24 OZ RED BULL CAFFEINE FULL

“People are always looking for a way to get high,” William Rorabaug, a historian at the University of Washington, tells me. Caffeine and alcohol shouldn’t mix, but they have always mixed. In fact, there’s a long history of people trying to showily ruin their nights or their lives with disgusting combinations of chemicals dreamed up for some business purpose that doesn’t especially concern them. There were also micro-eras for the nearly identical drinks Sparks and Joose, and the vodka Red Bull got almost two decades.

24 OZ RED BULL CAFFEINE FULL

But why? What’s so great about caffeinated sugar-water full of booze, in a can, retailing for $2.50, other than the obvious? The drink is infamous, and maybe an important cultural moment, but it’s not unique. I wasn’t old enough to drink or permitted to have more than one other person in my car at the time, but even I feel a bubbly sort of weakness in my chest reading a blog post about the founder of Ron Jon Surf Shops getting arrested for driving under the influence of Four Loko or a blog post about Chuck Schumer comparing Four Loko to “a plague” devastating the country.įour Loko was beloved, and it is beloved in death. Plus, they raised the alcohol level as high as they legally could for a malt beverage.Ģ010 sounds like such a long time ago that I was honestly surprised when one of the Gawker pieces about the moment mentioned the fact that Obama was president. In short: They made the cans tall and they gave them a neon camouflage print to make them stand out. In an oral history of Four Loko, published on Grub Street last summer, the team of Ohio State buddies who created it explained how the product went from a small production run in 2005 to a splashy New York City debut in 2009 to more than $100 million in revenue in 2010. Photos from Four Loko’s golden days are scattered around on Tumblr and Imgur, captured with the high-flash, red-eyed weirdness of disposable cameras and early iPhones. “Why tell, when you can show a photo series?” dancer and YouTuber Ava Gordy replied, attaching an image of herself surrounded by Four Loko cans and wearing a gas mask. “If you can remember your Four Loko experiences, it wasn’t a Four Loko experience,” comedian Kady Ruth recently tweeted, in response to a question from comedian Akilah Hughes asking for stories about the drink’s golden age. It is, if there is such a thing, the internet’s beverage, even years after the demise of its original formula. Remembrances of Four Loko - the super-caffeinated, alcoholic energy drink available in every convenience store for a narrow window of time before intervention by the Food and Drug Administration at the end of the aughts - are their own genre of internet content.

24 oz red bull caffeine