At 7:43 a.m. I crack open a can of Red Bull, original flavor. The O.G. Ol' faithful. Big red. Lil', uh, canny. Despite being by a significant margin the most popular energy drink in the United States for almost three decades, it's impossible to describe the taste of it. Sweet, but slightly tangy; that unplaceable chemical aftertaste; almost medicinal. What flavor is that? Is that taurine? What's taurine? Was there any truth to the old schoolyard rumor that there's taurine in bull cum, or maybe it was bull cum in taurine? (I forget which, even though the distinction is important.) There's nothing else quite like it. Red Bull is Red Bull–flavored.
Except when it's not. Beginning in 2013 the company began to chase the tastes of the market, introducing a series of flavors, some limited-time, some successful enough to stick around. Like blueberry, which I open at 8:01 a.m., having finished the first can—I need that caffeine in the morning like fish need water, and at 8.4 ounces, the experience of drinking one is sweet but short.
Which is merciful for my well-being, because I'm drinking one can of every Red Bull flavor, back to back, for the purposes of this blog. Or as close to every flavor as I could get from a variety pack ordered online and expensed to Defector, which comes out to eight: eight cans, eight different flavors, two full liters, 640 mg of caffeine, and I refuse to calculate how much sugar because I might contract acute diabetes just from doing the math. I am attempting this in the name of science—to see if enough Red Bull will, like the slogan goes, truly give me wings.
I am an energy drink pervert. My refrigerator is replete with them—at the moment, I have 39 cans in there, representing six separate brands. I can't say no to an online sale of a case of my preferred drinks, or of one I haven't tried yet. I definitely can't say no when in the wild I encounter a rare or new brand, like a shiny Pokemon; I have been known to spot an unfamiliar can in the morning, purchase it, and carry it around with me all day in order to bring it home and save it for an appropriate time. (Two treasured finds from the past couple of months: Adrenaline Rush from Honduras and Hypno from Turkey.) It must be said that I go unsupported in this hobby: I have a group DM with Luis and Maitreyi where I share my more exotic acquisitions, which are invariably met with either silence or pleas to "stop sending us these, we don't care."
Weirdly, though, despite the hoarding behavior, I am not really a caffeine pervert. I usually limit myself to one can a day, in the morning, energy drinks having almost completely replaced coffee in my routine. The sweet spot, which most brands these days contain, is about 200 mg of caffeine—what you'll find in your C4s, your Alani Nus, your Celsii. Sometimes I'll go lighter, something around 150 mg—Rockstar, Zoa, Monster. For hangover days or mornings I need to write, I'll reach for a 300-mg sucker—Reign, or Prime, or Bang. There appears to be a direct correlation in energy drink world between the amount of caffeine in a drink and how embarrassing the name is. I blame gamers for this.
The point is, I don't actually drink Red Bull that often—at just 80 mg of caffeine per can, it's not enough. But that also makes it the perfect choice to Drink Literally Eight Of Them: 640 mg of caffeine won't kill me, but it's more than enough to fuck me up to the point where this stunt blog becomes worth it. The FDA says up to 400 mg per day is probably fine; eight cans of Red Bull will be about three times my normal intake. No problem, right? Well, I thought that about eating 50 eggs, and that went poorly. But I've moved on to strawberry apricot at 8:24 a.m., and I'm feeling good.
Whereas the blueberry, probably my favorite varietal, was light and crisp and subtle, this one hits you over the head with its apricot-ness. It's not great. I appreciate the attempt, but I imagine there's a reason apricot isn't a more common flavoring. I am going to start pacing myself better from here out, instead of slamming these. I'm fully awake, and I'm not trying to make myself sick for this blog, though I recognize it might be an unavoidable effect of the investigative journalism.
Remember these little guys?
It is a dual artifact of the dotcom bubble that energy drinks were properly introduced in the U.S. in the late '90s, and they had no idea how to market them. Lipovitan had been invented in Japan in 1962, sold as a pick-me-up for factory workers and truck drivers, and it was exported and copied throughout East and Southeast Asia. In 1984, Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian businessman, discovered Krating Daeng on a trip to Thailand. Based on Lipovitan, the name translated to "red bull" (or more literally and geographically accurately, "red gaur") and the logo was two red bulls preparing to lock horns in front of a yellow sun. Mateschitz licensed the drink and began selling it in Europe, where it was marketed toward a more white-collar audience.
