Exotic beverage: Rhino's Energy Drink

Rhino's Energy Drink in all its glory.

I don't have much to report on this one. I somehow thought this would turn out to be one of the weird aphrodisiac drinks, containing extract of rhinoceros horn, or something. I guess import and poaching laws nipped that one in the bud, eh?

It's a tad paler than the usual slightly burned yellow colour energy drinks generally take on. I'd predicted red. I was wrong.

It smells similar to the scent of Red Eye Plus, a slightly fruity but contradictorily dairy aroma. It contains taurine and is pasteurised, so there's probably a link there.

It's really quite pleasant. It's got the vague taste of Red Bull (i.e. a sickly sweet flavour, kind of like vomit -- but in a good way) with a slightly spicy overtone. There's also very little taste of random chemicals, and miraculously no taste at all of vitamin-B. I'm impressed. Totally.

Bubble-tacular.

There's no aftertaste that's unexpected. The taste of generic energy drink lingers for a while, but it's thankfully lacking the flavour of vitamin B. It does leave a slight greasy "skin" on your mouth, but that's to be expected from these drinks. Bravo for someone finally making an energy drink that tastes like an energy drink should, but doesn't leave you feeling like you've just imbibed an entire health food store and a litre of sump oil.

I apologise for the dullness of this review, but I've not managed to find any part of Rhino's Energy Drink to mock, parody or otherwise take the piss out of. It's flavour is exactly how an energy drink should taste, with no outstanding good or bad points. It's pleasant, as a beverage. Hoorah, Rhino's Energy Drink.

B-52 - Exotic Beverage Review

Boom.

This is one of many disturbing drinks made in The Netherlands, like Private Energy, although they're all imported by different importers, as far as I can tell. This one states "Dutch Original" on the can, which is intriguing.

It's that generic "energy drink gold" colour. Kinda looks like either beer or pee, depending on whether you're a pessimist or a pessimist. It's slightly carbonated, and the carbonation vanishes speedily once the can is breached.

It smells identical to Red Bull. I had suspicions when I sampled Private Energy that it was merely re-branded Red Bull, but I was thwarted in that case by the inclusion of Ginseng, an ingredient not found in Red Bull. In this case, B52 does not claim to be pasteurised, which I assume is a mandatory statement on the can if it's the case. So again, not an actual Red Bull clone, just a similar recipe.

Generic energy drink gold. Mmm.

To taste: Whoa. It's very much unlike Red Bull. For approximately a quarter of a second, it tastes like Red Bull, then it becomes totally overpowering and bitter. The bubbles seem to amplify the excessively sour/bitter flavour, causing an uncontrollable shudder. Forcing myself to sip at the beverage now, I find I can manage no sips larger than about a half teaspoon at a time. It has a vague soapy fragrance hanging above it. It's worth noting that the can I have is past its best before date by two months, so it's possible the flavour has been affected. That said, I find it hard to imagine this tasted any better in November.

The only aftertaste is the irritating vitamin-B flavour, which tastes very much like you have a wad of fermenting lawn clippings wedged at the back of your throat. Overall, my soul doesn't feel too greatly damaged by this drink, although I don't believe I've imbibed more than a tablespoon of it.

It's a truly middle-of-the-road energy drink. It follows all the required criteria. Tiny can with snappy graphics on it. A name suggesting an explosion of flavour and energy. A price tag leaving you wondering why you wasted so much money on it. The reeking flavour of vitamin B, masked ineffectually by numerous fragrant fruit and artificial flavourings. Mild carbonation that vanishes upon opening the can. If Red Bull is the benchmark for an average energy drink -- in both content and flavour -- then this is just below the average point.

It's bad, very bad: Mother energy drink

Mother. It's deceptive, bro.

Note: This review is based on the original recipe of Mother, which was released in 2006. In 2008, Coca Cola decided -- wisely -- to reformulate the crap into a basic Red Bull clone, and marketed it with the slogan "It tastes nothing like the old one", transparently demonstrating their acknowledgement of the fact that the drink you're about to read a review about tasted like Satan's crotchpit.

