Behold: A Fourth Choice

Everybody knows the heavy hitters in the energy drink game—the holy trinity of street legal consumer-grade methamphetamine substitutes. The one with the wings. The one with the claws. The one you mixed with vodka that time before stealing a police van.

Well, the stuff that can get you banned from athletic competition in several Scandinavian countries also happens to be the performance-enhancing drug of choice for America’s long-haul truckers, second-shift telemarketers, and 20-something degenerates.

You think America runs on Dunkin’? Adorable. The old guy quoting your roof repair and awkward office birthday celebrations run on Dunkin’. The rest of this chaotic democratic experiment runs on vape pens, energy drinks and, once you’ve really made it, afternoon Scotch.

So let’s talk business. Because we’re on board with taking a completely respectable and inexpensive concept like your morning coffee and freebasing it down into a sugar-flavored cocktail of random-sounding ingredients so that you can suck back caffeine as unapologetically as possible. But maybe if the leading energy drink makers didn’t put so much other weird shit in the can, they wouldn’t need to spend quite so much on branding and marketing on the back end.

Seriously. Do you know how much it costs to sponsor an F1 racing team? Or to pay the ten dudes in your small town furthest behind on their child support to get your cool claw logo tattooed on the back of their calves? We have no idea! But it seems like it would be cheaper to just make decent drinks without the gimmicks.

So when we wanted to get into the energy drink game, we didn’t go hunting for companies blowing cash breaking world records or being the official beverage provider of some esports team of 17-year-olds who made more money playing video games last week than their parents did in a year.

We found these guys instead. Because their ingredients are good and their branding is STUPID.

“Celsius.”

Really? Nothing says hardcore performance and all-day energy like a unit of metric measurement, apparently. We’re guessing “Kilometer” was already taken by a protein-heavy granola bar.

Real stupid.

Was Kelvin even in the conversation? Because once you’ve decided that units of temperature are on the table, at least Kelvin is extreme. Kelvin is like someone took Celsius and was like “Yeah that’s cute, but don’t you know that shit can get WAY COLDER than freezing?” And then—BOOM—we’re starting at absolute zero and working up from there. That’s some rock and roll shit, thermodynamically speaking.

Celsius though? Good grief. It’s like if Jesse Pinkman from “Breaking Bad” branded their weird blue drugs based on reading the small print on their meth thermometer.

“This shit is off the charts. It’s Celsius, bitch!” — deleted scene, probably

But enough about the name. Their name is stupid and they’re doing just fine. Why? Because, as near as we can tell, this particular energy drink isn’t straight-up poison. It has an alarming amount of caffeine, yes, but that’s the point. And other than that, the ingredients actually come from stuff like ginger root, green tea extract, and guarana seeds. It’s the kind of stuff you’d expect more from a steaming clay cup clutched by a warrior monk than from the tiny aluminum can of some 24-year-old action sports influencer on rocket skis.

So there you have it. A bunch of caffeine. Solid ingredients. Terrible name. Mix it all together and you can get 24 cans for a buck a piece. Try doing THAT from the gas station cooler section.

By the way…mango tango and cucumber lime! We can’t imagine it matters which one you pick.