Vitabiotics Wellwoman

This tastes like it must be good for you, and by that I mean it tastes bloody awful. The can claims it contains Elderberry, green tea, grape seed, artichoke, pomegranate and cranberry – I can only tell you that the combination is not good. Maybe you do have to be a woman to drink it, perhaps it tastes better then? But, in my opinion, it tastes like someone has filtered compost and canned the residue. I know it has a decent caffeine hit, but couldn’t tell you the exact amount because there’s no information on the can. That means that it doesn’t contain enough to warrant the warning – but the caffeine is hidden amongst the guarana and green tea extracts.

Boost Sugar Free

I finally found Boost Sugar Free, but it’s not in a can. A 500ml bottle is all I could get hold of, and I really prefer to review 250ml can editions if at all possible. That said, it’s a nice yet unoriginal clone. Best chilled, of course, because being in a bottle it warmed up quite a bit by the time I’d got to the second half.

Blue Spark Tropical Sugar Free

Well, it’s alright. That’s as complimentary as I’m getting with this drink. It was a little watery, but not offensive.

Blue Spark Mixed Fruit Sugar Free

Really good! Nice and fruity, cheap, and low calorie too. I highly recommend this drink for something different to the usual array of supermarket own brands. It’s not too fizzy, not too sweet, not too bitter – just right. Go get a can right now…

Asda Blue Charge Diet Summer Fruits

Asda are really trying hard with their energy drinks… but not quite hitting the spot. They’re going for variety of range over quality and it shows. Fancy a berry flavoured drink? They have one! Tropical? yup! Diet? Most of them! This is a berry drink, and it is sugar free (at least, I haven’t found a non-diet version yet). It’s very strong in flavour – like it is almost 50% cordial! Overall though it’s only average so it gets average scores.

28 White

This is just the sugar-free version of 28 Black. It tastes more or less the same so it gets the same scores! It also contains the recently hyped Stevia (read about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia) and is the first energy drink I’ve seen to contain this sugar substitute. I expect to see a lot more Stevia based drinks in the near future.

Power Booster Sugar Free

Much better (yes, I know I’m biased to sugar free drinks) than the full fat version, but not only due to the sweeteners. It appears to have a different taste to the sugary version –  slightly more sour but not too much. It’s still a Red Bull clone, and a cheap tasting one at that so probably not worth hunting down if you’re in to that.

Go Splash: Energy Lightning Red

This is an unusual product. It’s a concentrated product which you add to water. The bottle contains 48ml of ‘energy squash’, and you are supposed to add 0.8ml of product to every 100ml of water, so per 100ml you only get 20mg of caffeine. But, the bottle has enough juice in it to supply 6 litres of water with caffeinated goodness – that’s 24 cans of Red Bull in a liquid comparison, or about 16 cans if comparing caffeine content. In other words, be careful to water it down enough or you could end up with serious jitters.

In reality though, what you end up with is quite a watery tasting drink. I experimented with different concentrations but you’re never really too sure how much to put in. The directions say 1 squirt per 200ml, but how big is a squirt? I ended up with about 3 medium squirts in 200ml of water just to get a drink that didn’t taste like manky water, but even at that concentration it tasted more like watered down flat generic energy drink. A good idea, but needs more work.

Here’s a tip – don’t use water! I made an acceptable drink by squirting a decent amount in to a glass first, then pouring in Sprite afterwards to make a fizzy and sweet mix-up. Much better than mixing it with water.

Vanilla Gold

My initial opinion of this drink, after taking one swig, is that vanilla should never, under any circumstances, be allowed near an energy drink. However, after a few minutes the acidic tang wore down slightly, and the vanilla aftertaste was quite nice. It was like a cheap vanilla icecream at the back of your throat. I probably won’t try this drink again, but it’s worth a go for something very different!