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01.31.09 by Widge @ 1:54 am  Who the hell is Bad Boy? I mean, besides a foe of the Legion of Substitute Heroes? And why would they want to put out a "power drink," now that the energy drink market is flooded with the stuff? Well, we need to not say too many bad things about them, since if you go to badboy.com, like it says on the can, we find "Bad Boy provides martial arts athletes with the most innovative, high quality, performance products designed to benefit the athlete in both training and competition." Jesus. Bad Boy has a legion of fu on their side. So we'll choose our words very carefully. Ingredients first. 100% RDA of B6, B12, Niacin and Riboflavin. It does have real sugar and also "glucuronolactone," which is a word so complicated I can't even think up a joke about it, even though it just begs one, doesn't it? The ever accurate Wikipedia lists this as "a naturally occurring chemical compound produced by the metabolism of glucose in the human liver." Having no idea what that means in a medical sense, let's just move on. The most frustrating thing is that I can't tell exactly how much caffeine is in this thing. The can doesn't list it, the official site doesn't seem to list it...nothing. Categorized as: Drinks and Reviews
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01.25.09 by Widge @ 5:32 pm  CoMotion bills itself as "2x Energy," which makes sense as its ingredients list is pretty formidable: coming in your 8.4 oz can, you get a total caffeine content of 160mg. It has a who's who of stuff I like to see in my drinks, like 200mg of yerba mate, and 70 mg of guarana. It also has 1000mg of taurine, 50mg of rooibos, 50mg of ginkgo biloba, 50mg of panax ginseng, and 50mg of schisandra berry. Plus 100% of your C RDA, 100% of B3, 190% of B6 and 4410% of B12. It's like somebody put together an energy drink ingredient supergroup, isn't it? It also manages to do this with a bit of sucralose and still manages to not completely suck, because they use crystalline fructose and something called palatinose to mask the sucralose crap taste. What is palatinose? "PALATINOSE™ is the only low glycemic carbohydrate providing longer lasting energy in the form of glucose," the official website tells us. Sounds impressive. It manages to seem like it's going to suck, with its dragon fruit flavor--but the other two sweeteners beat the sucralose into submission. Granted, it's very, very sweet--so if that's not your bag, then you might want to pass. But me, I'm very pleased by this. I'm pleased because the drink actually has a reasonable amount of energy-providing power--I actually grabbed this during a long drive and it helped wake my ass back up. So the boost pushes it up and over the unfortunate sucralose inclusion and the odd sweetness doesn't detract. Although the slight taste of the sucralose each time had me wincing, thinking it was about to pounce on my tongue and poke it with sticks like it normally does. I'd say give it a try. Categorized as: Drinks and Reviews
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12.30.08 by Widge @ 5:04 pm  Gatorade is trying to go EXXXTREME even beyond the EXXXTREME that they already had going. Which means they are now EXXXTRA EXXXTREME. They're taking their attitude to 11, in other words. Let's see what they have to say for themselves: This new Gatorade attitude will be most visible through a total packaging redesign. For example, Gatorade® Thirst Quencher will put the letter G front and center along with the brand's iconic bolt. For Gatorade, G represents the heart, hustle, and soul of athleticism and will become a badge of pride for anyone who sweats, no matter where they're active.
It also means "General Audiences." Which represents Benji movies. I'm just saying. They're changing the names of their drinks as well--I think--the previous name is still up there on the container artwork. Anyway...
"Gatorade understands different people have different wants – you can't speak to athletes and active people with a 'one size fits all' mentality," said Craig Horswill, senior research fellow, Gatorade Sports Science Institute.
Or a "name of the drink fits the bottle" mentality, apparently. As you can see on the bottle we have up there, these titles are so impressive and EXXXTRA EXXXTREME they come in a font size so big they can't fit properly on the bottle. I'm sure this just means they're going to roll out bigger 50 oz. drinks or something. Categorized as: Drinks
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12.28.08 by Widge @ 10:15 pm  On one hand, I can't agree with the government leaning on MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch/InBev till they pulled the plug on their alcoholic energy drinks. So perhaps they were marketing them to underage kids. Stuff gets marketed to kids too young to be partaking of it all the time and that's what parents are supposed to be for. I know comments like that catch me a lot of flak, but it's the truth. We can't kid-proof the world. Sorry. And supposedly there were health risks associated from mixing alcohol and caffeine. I frankly haven't looked into this and can't comment, but I will say that there are health concerns with stimulants and health concerns with depressants--and if you mix the two, I could probably believe you get some combo that's the worst of both worlds. But if there are proven risks, document on the can. I doubt they'd do any good--see Denis Leary's routine about warnings on cigarettes for reference--but we can't (and shouldn't) protect people who are (mostly) in their right minds from willfully and consensually damaging themselves. Sorry about that too. But setting all that aside, I have never understood the appeal of alcoholic energy drinks. I mean, seriously: make up your damn mind. Do you want to be up? Or be down? Do you want stimulants? Or do you want depressants? If you take both at the same time don't you just wind up back where you started, except for having consumed a crapload of sugar, thumped your liver a good one and freed your wallet of several bucks? So I can't shed a tear for their passing. Is anybody else sorry to see them go? Categorized as: Drinks
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12.15.08 by Widge @ 5:04 pm  So yes, they sent out a promo can of Booty Sweat, Alpa Chino's energy drink, from Tropic Thunder. After what a ridiculous good time the movie was (and the commentary--it's genius) I felt confident that I should sample this unfortunately named beverage. This was created by Boston America (who brought you the Duff energy drink) and so I had high hopes--usually a movie tie-in promo drink is boring and uninteresting, but Duff was rather tasty. This, though, is less successful. The main taste is cherry-ish, followed by sugary syrupy. Granted, usually when drinking one of these things (energy drinks in general, I mean), you're prepared for an onslaught of sugar--it's an energy drink, after all. That would be like ordering a cheeseburger and then bitching about the cheese taste. But even for an energy drink, this is strong. And the cherry taste--well, I'm not a big fan of cherry anyway, but this tastes more artificial than even most artificial cherry flavors. It's nowhere near the excellent cherry taste execution that we got with Game Fuel Mountain Dew, for example. Categorized as: Drinks and Reviews
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