No alcoholic can drink on Earth has gained such notoriety as Four Loko.
The drink used to be all the rage in the USA, and locally it is available but its a kind of a you know a guy who knows a guy kinda deal going on.
So what’s the big deal about this drink?
Well Four Loko is known to allegedly be very potent, so one can of this bad boy is all you need to feel tipsy.
The “Four” in the name stems from its four active ingredients; alcohol (malt liquor), caffeine, guarana (Brazil-sourced stimulant), and taurine (common in most energy drinks like RedBull). And the combination of alcohol and caffeine only makes it the meanest combo.
The drink comes in various flavours: Fruit Punch,Watermelon, Peach, Lemonade, Strawberry Lemonade, Uva Berry (Grape), Blue Hurricane (Tropical), Mango, Black Cherry, Gold, Green Apple, and Coco Loko (coconut).
If you think that sounds mighty delicious, it is. But you might also want to remember that this is one strong motherf.
The fact that this drink also contains wormwood, the supposed psychoactive ingredient of absinthe, you know it will knock your socks off after just one can of it.
The drink is said to be so dangerous that there has been hospitalization cases and near death cases. Heck, the government had even stepped in to put pressure into removing caffeine from its product. Later on Four Loko kinda disappeared, only residing in what’s left of it’s user’s memory.
According to a publication by Quartz, it’s available on massive online shopping portals such as Alibaba and JD.com, advertised as “blackout in a can”. Speaking from experience that moniker rings quite true as many daredevil netizens even called it a “time machine” that only sends you to the future. Yikes.
It’s users in China affectionately refer to it as shi shen jiu or “lose virginity liquor”. Yeap leave it to the Chinese to tell it as it is!
The company maintains that the product does not contain any caffeine whatsoever since they dropped it from their formula back in 2010. Prices vary on the site from around RM18 to RM61 though the former prices are lifted from Taobao which are infamous for selling counterfeit goods.
A can of Four Loko is 695ml and is 12.0% ABV (Alcohol By Volume) and assuming my math has not completely messed up, it would mean that it has is 83.4ml of pure alcohol goodness. To put that into perspective, that’s almost 5 shots of Absolut Vodka at 40% ABV and almost a 6 pack of Heineken at 5% ABV! All from 1 can! Geez!
I don’t think you guys need me to tell you how dangerous this drink can be if you binge it. So does any one of ya’ll think you can handle the legendary ‘black out in a can’?
As always guys, bottoms up and stay classy!
Also read: Video Captures Last Moments of Chinese Bridesmaid Trying to Down Alcohol Before She Died