The TV ads, which featured slightly offbeat, tangibly European humor, confirmed the targeted adult demographic, since Mountain Dew had pretty much claimed the teen market. But for a kid like me, who had never liked soda, was too young to enjoy coffee, had not yet been exposed to any other mind-altering substances, and was facing the sleep deprivation that came with teenage hormone-driven circadian rhythms and 8:00 a.m. school starts, Red Bull was a godsend. The commercials were quirky enough to command my attention, and the product was—obviously—addictive. As my first real caffeine delivery device, Red Bull imprinted on me as The Drink That Makes You Feel Good.
Unfortunately, tolerance is a thing. One can no longer really makes me feel anything. Four cans, however, is a different story. I've popped the top on the dragon fruit flavor at 9:31 a.m. I don't know what a dragon fruit is, other than it's cool-looking, but it makes a perfectly acceptable flavor here: broadly tropical, not insistent. With this fourth can, I've surpassed my average daily caffeine intake, and it's showing: I'm jittery—not yet the kind of excitable where I'm compelled to run around, but a more stationary fidgetiness. A hum, in my bowels and my brain. This is an acceptable level to be at. I like it here! I would like to stay here. The knowledge that I am not even halfway through my Red Bull flight hangs over me like a threat.
I've made myself sick. Let me explain! It's not the energy drinks' fault. In this household, energy drinks cannot fail; they can only be failed. Since I wrote the last section of this piece, I edited three blogs in something of a productive fugue state. By the end of that I had so much nervous energy that I made a totally unnecessary trip to the supermarket just to be moving around. During that trip I began feeling gross: overheated, vaguely nauseated, a bit floaty in the head. It was then that I realized that I had completely forgotten to eat or drink anything besides Red Bulls since I woke up this morning. Surely there are dumb ways and slightly less dumb ways to binge energy drinks, and I have been practicing one of the dumbest.
So! It's now 11:49 a.m. and I've chugged a bunch of water and eaten a prepackaged Caesar salad and am opening a can of peach-nectarine. While I feel a little better, and this flavor is borderline excellent (the nectarine dominates the peach, but that's not a bad thing) this is the first time in this experiment that I am drinking against my will. If you had "Can No. 5" in the "When will Barry first start feeling the stirrings of regret?" pool, collect your winnings. Still, when I did the Egg Challenge, I realized by the third mouthful that I had made a poor decision. That this time it's taken me until the fifth can gives me hope that I'll be able to complete this.
But pushing the limits is what Red Bull would like you to think it's all about. Behind the world-conquering behemoth that sold more than 12 billion cans last year is perhaps one of the most successful marketing arms ever conceived. Somewhere along the line, "Red Bull" stopped meaning charmingly animated TV spots about office workers, or even energy drinks, and started being about, like, a guy jumping out of the stratosphere.
The marketing campaign started logically enough, by sponsoring various extreme sport athletes and competitions. Somehow that progressed to homemade flying machines and shockingly watchable viral drone footage and a dominant F1 team and a crappy New Jersey–based soccer team. I'm not sure any of it makes me crave the drink, exactly, but we're always told that's not the point of advertising—that mere awareness is the goal. They nailed that: Red Bull is inescapable. And, once again, this is all preferable to consuming a product whose advertising makes clear it's targeted toward tweens playing Call of Duty all night. I'll drink your drinks, but just don't make feel like I should be ashamed of it.
I'm noticing (when self-editing the next day) that I'm making a lot more typos at this blog goes on, as my brain outpaces my fingers, or perhaps the other way around. Nothing to be done for it; I must soldier on.