Mother claims to be an "all natural" energy drink, although I suspect most drinks can parade themselves under this label if they choose to. It contains an alarming amount of "natural" chemicals, including something extracted from the berries of the Açaí, a type of palm tree native to the Amazon basin, Korean Ginseng and the usual caffeine and guarana characters.

I got too close.

This drink is available almost everywhere, but I first located it in a convenience store in Sydney city. The store was being loaded with crates of the stuff, suggesting to me that it may actually be a decent drink.

It's slightly red-brown, and not as dark as cola. It's also quite carbonated and remains that way for much longer than other energy drinks.

It smells of ginger. It's like weak ginger beer, with a hint of medicine over it. I don't like ginger, or ginger beer, so this doesn't bode well for Mother.

It does (did) come in a funky bottle, though.

It tastes utterly unpleasant. In fact, it tastes as though it just corroded part of my soul. It's slightly gingery with no effort made whatsoever to mask the reeking flavour of b-vitamins. There's also a hint of aniseed and the general flavouring of medicine. I can detect no flavour whatsoever that feels either safe, nor good for me.

It leaves very little aftertaste, and what it does leave tastes simply fresh, as though I've just swilled with ginger mouthwash. There's a very mild hint of b-vitamins.

I find it rather difficult to rate this drink on a whole. It's neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and my immediate dislike of it probably stems from my general avoidance of ginger, which makes my opinion more biased than usual. The problem with these drinks on a whole is that the ingredients rarely perform the magical tasks they claim, and are rarely well thought-out as companion ingredients in the same beverage. Having "all natural ingredients" doesn't necessarily mean that the ingredients, when mixed together, won't curdle your innards. This drink isn't unpleasant, but it does taste of ginger. It's unlike any other energy drink I've reviewed, thus far, so it stands alone in its weirdness.

Exotic beverage: Speed

Speed.

"Speed" is a licensed trademark of "Steb", and is apparently canned..or manufactured..or something, in Clayton, Victoria. It's distributed by L-Z Distribution. Not sure if there was ever an A-K Distribution. More research needed.

No spectacularly bizarre ingredients, but it does contain Citric Aurantium, which has no redeeming qualities other than being used occasionally as a flavouring in Asian dishes.

I guess the ultimate way to get people to buy your product is to name it as though it contains narcotics. Or to name it after a Keanu Reeves movie.

It's a darkish, dusty maroon. Purple, really. The photos don't do it justice. My camera is red/purple colourblind. It's quite fizzy. (The drink. Not the camera.)

It's got a really strong stink of raspberry, combined with a smell of stale beer and methylated spirits. That said, though, it doesn't smell too bad. What the hell is wrong with me?

it's PURPLE

It tastes slightly of raspberry and quite a bit like the official standard of "energy drinks", which is the overpowering flavour of vitamin B, usually coupled with some horrendous fruit flavour trying to hose it away. It's got quite a rough texture, too. Although having described it, it's still not that bad.

Once again I have to deal with the fundamental vitamin B flavour trying to eat away at my soft palate. The methylated spirits aroma from before again reappears, which isn't the most pleasant experience.

It's not that bad. I can't say much more than that. After all of the above mocking, it's still quite drinkable.

Exotic beverage review: Private Energy

Mmm, porn flavoured.

This is the first energy drink I've seen to feature a porn star on the can. In pale green relief in the top corner is porn "model" Silvia Saint (link is from Wikipedia, it's relatively safe). I was curious as to whether this drink fell into the curious "energy drinks and aphrodisiacs" category, but it seems to contain no aphrodisiac ingredients, nor claim any magical powers in the bedroomal department.

It's yellow-brown. I partly suspected this was going to be either blue or green, but that's based entirely on the colour of the print on the can. I'm neither impressed nor disappointed in the colour of the beverage, so far. The label claims the drink is carbonated, but it was barely even pressurised upon opening and the drink poured as flat as a car parking lot.

