an actual void, and that's when you realise the lime-bomination's true purpose: it's the only way they could make Bud Light taste good. Those seconds of utter emptiness are blessed relief, like the fire alarm stopping or a Gestapo torturer misplacing his favorite scalpel. I truly cannot get across how synthetically, calculatedly evil this alcocrime is: they know how bad everything they inflict is and built a worse, more marketable drink based on it.
Do It Yourself: Find a way to communicate with fruit and use it to psychologically torture limes into self-hating psychosis. Get a Ph.D. in high energy physics, build a particle accelerator, and work out how to collect antimatter -- use it to construct the negative-universe opposite of tastebuds. Bottle and serve.
Alcoholic Effect: Negative. Bud Light Lime is sheer soulless corporate crap in allegedly alcoholic form, designed from the ground up to be advertised instead of liked, and it's such an unfun antibeer I honestly think drinking three would render me teetotal. Five would cancel my Irish citizenship, and ten would turn me into a MADD spokesperson. When I even suggested drinking more than one Wallybob tried to punch me, but because the bottle was between us his body wouldn't let him move forward, much the same as you don't put your hand back on a hot stove.
The Final Verdict
We subjected ourselves to things you're not allowed to do to lab animals, and Bud Light Lime isn't just the worst alcopop -- it may well be the worst anything, ever. Other results include the discovery that you can bottle spoiled cream and sell it, Terminators are pissing back through time, and if you drink something terrible enough, you can get the hangover headache before you finish the bottle.
At this point I released Wallybob back into the wild, where he'll lick his wounds until it's time to torture ourselves once again.
Luke McKinney writes for The Beer Magazine, FoodConnect, Cracked comedy and his own site. His favorite beer is Innis & Gunn.
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