How the Brits beat us to Four Loko
How the Brits beat us to Four Loko
Plus: Behold, the United States of Boilermakers!
Editor’s note: Today, I’ve got a real treat for you, Fingers Fam. Writer and author Doug Mack is gracing these digital pages with some of the excellent work that’s made his newsletter, Snack Stack, a must-read for consumer-packaged-goods nerds all over the internet (including me). You should really subscribe, go ahead, I’ll wait:
Doug and I swapped stories today. You’ll find his archival investigation into the Anglo precursor to America’s Aughts energy-beer boomlet below, and my cultural-economic analysis of said boomlet at Snack Stack.—Dave.
We have to begin where very few productive discussions do: with a vodka Red Bull.
It’s not where I meant to start things today. (It never is.) This post began as an investigation of the caffeine-boosted alcoholic drinks that had a brief cultural moment in the USA back in the early 2000s, products like Four Loko, Tilt, Sparks, and B to the E. I thought it would be an interesting jaunt back to that bygone era of freedom fries and “Hey Ya.”
But I’m obsessed with research and origin stories, the sort of person who searches random topics in newspaper archives just for fun, and my efforts to understand those American drinks soon led me tumbling down a rabbit hole that led further back in time and across the Atlantic, to the auspicious meeting of Red Bull and vodka. This seems to be where it all began, the first booze-plus-energy concoction in the spirit of those later packaged drinks.1
There are competing theories about how the vodka Red Bull got started. No one knows who first mixed the two, but Red Bull entered the European market in 1987, so it probably happened right around then. But the moment of popularization, when it became something people might expect to find at a bar, is something we should be able to pin down.
In separate paragraphs, Wikipedia credits a Brit named Matt Picken, date unknown, and another named Ben Reed, in 1999, but as the website Punch noted in 2018, there’s no credible info to back up any of this.2 More recently, Mel Magazine did some research and put the date at 1998, claiming it took off in San Francisco that year, at a bar called Butter.
Some cursory poking-around on Newspapers.com shows that this is all wrong. Numerous bar ads from around Great Britain in the mid-1990s show a trend already in the making. The earliest example I can find is the ad from Kilmarnock, Scotland in 1994 (below, left.)
The beverage combo isn’t explicit here—it reads like more of a double-fisting situation than a mixed drink–but the intent is obvious enough. You can find plenty of other similar ads from the period, always in the context of a marketing a wild night (“Do you wanna party,” indeed). By 1998, the year a San Francisco bar claims to have popularized the drink, it was so firmly established in European nightlife that when London’s Evening Standard published a “Postcard from Ibiza” celebrating the island’s boisterous joys, it advised revelers who might be suffering in some way to “do as everyone else does–drown it in Red Bull-with-vodka.”
Around the same time, in the mid-1990s, Great Britain was seeing a trend of sweet, prepackaged booze products, which the media dubbed “alcopops.” This included alcoholic lemonades like Hooch and Two Dogs, a hard cola called Cola Lips, a hard cream soda called Mog, and a hard ginger beer called Red Raw. (I have cringed while typing every single one of the brand names in this story.)
In 1996, the craze had already reached such a saturation point that Carlsberg-Tetley launched a drinkable gel called Thickhead. The company itself billed the product as "tangerine in flavour, fluorescent orange in colour ... [and] the consistency of liquid hair gel,” which is not a marketing pitch that will appeal to anyone who’s currently sober. One critic called it “a ‘revolutionary’, tangerine-flavoured, fizzy, alcoholic gunk launched on an unwary public” and noted that, though the “gunk” was orange, any spills left a blue stain. Public reception was thoroughly negative, not just because Thickhead was undeniably weird, in a way that no drink should ever be, but because it felt like a blatant attempt to court teenage drinkers.3
Carlsberg-Tetley pulled Thickhead within a matter of weeks and it’s not clear if it was widely available at any point. But experimentation within the alcopop industry continued apace, even as the drinks started to decline from their place at the top of the British drinking zeitgeist.