Can you smell the porn?

It smells exactly -- and I wish I had a second can so as to test this theory properly -- like Red Bull. This leads me to suspect that Private Energy may be colonpipe.com's first rebadged exotic beverage! The colour and smell are absolutely identical to Red Bull. It's also pasteurised. The only spanner in these works is that Private Energy's label claims it contains ginseng, an ingredient not present in Red Bull. Lacking a mass-spectrometer, I cannot chemically analyze this drink. Thus, one test remains!

It's still Red Bull. I'm grasping at minutiae here, but it's a tiny, tiny, tiny bit sweeter than Red Bull.

It does an amazing job of drying out the mouth and throat. I've recently had a cold, and Private Energy seems to want nothing better than to make me cough in an awkward fashion.

Quite frankly, you can read my review of Red Bull for my opinion of that, because it's virtually identical. I shall paraphrase for the terminally lazy: It tastes kind of like vomit, albeit in this case vomit with added sweetness. And apparently ginseng. And I'm curious as to whether all cans of this gear are flat, or whether I simply bought a dodgy one.

Exotic beverage: Naughty Girl Energy Drink

"Hi, I'm red."

This energy drink contains caffeine, carnitine, not much else. The more interesting of those two ingredients, carnitine, is a quarternary ammonium compound (whatever the hell that is) synthesised from amino acids. It's found in red meat and nuts, and is synthesised during pregnancy to aid in growth. It's listed on the can as a fat burning magical chemical of awesomeness, but I can't fathom the diagrams on Wikipedia well enough to explain whether this works or not. (It's in a sugar-laden aphrodisiac beverage. Methinks it does not.)

It's violently flourescent red. It's not just red, it's RED. Proper red. It's mildly carbonated. I'd expected it'd be pink, but at least it's not urine-coloured as I kinda suspected it would be.

It smells like window cleaner. The blue kind. (Not the red kind.) It's somewhat scary. One is tempted to include an appendix to this article detailing how well "Naughty Girl" polishes glassware.

The bubbles are trying to escape, bless them.

Once you stick it in your mouth, it's far from pleasant. It's basically a canful of the flavour that all energy drinks try to disguise, the reeking unpleasantness of vitamin-B. The can describes the flavour as "raspberry", but it's about as close to raspberry as a glass of aerated water saturated in b-vitamins.

The best feature of this beverage is its complete lack of an aftertaste, it's a shame there's no other good points, because inhaling air has the same effect.

On a whole, It's fairly disgusting. I couldn't manage a glass. It's unpalatable because there's no real taste to it, just the underwhelmingly vitamin-B like flavour of blurgh. There's no aftertaste to speak of, and it made my face twitch uncontrollably.

I suppose I should hesitantly address the other "property" of this drink: aphrodisia. I believe it's aimed at women. It didn't excite me any. This may be because I'm not a woman. Should I ever find a woman who's willing to drink vitamin-B and window cleaner, then tell me how her loins are feeling, I'll be sure to post the results.

Exotic beverage review: Red Devil Energy Drink

It's red, and one would imagine, devilish.

It's all Red Bull's fault. "Red" has apparently become a convenient catch-all buzzword for energy drinks. Between Red Eye, which is pleasant, and Red Bull, which is bile in a can, it's a shame the term cannot be safely used to distinguish the palatable from the impalatable.

Red Devil is alarmingly tomato coloured. It kinda looks like someone has bled into it. It's not a comforting colour. I had anticipated it'd look somewhat like Red Bull, based entirely on the contents being similar. I'm almost disappointed.

It smells exactly the same as every other energy drink that tries to disguise the patently disgusting flavour of b-group vitamins with some kind of uberberry fruit deluxe syrupy flavour. It smells very much like someone's vomited some berries and added Berocca.

Close-up of Red Devil in a glass.

