Awfulholic: Rev Guarana

Alcohol is awesome. It's self-selling. From whiskey aged in ancient Scottish cellars to hobo-fuel distilled over an engine block for up to forty seconds, everyone loves it, so when a drink advertises anything except its alcoholic content it's guaranteed to suck enough to open a portal in time. Now let's look at "Rev Guarana"! My hopes are not high.

Please understand that "New, LARGER Rev" is like
advertising "The Plague: Now with ADDED IMPOTENCE!"

Rev is the latest experiment in hybridising alcohol with energy drinks, and we're talking "Resident Evil"-style experiments - horrific abominations, pain and suffering, but without the coherent reasoning of an Umbrella Corporation plot. The drink is billed as a Vodka/Guarana drink, and anything that claims to contain Guarana except for "Guarana pills" will taste like ass. (So do the pills but at least you're expecting that.)

They combine the dirt-herb with the two-nickel street whore of the drinks cabinet, vodka, which suffers from a very loose definition. If vehicles followed the same strict standards as vodka I could sell two fireworks strapped to an action man as the new Space Shuttle. Companies drain run-off from the radioactive fields around Chernobyl and sell it to fratboys, except for the truly contaminated stuff, which they fill with artificial fruit flavors and flog as Absolut.

Rev did not get the pure Chernobyl runoff. No, the brave drink recovery technicians suffering from fatal exposure were allowed to drink themselves to death, and once the Institute For Chemicals That Might Kill God were finished with the resulting urine samples they were sold to Casdon Canada Co. But Casdon had a plan - no-one need ever taste the origins of their "vodka"!

Rev's ingredients list is a crash-course in artificial additives - pharmacologists buy bottles instead of a copy of "Commercially available colors and flavors." Everything they can think of is in there (giving you some idea of what even they thought of their drink) including vanilla, cherry, pineapple, citric acid, raspberry, caffeine, cola nut, and various scrabble-breaking concoctions including Potassium Metabisulphate (which I'm fairly sure gave The Flash his powers.) And all the fruit flavors list "Natural AND Artificial", meaning they kept trying to kill the taste even after finding that nothing which grows on Earth could do it.

Amazingly, the taste of this infinity of chemicals compendium can be summed up in a single word: ass.

Specifically, Doctor Manhattan's ass when he was still flashing with lightning and hadn't put his skin back on yet.

Remember Blue Raspberry sodas? This tastes like a crack team of Candy Commandoes saved the world from that goddawful abomination, and Rev stole the lead-lined flask they buried it in. When you drink some, and you won't because I'm telling you right now DO NOT, it somehow skips over the actual liquid feeling and hits to the "rancid chemical residue around your mouth" stage while the fluid is still in your mouth. It's like someone turned the chemical scum on a half-scrubbed bathroom into a flavor.

I'm Irish, a professional drinker (these guys pay me), consider kilo-bags of Skittles a study aid, and this crap gave me a headache before I was halfway through it. Please believe me when I say this is an extreme event - for me blood-sugar isn't a medical term, it's an accurate ratio. Anything that can give me a chemical headache would probably kill you by crystallizing in your brain and your last thoughts would be "I don't remember headbutting any nutrasweet-coated batteries."

I actually didn't finish it. For me this is like admitting losing at Scrabble to a pro wrestler before being beaten up by the Chess club, but I have things I want to do today and I prefer to suffer incredible pain the day after drinking, not during it.

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