This one is a bit of a throwback as the first thing that I wrote professionally was about malt liquor energy drinks (Four Loko, Sparks, Joose, etc.) for Zane Lamprey’s Drinking Made Easy. And here I am, literally 10 years later, doing almost the same thing. I remember the picture I used to send in for the article I took on my flip phone. They emailed me back immediately and told me to use a real camera.

I used to drink Four Loko’s all the time, like every other poor college student in the mid 2000’s. They were cheap and strong. A perfect combination for any struggling 18-22 year old. I’ve always said that Four Loko should come with plan B, because it’s literally just horny juice. Back in my day they were loaded up with caffeine, so when your body would normally just shut down after too much booze and pass out, on Four Loko you’d just keep going… until your heart exploded or you’d have a shitty orgasm with some girl whose name you can’t remember.

Since then so many teenagers/college students have died from drinking this delightful cocktail that they had to ban them from college campuses. Eventually the companies who made these malt liquor energy drinks had to change their recipe, some of the shittier one’s just folded, seeing as it was a dwindling market. Sparks, it’s lower alcohol (6%-8%) cousin was great for day drinking at the beach because it would take much longer to get banged up on than Four Loko (12%-14%). But in my glory days, Four Loko was king.

Anyway, here we go, another edition of The TasteMaker:

So we’ve got “Sour Apple” on the left and “Gold” on the right. Let’s start with the Sour Apple.

I’ve actually had this one before, years ago, when I was very, very poor. The smell is the same, but it’s slightly more horrifying than I remembered, like if Sour Apple Jolly Ranchers were made with extremely toxic chemicals instead of the mildly toxic chemicals they are made of. The taste however, was like if you ate the Jolly Rancher out of Whitney Houston’s ass, yesterday. My god it’s fucking terrible. It almost hurts to drink.

It tastes incredibly fake and loaded with chemicals. It’s literally poison. I’m drinking Sour Apple flavored poison. The can was tough to finish. The color though, the color is beautiful.

Now, time for the Gold. Gold isn’t a flavor. It’s a color, but I mean, Gatorades go by colors as flavors too and they’re delicious. Speaking of Gatorade, I’m going to need some tomorrow morning after this shit I’m pouring down my throat.

Gold sort of smells like Red Bull and vodka. It tastes like Red Bull and vodka was farted in by someone from Chernobyl. I really can’t wrap my brain around the flavor. I just know that I do not like it and it is bad.

I’ll tell you what I’m not looking forward to tomorrow, and that’s the diarrhea this will surely be giving me as my body tries to flush all of this poison out of me.

So in my last review I told you how many drinks you’d have to have to eat those hot dogs, but obviously that same scale won’t work. So this will be graded differently, for this one I will tell you how much money should be in your bank account for this to be a suitable option. So to drink Sour Apple Four Loko and Gold Four Loko, you have to have $5.18 in your bank account, which is the exact amount of money both of these drinks cost. I can’t wait to send my agent a faxed copy of this receipt so he can reimburse me.