At the risk of offering a cheap-arse description of the flavour that'll be of no help to anyone, it tastes virtually identical to Red Eye Gold. It's got a strong medicinal flavour, buried beneath an unpleasant taste of partially digested berries, all of which are swimming on top of the unpleasant vegetable flavour of b-group vitamins, which still manage to poke their hideous heads through the masking agents to make this a vaguely unpleasant beverage. As flavours go, this one isn't too bad. I was afraid it'd taste like Red Bull, but thankfully it does not.

The only noticable aftertaste is that of the berry-like puke flavour, which -- as an aftertaste, at least -- isn't totally unpleasant.

It's not entirely bad. For something with all the ingredients of Red Bull, a name that begins with "Red", and a colour that looks like someone's been punched in the kidneys and taken a nice long piss, it's decidedly palatable and probably earns itself a place on the short list of energy drinks that don't make your soul depressed.

Exotic, uh, beverage? Sour Spray

It's been a while since I've written an Exotic Beverage Review, so here's one in a slightly different direction.

I picked this stuff up at my local video store. Immediately, I got the urge to buy two cans, because this stuff clearly cannot last. This is another entry in the gargantuan line of sour sweeties, which seem to function entirely on the concept that the more disgusting a confection tastes, the more likely children are to want it. "Sour Spray" guarantees kiddies will love it by adding the bonus gimmick of being delivered to the taste buds in much the same way as Raid is delivered to insects -- by aerosol.

My immediate reaction to this was "Holy arsegiblets, Batman! This'll make small children think it's okay to eat bug spray!". My secondary reaction was "I'll take two!".

I had planned to make this a conventional Exotic Beverage Review, but the crap by nature defies the standard format of an EBR. It contains no truly exotic ingredients (apart from whatever the propellant in the aerosol is, evidently it's not hydrocarbon -- which cannot surely be a bad thing -- but the can divulges nothing as to what the gas actually is). The sugar content of the goo is not suprising, 10g in an 80ml serving.

The can is about the size of a handy deodorant can, the type women tend to carry in their purses. It's well sealed with a layer of shrink-wrapped cellophane plastic around the cap. The label on the can is also shrink-wrapped plastic, not enamelled painty crap like on most aerosol cans.

Click the jumpy jump to read more about this astounding aerosol --

The directions and precautions on the can are as follows, and I really wish I had made these up:

DIRECTIONS: open the can, spray candy directly into your mouth and SCREAM. Manufacturer assumes no responsibility for crazy outbursts, silliness and laughter you may experience. Do not mix with other whimpy candies. CAUTION: This candy does not cause boredom if used as directed.

So that's the joke warning panel. The real warning panel reads as follows:

WARNING: Contents under pressure. Do not puncture or incinerate. Exposure to high temperatures may cause bursting. Avoid spraying in eyes. Intentional disuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents can be harmful. Store below 120F.

Fair enough, says I.

But wait..

DIRECTIONS: open the can, spray candy directly into your mouth and SCREAM.

..and..

Intentional disuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents can be harmful.

I assume the screaming is due to the probably highly carcinogenic propellant you're not meant to inhale while the CAN IS SPRAYING INTO YOUR MOUTH HOLE speedily eroding your lungs and causing some kind of narcotic trip.

Or maybe I'm just too cynical.

The nozzle. Don't suck on it.

A poorly translated Chinese paragraph on the side of the can suggests the can contains 28 feet of foamy goodness. Upon reading this, I immediately realised the potential for an..

UNAUTHORISED "HOW MUCH IS INSIDE"!

So, without further ado, I hereby rip off pay homage to Cockeyed.com:

Realising I needed a method to measure the output of the can, I quickly comandeered my kitchen bench and set up a high-tech measuring apparatus:

Cling wrap + tape measure.

The plan was for the cling wrap to contain the overwhelming foamy madness, which would be distributed across its width in 12 inch sausages, as measured with pinpoint accuracy by my fluourescent green tape measure. It was a plan that could not fail!

Foam?

