Red Bull The Winter Edition Iced Vanilla Berry Sugar Free Energy Drink Review

I do appreciate Red Bull not only expanding beyond their basic, well, Red Bulls, with their various "Summer" and "Winter" editions, but this year also comes a diet variety. Is it a merry Christmas, or a lump of coal in our stocking? Or, you know, is it fall?

The visuals here are alright but busy, loaded with text of different sizes, colors and orientations, forcing your eyes to zip around and right off of the can. In particular, the "Sugar Free" badging not only is written twice, but also seems plastered over a look with a completely different design language. I dunno, I am no graphic artist, just a sometimes-fan who pines for something a little better looking.

The flavor is a lot like the surprisingly good full-sugar version, though the sucralose and ace-k used here means mouthfuls lack a certain gravity to them, passing over my palate and through my cavity-filled teeth with a certain unsatisfying lightness. Vanilla and berry again arrive here, resembling cotton candy like its aforesaid calorie-ridden brethren, but only until you stop to think about the bright blue beverage crashing down on your tongue; the elixir's slight texture pretty much destroys any confection pleasure one could get from a taste such as this. Acidity is washed away in a sea of synthetic sweeteners, who not only rule the experience from the moment it hits your taste buds to the time it finally washes away, leaving behind a bit of an artificial aftertaste. If I sound overly negative, then it is only because the original was that tasty.

Between a lousy look and disappointing taste, it is a shame that the 114 milligrams of caffeine just does not muster up a very good kick. Lasting two hours, the buzz is old hat. The whole production is old hat, actually, and I stop wearing hats years ago.

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