I was in college when Sparks was first released and it became an indelible part of the college party experience for a few short years. I saved a few packs after the ban and brought them out for a 10 year reunion. People were jubilant to get to experience it again, and thankfully there was only enough for everyone to have a bit, because it’s one of those things that only the metabolism of a still growing person can handle without serious consequences.
Sparks also aligned well with the burgeoning post-punk revival / indie dance scene of the early to mid aughts. In Baltimore, one of the monthly dance parties was doing Sparks happy hours for a while. The deal was absurdly cheap, especially for a big music venue -- two or three dollars per can if I recall, but my memory is hazy for obvious reasons!
Combined with good DJs and a very reasonable cover charge (for example $5 to see Diplo before he got huge), it was quite a time...
As someone from a country where when you ask for a drink, you get like 3x as much vodka as you would in the UK or US, when I was young I typically drank vodka with lemon soda, but when I lived in the UK I switched to vodka red bull. The reasoning was "so little vodka does nothing so let's see if at least the red bull does something" which was at least partially true, although still didn't make up for the lost alcohol content with respect to what I was used to :) Back to my place, I stopped having vodka red bull except very infrequently to remember those times, but here, with serious amounts of vodka, it's quite a bomb.
I've never seen these energy beers (not sure if they were even sold in my country or countries where I lived) but I might have liked them.
Correcting myself: I was thinking of a different can apparently. That 12% ABV can mentioned in the article corresponds to 4.4 shots of vodka (using standard US 1.5 oz shots of 80 proof vodka.)
In the US, they fall under the same legal category as beer, which is "malt beverage", but beer is just one type of malt beverage, drinks like Four Loko are another.
They're closer to drinks like "hard lemonade" or "hard tea", which aren't beer. They're made by adding malt liquor to some flavored drink.
The author must have just been trying to be cute, because yes, they were never referred to as energy beers. In fact, Four Loko was so popular that the brand itself suffered from genericization, where all caffeinated malt liquors were colloquially referred to as Four Loko
They tasted horrible but were cheap and would get you incredibly wired and drunk in a short amount of time. A perfect storm for binge drinking students, especially pre-gaming early in the night for other parties/bars. It was a fun time for a year or so but can understand the ban.
I'm a young millennial and Four Loko's were still somewhat popular at my college. Maybe it was just a localized thing.. they went under the name "sidewalk slammer" where you would (quickly) drink half of it, then pour in a Red Bull (or other energy drink). So still finding a way to get that combo of caffeine, and still using the (at that point) slightly "retro" branding?
I always thought the litigation and regulatory pressure over this was misplaced. Consuming a single serving of the most outrageous product described in the article (22oz, 12% alcohol, 156mg caffeine) is not acutely dangerous to a healthy adult who isn't about to drive a car. Chugging multiple of them is a bad decision of course, but it's just as easy to drink other alcoholic beverages to excess - perhaps easier with hard liquor.
Alcohol and caffeine are not a wise combination. Socially, consuming both in parallel isn't common (Red Bull excepted, I suppose, but that was exactly the target market and inspiration for these as well.)
The amounts are also deceptive from a cultural standpoint. Most people are not expecting a tall can to contain _nearly the same alcohol as a full bottle of wine_.
It's the same reason we don't sell neat whisky in 12oz cans. Yes, people can choose how they imbibe, but product design does practically matter.
> Most people are not expecting a tall can to contain _nearly the same alcohol as a full bottle of wine_.
So like, a full bottle of wine is 25 fl oz and these cans are 22 fl oz. They're nearly the same volume. So we're haggling over a few percent ABV differences and wine already has a range of ABVs. It is not really shocking that they have similar amounts of alcohol.
This is also in the same market segment as products like Mad Dog 20/20, which... comes in 22oz cans or 750mL bottles and has 12-18% ABV.
I suppose I don't have evidence for the idea that it's as easy to drink four shots of liquor as a can of Fourloko. It's certainly less volume of liquid.
> Socially, consuming both [alcohol and caffeine] in parallel isn't common
Caffè corretto, Buckfast Tonic Wine, and Irish Coffee are all over a century old.
> Most people are not expecting a tall can to contain _nearly the same alcohol as a full bottle of wine_.
I'm not so sure about that. A 32oz can of 8% malt liquor, for example has about the same amount of alcohol. As for whisky by the can, it would need to be 6.6oz, not 12oz to equal the 2.64oz of pure ethanol in the most extreme product described in the article.
I could see a reasonable argument for limiting the total amount of alcohol in containers that can't be reclosed, though that could easily ban traditional champagne bottles.
> Alcohol and caffeine are not a wise combination.
Yet, what does every single person that's trying to sober up ask for or have suggested to them? Coffee.
One of my favorite movie scenes is from "Flight - 2012" with Denzel and John Goodman trying to make Denzel's character "right". I love it for that fact that they don't try to call it "sober him up", but just to get him balanced. That's all the caffeine in the coffee is trying to do, yet people insist on saying "sober up"
The scary part of these "look towards caffeine for an answer" messages it that drunks taking caffeine will feel like they aren't impaired... but still fail at driving tests, etc.
A charitable interpretation of these media-scenes it that one character is trying to help another disguise outward signals of their problem, while too many viewers misinterpret it as an actual cure. (Especially when the protagonist has plot-armor against failure.)
At 12% ABV, a serving size is 5oz.[0] There's 23.5oz in a FourLoco.
IMPORTANT EDIT: Apparently these labeling changes were made specifically due to a lawsuit against FourLoco.[1] So you're totally right, a serving was 1 can, despite having almost 5 drinks worth of booze.
Very few adults, especially if we’re talking 40+, are healthy. By that age almost everyone has high blood pressure or asthma or a bad knee, or whatever.
Heck, just sell the energy drink by itself and subtly market it as a mixer - probably cheaper to make with higher profit margins. There is a reason "Red Bull and vodka" is popular, and that the founders of Red Bull were mega billionaires.
Sure, but then you're competing against red bull and every other energy drink on the planet, of which there are loads. People invent this stuff obviously because it's a relatively empty nieche.
