Four Loko (standard flavor)

Did you watch that video? (I didn't-- I cut out at the point when he was sharing his pride in spending three dollars on his chosen poison at the corner store). But yes-- that's why I'm going for some Four Loko tonight. Well, that and the fact that, according to Wikipedia, it's currently under investigation by the FDA. And when you Youtube search for it, one of the first results is about teens being hospitalized by it. Also, there's wormwood in it, which strikes me as a terrible idea.

Essentially, Four Loko is malt liquor full of fruit flavor and energy drink and, I can't stress the cosmic foolishness of this idea, wormwood. Also, its company is based out of Latrobe PA, which makes me sad because I started drinking beer with Rolling Rock. So I got just the standard purple-colored can and thought I'd see if this is normal malt-liquor bad or a special thing unto itself.

LOOK
Oh my god this looks more like grape soda than grape soda does. It's a really really dark purple, like, darker than Fanta. (They made Fanta originally because Nazi Germany couldn't import Coca-Cola syrup.  I'm not making any claims here about quality or trying to say that Four Loko is a war crime. I'm just telling the exciting story that is 20th-century history)

Apparently exciting enough that someone made a Martin Bormann action figure.

But anyway, it's malt liquor and it's dark purple. It wouldn't matter if that purple was like made out of ground-up amethyst and unicorn jism, it would still be wrong.

NOSE
It also smells like grape soda. It's really reminiscent of Purple Passion, (man, those were halcyon days. Back when I had  a liver larger than a golfball and more solid than a whiffleball)-- it smells purple and fruity, but neither like actual grapes or totally healthy. There's a weird, old, dusty foot smell at the bottom of this, like I'll drain the can and just wind up choking on someone's knucklebone.

"Looks like a ... pinky."

There is a cheap beer aroma mixed in, though, and that's just terrible. It can smell like soda, it can smell like cheap beer, but smelling like both just feels like something-- either a rat or an oompa-loompa, respectively--fell into the mix and drowned.

TASTE
 Well when you sip it, it just tastes like soda. But it's malt liquor, so you should chug it, and when you chug it thenitdsjcdlsjl;ZALGO.

Whoo. Sorry there. I drank like a fifth of a can and for a second everything was black and yet somehow fire at the same time. I was somehow absolutely nothing and yet aware of nothing but my own flesh. It was a little weird.

NO WONDER YOU'RE ALWAYS SCREAMING.

It starts off with this faint, bitter wormwood flavor down at the very base of the first sip. It tastes like dust and hangover-mouth, with sort of a lemon-rind sourness. But with every  gulp I take over the course of a chug, the grape soda flavor diminishes and that grows, until after about four gulps and it tastes like wood pulp and mushrooms. It tastes like something that is legitimately poisonous and then you salivate like crazy as your mouth tries to flush it out. And it's not just in the course of one chug-- the deeper I get into this increasingly too-large can, the worse every consecutive sip tastes. It's the opposite of the Mad Dog effect (fun fact: my first exposure to Mad Dog was on My Name is Earl, where it was the preferred drink of Patty the Daytime Hooker).

Seriously, a sip of this is passable. That last gulp is some of the worst stuff I've tasted for this blog.

(I gotta take a break while I process the buzz. Here's something special to keep you company).

zALgO RiseS

BUZZ
I'm just adding this section because this is an energy drink as well as a beer as well as, in Europe, absinthe-pop (which all combine into a Japan-level bad idea). I figure that, since the reason to drink Four Loko over anything else is the buzz, I better talk about it.

It's not really an energy drink buzz, though, as the alcohol mostly negates that. I am typing better than I usually do in the reviews, so I guess it makes that a little easier, but I'm not jittery or tweaking. It actually reminds me of an absinthe buzz (only with Taurine and Shoggoth-bile instead of fennel and anise) in that I'm clearly kinda drunk but not tired or lethargic.  But whereas an absinthe buzz is fun and an excellent conduit to bad ideas and weird fuckin' dreams (seriously-- can't go into details but they were strange as shit and we all dreamed about different variations on the same idea) I imagine that this is just a conduit to sitting on the hood of a moving car.

"Someone slammed their butt on your car! It looks like a butt!"

(Wonder Boys is hella late-90s-early-2000s but it's still a damn fine movie). Essentially this buzz is just gonna make you a chattery asshole but not actually inspire you to any bad decisions.

FINAL THOUGHTS
More like you'd have to be loco to driiiiiiiiiiiiii
ZALGO
HE RISES.