The electrifying rise and litigious fall of energy beer | Hacker News Reader

The electrifying rise and litigious fall of energy beer

snackstack.net

34 pointsprismatic50 comments

Millennials will talk about four loko the same way their parents talked about lawn darts

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...

Haha yes, I was in 11/12th grade when Sparks came out. What a unique time to be alive.

You can’t buy lawn darts anymore. Every bar will make you a vodka redbull.

Will they put four vodkas and 3 red bulls in a single glass for the price of a college students budget? Because that was a four loko

You'd have to ask for more than three and a half shots of vodka to match the alcohol in a 22oz Four Loko can.

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.

> I've never seen these energy beers (not sure if they were even sold in my country or countries where I lived)

If you were in the UK, you might have seen "Buckfast Tonic Wine" [1]

It's a fortified wine rather than a beer - but it's 15% ABV with 30mg/100ml caffeine, and comes in standard-sized wine bottles.

Apparently, Buckfast accounts for 0.5% of alcohol sales in Scotland but it's responsible for 80% of public intoxication incidents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckfast_Tonic_Wine

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.)

Lots of bars around here will also have lawn darts which you can play while drinking your 8th vodka redbull, which I find interesting

> Every bar will make you a vodka redbull.

we call them "espresso martinis" now

What’s a lawn dart?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_darts

Wow, as a Millennial, I must've totally missed the memo on this stuff. Never heard of Four Loko or energy beers at all... sounds disgusting.

They weren't actually called energy beers.

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.

Tho off brand Red Bull with a couple of rotgut vodka shots already mixed in.

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?

Never tried one myself lol

I think that practice came to be when 4loko was forced to lower the caffeine content.

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.

> just as easy

Citation needed. The social context matters.

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.

Kahlúa (coffee liquor) also has caffeine, obviously.

It does, but not very much according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_caffeinated_alcoholic_...

It's about 1/3 as much as Four Loko (45mg vs 150mg) when you scale up the alcohol to match. (Less, but not insignificant.)

> 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.)

A can of FourLoco contains 4.75 servings.

Do you have a citation for “4.75 servings?” The one thing from 2010 I could find has a serving size of one can.

https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/four-loko/four-...

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.

[0] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/overview-a...

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2013/02/...

An yet you can still buy cans of other malt drinks with even higher ABV and volume.

An aisle over, you can by 1.75L of vodka for $9.99. That is 40 servings!

A major difference is that bottle of vodka can be closed after being opened.

The malt liquors usually can't.

An aisle over the other direction has micro brew IPAs with even higher ABV

I assume you mean manufacturer-recommended servings printed on the label. I meant drinking one can.

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.

I don't think "people aged 40+" were four loco's target market.

Isn't this stuff mostly for 20-somethings on their way to a nightclub, who want to get drunk and stay up until 4am?

Were they, perhaps, the target market when they were 20 years younger?

I think I live in a different part of the world than you do.

I know a lot of healthy adults in their 30s and 40s.

And 50’s and 60’s even.

I donno, it must something awful if Oregon bans you (Oregon decriminalized “heroin, methamphetamine, PCP, LSD and oxycodone” [0]):

On November 20, 2010, Oregon Liquor Control Commission's five citizen commissioners held an emergency meeting resulting in a 4-1 vote on the ban. [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_Ballot_Measure_110

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Loko

Those were different points in history.

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.

They’re still around, just not as caffeinated. Still fun to drive around with one between your legs. Just alternate sips with a Monster.

"Not just stupid, but aggressively stupid" - referring to adding caffeine to malt liquor.

*It was from a comedy bit and I don't recall it.

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