Energy Drink Review: Cocaine
I’m not sure if the makers of Cocaine had intended for this pun to be used in every review, but I feel it necessary: I’d rather snort Mötley Crüe-at-their-peak levels of actual cocaine than ever have to drink this stuff again. Cocaine, an energy drink which purports to being “the legal alternative,” is quite easily, without an ounce of hyperbole, the most awful tasting drink ever mass-produced. I say “mass-produced,” because I assume someone, somewhere, has made a bathtub-beverage from fermented septic tank runoff.
Honestly, where to begin? The drink smells slightly fruity, which is easily the most pleasant thing I can say. As soon as you take a sip, though, everything goes downhill; the taste it just truly, truly awful. Tasting sort of like liquid cinnamon, the drink burns your throat as it makes its way down. As if the sensation of just swallowing a lit cigarette weren’t bad enough, the aftertaste is the most realistic imitation of throw-up I’ve ever experienced. Seriously, after a single sip it feels like you’ve just finished a brisk, five-hour round of purging the contents of your stomach.
I’d go on about the subtle nuances of the drink’s flavor, but I couldn’t even finish it. I stopped half way because the taste is just so repulsive.
Cocaine is really a text-book case of marketing gone terribly wrong; the Pepsi Blue of energy drinks, if you will. The problem with Cocaine is that, instead of relying on its taste, it fully relies on its image - a loose basis to begin with let alone when it is based off the one-time gag of “har-har, I’m drinking cocaine!” See, contrary to popular opinion, gimmicks aren’t necessarily bad things. Even Cocaine, with its tasteless, insensitive gimmick, could be a marketable product. However, once you’ve got the person to succumb to the gimmick, unless you can hook them with something else, you’ve already lost a future customer. This is the problem with Cocaine, the only reason to ever buy it an additional time is to show a friend that, no, you weren’t kidding this truly tastes like vomit.
Unless you’ve got a business plan that only involves selling a single can to your customer base, this type of product is just unsustainable. Or, in the case of Redux Beverages, the makers of Cocaine, you have a business plan based around either buying weird licenses, e.g. licensing Brawndo from 20th Century Fox, or creating drinks painfully contrived in their name and marketing. I’m not so sure how sustainable that particular plan is.
Anyway, here are some technical energy drink positives: the drink is low in sugar and incredibly high in caffeine. Each 8.4 ounce can contains 280 mg of caffeine or for those that don’t wish to do some math, a little over 33 mg per ounce. For perspective’s sake: Coca-Cola has about 3 mg of caffeine per ounce. While the drink is technically low in sugar, it does get its sweetness from sucralose, also known as Splenda. So for those wary of drinking artificial sweeteners, be aware.
Overall rating: Quite literally, insanely awful. It makes you both question the sanity of those that produce it as well as your own for consuming it.
Further reading:
Website: Drink Cocaine
In Video: The Daily Show: Just for the distaste of it (embedded behind the “read the rest…” link)
- Rob O’Reilly
