Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
I was a little afraid of Red Bull at first. Granted, this was 2002 and I’d just been diagnosed with a heart murmur that kept me from running cross country in college (not anywhere good, mind you). There was a concern, in the back of my brain, that the caffeine could short circuit me, lead to palpitations, whatever.
This was, of course, silly. Red Bull may have pioneered the energy drink marketplace, but it’s not excessively energetic. Its 80 milligrams of caffeine per can feels quaint next to the 300 milligram payloads of competitors like Rockstar or C4, though those come in a larger serving size.
This shifted my concern about Red Bull elsewhere; to its calorie content. In my early 20s I traded regular Coke for Diet Coke, understanding I no longer had the metabolism to fire down a pound of sugar each day without spilling over the top of my cargo pants or stretching the limits of whatever already-thin 1980s-era t-shirt I’d happened to find at the thrift store that week. Red Bull only had one sugar-free option for a long time, and it was in the classic, ground-up SweetTarts flavor.
Finally, there is rain in that desert. Red Bull debuted new sugar-free options this summer, a standby energy drink flavor (watermelon) and a new twist I haven’t seen before (strawberry apricot). Together, they promise a coffee-adjacent jolt without the shame of dropping four Splendas into a cup.
So do these new, fancier Red Bulls reinvent the genre? Or are they the artificial tasting, slightly acidic and totally poundable monsters we’ve come to love and appreciate? Or are they, in fact, bad?
Well, only one way to find out.
Watermelon: A
It smells and looks exactly like you’d expect a watermelon energy drink; like candy and neon red. There’s obviously value in having flavors that are true to the source, but when it comes to jump-starting my day with caffeine and taurine I’m not looking for organic garden flavors. I want a drink that tastes like someone blended up a bunch of sour gummies.
Red Bull thoroughly crushes it on that metric. The sweetness here is full bodied despite the reliance on sugar substitutes. There’s a gentle acidic tartness that snaps that off before it gets overpowering, leaving you a nice balance that keeps you coming back for more.
That’s sorta all there is to it. The carbonation helps enhance that balance between sweet and sour. It’s exactly what I’d hoped.
Strawberry Apricot: A-
A new challenger emerges! Apricot is a terribly underserved fruit in the beverage business — especially one that constantly tries to make passion fruit a thing even though it tastes like old rubber.
This also smells and pours familiar — though instead of candy, this is strawberry Fanta all the way. The bright pink liquid is both troubling and reassuring, and I gotta hand it to whichever food scientists handled the dyes for this round of sugar free drinks. They look awesome.
The taste, like the smell, is much more strawberry forward than apricot. But you do get that peach-adjacent flavor toward the end, adding a nice twist at the end of a simple sip. There’s no mitigating citric acid here to balance things out, so you get sweet-on-sweet before there’s a little bit of earthy apricot to round things out.
I drank the watermelon and strawberry apricot back-to-back on a coffee-less morning and honestly feel kinda great. 160 milligrams of caffeine is my sweet spot — enough to brighten my eyes, not enough to discount another energy drink or Coke or whatever later on.
I’m not sure it qualifies as “wings,” but I’m less tired and not jittery. I just feel like I got the extra hour of sleep I missed out on when I woke up at 4 am to think about whether or not my high school crush ever liked me back and I was just too oblivious to notice it.
I think the answer is that she did. I’ll never know. Drink Red Bull.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm’s?
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Red Bull’s new sugar free flavors over a cold can of Hamm’s?
I’d drink it on the way to the tailgate to ensure I’m alert for the eight Hamm’s I’m about to drink before UW-Platteville and Wartburg kick off, I can tell you that much.