It's 12:31 p.m. and it's time for coconut berry. Another one of my favorite variants, coconut is hit or miss as a treat flavor but is almost always clutch as a drink. Evolution was really onto something when it invented Cocos nucifera. I would like to pace myself on these last three cans—there's still five more hours in the workday—but in a cruel joke of nature, I'm very sensitive to caffeine late in the day. Generally I try not to have any after 2:00 or I have trouble sleeping. And I can't in good conscience try to call out of work tomorrow because I drank too many energy drinks for a blog. Not after I've already expensed them to the company, anyway.
The idea briefly crosses my mind, before I realize how stupid it is, that they should make decaf Red Bull.
Had some pretty aggressive diarrhea.
Drinking a watermelon at 2:37 p.m. and feeling pretty bad. There's tension in my chest and mania in my head. I can hear a moth beating at my bathroom window and the drip of my air conditioner. I have had so much sugar. I feel like when I drink water it's not being absorbed by my body but dissolving in that pile of sugar in my gut and just making everything in there slushy and gross and sweet. I wish I had an IV drip. I just struggled to read and comprehend a 300-word blog post. My coworker claimed this tweet was the caffeine speaking but I stand by it. Once when I was a kid I went on the gravitron at Rye Playland, and liked it so much I went right back for a second ride and immediately got sick, though I was able to hold in my yarfing until the ride ended; that's how my stomach feels. I have had cocaine nights gentler than this. My head keeps darting around like a songbird's. The width of my skull feels off. My eyeballs are dry. I can hear my blood.
Possibly worst of all, the watermelon flavor is a disappointment. How do you screw up nature's most refreshing fruit? (I will, in the sober light of day, consider that I might not be objectively judging the taste of my seventh can of Red Bull.)
I am not actually worried for my health, at least beyond the whole "in the future" thing. I've made worse caffeine decisions and survived. Back in college I attempted to cram half a semester's worth of studying into one afternoon. I took the textbook down to a coffee shop on Philadelphia's South Street. I don't remember the name of the coffee shop, or even the subject of the class. But I remember the name of the drink. The Crazy Horse. Four shots of espresso. I had one Crazy Horse and felt like I could beat the world in a fistfight. I studied the hell out that textbook. And then I made the mistake of ordering a second Crazy Horse. I genuinely felt like I might die. Unable to focus on reading or on anything other than willing my heart to slow, I retreated home, defeated by my own hubris. I tanked the test and the class.
I am realizing, now, there appears to be a common thread in how I tend to overdo good things until they turn bad. I'm sure this doesn't say anything about me or my decision-making, or have any larger negative repercussions. Anyway it's time for Red Bull No. 8.
The last one, opened at 3:41 p.m., is "tropical." That's the name. The can is yellow so I assume it's some sort of citrus. I wish I hadn't saved this one for last. I already started having acid reflux a couple cans ago and have been housing Tums. My body is hollering at me, in every way it knows how, not to keep drinking these. But I am very, very good at disregarding what my body wants.
I am trying to (whatever is the reversed equivalent of) "wash it down" with Wheat Thins. The end is in sight, but every swallow is a burden. I consider "accidentally" spilling some, maybe blaming my cat for it. I realize my cat is currently sleeping in the back of my hallway closet, inaccessible, because earlier I was disrupting her sleep when in my amped-up state I kept trying to play with her. My stomach feels at once sickeningly brimming yet barren, like someone squeezing a fist inside a kiddie pool full of Jell-O. I think I have abandoned the organizing purpose of paragraphs. I wonder if this blog is good or bad press for Red Bull GmbH.
I just took part in a Zoom meeting, and by "took part" I mean I sat there silently and tried to look normal. I realized from seeing my face on the webcam that the niacin flush has made my cheeks so red I look like Pikachu. I will regret all this tomorrow. I regret it now, but I will later, too.
But I think I may have broken through to the other side of the binge: the strung-out side, where I am no longer wired or even really alert, but mostly just fried. I find a perverse pride in this, as I take the final sip of the final can at 4:19 p.m., eight hours and 36 minutes after I began—that I was able to outlast the stimulant. I am more powerful than eight bulls, of any color.
Postscript, the next morning: I slept terribly. I feel like shit. I need a Bang.
