Quick? Yes. Healthy? Probably not. Energy? Hold on to your underwear.

I found this garish monstrosity on an adventure to find beer a few weeks ago. After being promised ‘Quick. HEALTHY. ENERGY.’, I couldn’t resist inviting it back to my flat with the intention of letting it slide itself inside me.

See, now I feel dirty.  Anyway.

One thing that I’ve learned from my experience with energy shots is that they taste really quite bad.  This is to be expected – generally, psychoactive chemicals don’t taste very good at all, so a strong flavouring gets added – but this stuff took me by surprise.  It’s very similar to drinking neat orange squash – very sickly, quite persistent but not entirely unpleasant, and for an energy shot that’s pretty high praise.

One thing that I’ve decided to do with these energy shots is to actually take a look at the liquids themselves.  This is no exception, so I poured it out into a shot glass emblazoned with the Jack Daniels logo – in the hopes that Almighty Jack, our Lord and Saviour of shitty clubnights, might look down from on high and bless this endeavour.  And by ‘bless this endeavour’, I do of course mean ‘stop me from getting a massive fucking heart attack’.

Fortunately, I’m still writing, so I must have done something right.

This stuff is the colour of unicorn piss.

It’s pale pink.  This is surprising considering how strong it tastes, but the surprise fades when you remind yourself that absolutely nothing natural is dissolved in it.  This is a glass of industry, a glass full of Robert Louis Stephenson’s vision of a mechanised Utopia.  Which is interesting, considering it’s essentially WD-40 for the brain.

And how.  Rocket-powered uplift, which plateaus for about three hours, followed by a gradual return to normal energy levels.  If you can brave the very brief OH GOD MY FACE IS MELTING as the stimulants kick in, you’ll be set to go without any significant discomfort.

I like this stuff.  Of all the energy shots that I’ve had, this is the best, even if its packaging does look like it was designed by a twelve year old with a copy of MS Paint and a pirated version of Illustrator circa 2001.