Blue Ox - Exotic Beverage Review

These are a handful of energy drinks I found in Albury, on the New South Wales/Victorian border. They're kinda nice, in that they're very obviously a knock off of Red Bull in that they've borrowed the "Coloured Bovine" approach to naming drinks.

They also have the spectacular consumption warning of “Consume no more than 5 cans a day.” Yes. Five. Five. FIVE. That's terrifying on so many levels.

Also, the can art is a label. It's not printed directly onto the aluminium. Such is the price you pay for a spectacular range of flavours, I guess.

I reviewed these rather speedily on location, and I took notes to allow me to finish the reviews properly after the fact. I've included scans of my original notes for your edification, should you like that kind of thing. If you don't, that's cool too. I'm easy about things like that.

First up, the blue one. It's the "original" flavour, which means not a jot to me, as I'm not familiar with whatever originality Blue Ox has going for it. It's quite unpleasant. It shares the same characteristic of slightly aged plastic as Go Fast, which ain't saying much. Make it go away. Please.

Blue Ox Orange: It's orange. Kind of. It's verging on brown, with kind of a luminescent yellow tinge to it. If it was seeping out of a wall at say, Chernobyl, you wouldn't think it was out of place. It looks like something's been oxidising inside of it.

It smells like really strong orange cordial with vitamin C tablets dissolved in it. En masse.

There's a type of cold medicine called "Actifed". This tastes very much like it. If it were seeped in rotting celery for several months. This drink could possibly be a cure for the common cold. Or a carrier for cholera.

Blue Ox Cherry: It's called "Black Cherry". It's dark and vaguely resembles cherry. So far, so good.

It actually smells like cherry. Which would be a good sign, if cherry didn't smell like medicine.

It's......crunchy. Hard to describe. There's an odd powdery texture to it that clings to your teeth afterwards. That said, it's by far the best of the three Blue Ox flavours I've been privy to. Which isn't saying much.

If you have a choice of Blue Ox (rather than, say, Blue Ox Russian Roulette), pick this one. And hold your nose.

The Blue Ox collection isn't the worst thing, all things considered, that I've ever stuck in my mouth. It's certainly not the best, though. All three flavours suffer from bizarre powderiness, overpowering vitamin-B flavours, and peculiar textures.

Since this review was written in 2005, I have since come across Blue Ox in another form, a similarly coloured set of drinks labelled "BLOX" (you can see the cans in this article), with little cube men on the front rather than the characteristic blue cow. I'm not sure if this is a result of Red Bull going "Hang on..blue ox? Red bull? HOW COINCIDENTAL", or the marketing team at Blue Ox simply branching out into more geometric demographics. Who knows. I never drank the BLOX drinks, largely under the assumption that they'd taste like crap, too.

Exotic beverage review: Red Bull

It should be noted before going into depth about this particular beverage that it's pasteurised. This is the process they put milk through in order to remove the bits of random cow bacteria that they figure won't be compatible with bits of random human bacteria it's likely to encounter. There's much more to it. But that's still enough to make me wonder what the sweet Christ is in Red Bull (or moreso is no longer in Red Bull) that required a massive dairy-based process to remove.

It looks like beer, albeit a bit browner. It fizzes tremendously upon being opened, and forms a brief head atop the beverage.

It smells like Combantrin worming medication. So, rest assured that while Red Bull may not give you wings, per-se, it'll quite likely rid you of worms. Seriously, though, this stuff smells vaguely toxic.

It tastes like vomit. Chefelf described it as bile, which is much of a muchness when it comes to internal fluids ejected orally. But yes. It's sickening. It tastes like a heavily carbonated combination of worming medicine and vomit. The reason this stuff initiates a gag reflex in me is, I fear, not due to its taste, but due to my body going "Hey, I know this flavour, it goes outward, not in!"

The illusion of consuming spew continues in the aftertaste, which cannot be described more efficiently than "it tastes like you just blew chunks". And possibly attempted to wash your mouth out with worming medicine to remove the taste of expelled bile.

It tastes like puke. With bubbles. And for some reason, I bought a four-pack of it.