Reflective
Adrenalin - Exotic Beverage Review
It's nice to find an energy drink that isn't obviously a Red Bull clone, after the recent onslaught of them that I've sampled. Adrenalin comes in a variety of flavours, including "orange" and "citrus", a flavour definition about as broad as "potato" and "tubers". The other flavour is "berry", which I wish I'd bought, but decided not to, feeling it was a pretty generic flavour for energy drinks and that citrus was sightly more unique.
It's the colour of radioactive urine. It's YELLOW. Not just yellow. In fact, not just YELLOW. It's YELLOW. And it's not carbonated, so there's no movement in it at all.
It smells like an intriguing (albeit slightly sickening) combination of Mountain Dew, lemon cordial, and Berocca. I get the feeling there'll be lots of vitamin B to be enjoyed in this one. Mmm.
To taste, it's vitamin-B flavoured Gatorade, really. It's slightly lemony at first, but it's overwhelmingly laden with vitamin B and the taste of wood and chemicals. It also seems to strip the lining off the inside of your mouth at the exact same time it sends some weird chemical message to your saliva glands, telling them to quit manufacturing saliva because it's harming the environment. Or something. It dries your mouth out like you're sucking on a piece of chalk. That said, the taste itself isn't that bad! It's just oddly textured and slightly weird.
Oh, God. Don't burp. For the love of Christ, if you feel a belch coming, compress it and make it come out someplace else. It's the most unpleasant form of reflux you can possibly imagine. Remember those herbal cold and flu tablets? The green ones, shaped like diamonds? I think they had red ones that were the "night" variant. They produced an unpleasant aftertaste of garlic, vitamin B and death when you belched. This stuff produces the same taste, but with a nice liquidness to it, reminding you that you just drank something that's chemically indiscriminate from yak piss.
I don't know what to make of this one. The concept is nice, it's basically envigorated Gatorade. It's nice that it's not carbonated, but I don't think it'd be of any benefit to slam this stuff down fast, as it'd probably throw your immune system into chaos. The flavour is quite nice, but the aftertaste and ultimate belching make you want to smash the bottle on a nearby hard thing and commit ritual hari-kari before any more of it millimetres its way up your eosophagus. Like I said, I'm not sure. I guess this is about average for an energy drink, all things considered. Nice taste, makes your soul ache.
As of 2013: Extinct. No longer for sale. What a shame, too.
Exotic beverage: Speed Chrome
I haven't opened this can yet. The name conjures some interesting possibilities, two of which are: It looks like chrome. This is unlikely, as I'm unaware of it having become legal to include actual metal in beverages. The other alternative is: It acts like chrome, meaning you can spray it into a rag and inhale it for happy fun time. I doubt both reasons, but bear in mind we are talking about an energy drink manufacturer who's modus operandi is "name it after something morally reprehensible".
It doesn't look like chrome. It looks like slightly greenish, carbonated wee.
When you open the can, there's an overwhelming stink of window cleaner. On sniffing the liquid itself, it smells like a relatively benign fruit drink. Whether or not it's actually benign, I'm as yet unsure.
It's...............interesting. It's slightly fruity. The other sensation it carries is quite similar to the "HOLY CRAP IS IT MILK OR IS IT SODA" effect the choc-orange Fanta Spider demonstrated. It's like there's a haze of awkward gaseous matter surrounding the real flavour, which, like most energy drinks, consists mostly of strong, sweet fruit flavours attempting to mask the overwhelming presence of Vitamin Berocca.
The flavour dissipates pretty quickly, leaving you with the horrid tang of vitamin B and the weird sensation of the "flavour haze" described above, which doesn't seem to go away, no matter how much other fluid you consume afterward.
It's not pleasant, but that's okay. Few of these drinks actually are. As they go, this one's pretty middle-of-the-road. It's got gross bits, it's got good bits. At least it's not liquid metal.
Update: I just took a huge swig, thinking "it's not that bad! You just typed out an essay saying so!", but...it is. It's horrid. It tastes like really nasty fruit drink with some methylated spirits in it, and possibly some pee. Blurgh.