Unfortunately, I'd failed to anticipate that the word "foam" is apparently a bad Chinese translation for the Chinese word that means "slightly damp snotty goo that turns to rancid fluid within seconds". So my nice foamy sausages speedily mutated into streams of unpleasant pink sticky matter. But one soldiers on, in true How Much Is Inside? tradition!

Ten feet of pink!

Here's the first ten feet of pink goop, which by now has congealed to a kind of Klingon blood-like substance. Thankfully, the cling wrap is containing it quite nicely, as the top left corner indicates. As hard as it's trying to escape, the surface tension of the Klingon haemoglobin is too strong to break the bounds of the plastic.

oh god no

Here's a final photograph of the stuff as it begins to break through the gravitational boundaries of the cling wrap and starts to invade my kitchen bench. Ultimately, the final spray count got to 28 foot-long lines of pink crud, but the stuff was congealing and liquefacting and disintegrating and eating through my house so quickly I didn't have a chance to photograph it. I was too busy attempting to scoop up the plastic sheeting into a sort of bag-like formation before the stuff became a permanent part of my kitchen.

However, having proven the can did contain at least 28 feet of "foam", as per the label, I decided to get brave and sample a bit of the stuff.

I sampled the stuff. My tastebuds collapsed in upon themselves like a black hole, retreating from the seething pink goo I had so disdainfully thrust upon them. It felt like I'd sprayed rancid, carbonated vinegar onto my tongue. It's also worth mentioning that it's not at all possible to have any control over the direction and ferocity of the spray, so you might as well toss a handful of coins as to whether you want the "foam" to go into your mouth, down your throat or up your nose.

Curious as to how much crud remained in the can, I exhausted it into the makeshift cling-wrap bag:

Squirt.

It's a goddamn alien lifeform, I'm telling you.

I debated whether to drink the stuff, attempt to preserve it, or feed it to a homeless person and sit back and watch. After some deliberation, I decided the best fate for the red glowing bile was..

The ultimate fate of the rancid pink goo. Also, red + blue = purple.

Never again. Ever.

As an addendum, however, I returned to the kitchen to discover the cling wrap had at some point failed me, and the red crap had actually stained my bench:

It's still there, weeks later.

Never. Again.

Exotic beverage: Pepsi Samba

Pepsi, now with more samba.

This stuff is mango and tamarind flavoured. Mango and tamarind. This does not sound pleasant. Mango is alright, I guess. Mango I can accept. Not sure about mango and Pepsi combined, but I'm okay with Mango. My only experience with tamarind, however, is an Asian "sweet" that consists of dried up balls of the fruit soaked in sugar and chili powder, producing a horrid, horrid, horrid burning mass of gross.

One of the few redeeming features of this drink is its television spot, a commercial featuring a pair of disembodied dancing legs, legs that belong to David Elsewhere, master illusionary dancer (there's a career none of us considered) and generally cool dude:

It's orange-er than regular Pepsi. Clearly there's some hint of tropical fruit about the colour.

For it was blue, with an orange top..

There's almost no smell. It smells like regular Pepsi, really, with a very very vague hint of that Tropical Sunkist crap they put out a few years ago. I'm under the assumption this is the same syrup, mixed with Pepsi. And tamarind.

Oh, it's gross. It tastes like Pepsi with soap in it. For anyone familiar with these drink reviews, it has the "we're trying to mask the taste of vitamin-B by adding overpowering fruit flavours" taste. Which wouldn't be a problem, except THIS ISN'T AN ENERGY DRINK, AND HAS NO VITAMIN B ADDED TO IT.

The aftertaste is horrid. It's still soapy. I'm having a hard time telling whether it's due to the base of this drink being regular Pepsi, which is usually pretty grim in its own right. Also, for some odd reason, there's a hint of eucalyptus or mint or something.

Considering this is based on Pepsi to begin with, it's not that bad, I guess. It's soapy, but it's kind of fruity. Tropical Sunkist was far, far better.

Exotic beverage: Speed Chrome

Apparently chrome is yellow.

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.

Mm, wee.

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.