In 1998 London’s Daily Mirror, citing industry experts, declared that “alcopops” were over and had become what the bold-face headline declared “ALCOFLOPS.” The newspaper said that the sector’s declining sales were due to criticisms that the drinks were “aimed at youngsters,” alongside the rising fondness for “the natural ‘buzz’ provided by energy drinks.” The Daily Mirror story didn’t say so outright, but it’s easy enough to connect the dots: as energy drinks rose and alcopops fell, of course corporations and consumers would combine the two.
The first such products hit the market in 1996. It was also the early days of the guarana craze (there was a lot happening all at once in the beverage industry), and some of these new drinks included the ingredient, with the brands leaning into a certain amount of exoticism. Marketing materials for a product called Wild Brew, for example, said that the berry “has been used through the ages by the Maues Indians of the Amazon to combat fatigue.”4
By late summer in 1996, this new category of drink had its own name: “alco-stimulants.” It also had a natural habitat, the nightclub, and dueling messages of panic and promotion from observers who saw them as a public-health danger and others who said, Nah, don’t worry, it’s just a rum and Coke in a different format. Both drinkers and detractors also cited guarana’s purported aphrodisiacal properties in their commentary, but that seems to have fizzled out quickly because, well, it doesn’t have that effect.
Soon enough, alcopops and alco-stimulants were not just big business but the source of much media discourse, as in the graphic published in the Evening Post in July 1997 (above, right.)
The two trends fit a common timeline: “alco-stimulants” and vodka Red Bulls rose at the same time, in the same place. They were products of British drinking culture and you can see how and why they became popular at the same time.
The USA, meanwhile, was behind the curve. The nation’s most famous alcopop, Mike’s Hard Lemonade debuted in 1999, and the prepackaged boozy energy drinks didn’t follow until past the turn of the millennium. Steel Brewing introduced Sparks in 2002 and three years later, a flood of competitors arrived: B to the E, Four Loko and Tilt all debuted in 2005.
Like their British counterparts, these drinks quickly became beloved among a certain sector of hard-partying young adults, as anything that combines excessive sweetness and a mega-buzz will do. This is purely speculation based on a data set of one,5 but I would guess that the various beverages’ fruit-forward flavors appealed not only to underage or just-legal drinkers but also to twenty-something millennials with early-onset nostalgia fueled in part by the decade’s economic and political instability and a desire to take solace in the Kool-Aid memories of their youth, paired with an anxiety-easing punch of booze.
As in Britain, the backlash came quickly, with the same talking points—and eventually, the scientific research caught up and proved that, yeah, adding caffeine to booze really does seem to lead people to drink more and be less aware of just how drunk they’re getting. In 2010, the FDA signaled it believed prepackaged caffeinated alcoholic drinks were a violation of federal law, more or less bringing an end to this short-lived era in the USA.
Back in the UK, caffeinated alcoholic beverages appear to be much rarer than they once were, but they remain legal, and the product names are as terrible as ever. The most popular one at the moment is called Dragon Soop. And, of course, over there and over here, the vodka Red Bull endures, defying other trends and competitors, a testament to the enduring power of a traditional recipe, even for an ill-advised party drink.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Snack Stack for more cultural history of snacks (and other foods and drinks) around the world, one agreeably nerdy post at a time!
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🗽 Behold, the United States of Boilermakers
Hey, it’s Dave again! About a month ago, I kicked off a Fingers Friday Thread with an inquiry into your go-to boilermaker orders, research for a “little collaboration with a wonderful artist pal of mine.” Now, that project has come to fruition. Behold, The United States of Boilermakers, a limited-edition print created by your fearless Fingers editor in collaboration with the talented Em Sauter of Pints and Panels! Please buy one to dramatically improve your home bar’s decor:
Em and I first got to talking about this project at the Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas in April, and finalized the concept via email the following month. Then, she made it a reality, using some of my pairings and some of your pairings to create this cah-yoot original artwork showcasing some of America’s most beloved shot-and-beer combos. I think it came out terrific. If you agree, you can buy it as a print on archival matte paper (8”x10” or 11”x14”) or a poster (16”x20” or 18”x24”) on glossy poster paper. We’re splitting the proceeds, with Em getting the larger chunk for actually making the thing and me the smaller chunk for being more of a “big picture” kind of guy. C’mon, support independent drinks media and score some fun new art:
While you’re at it, make sure to follow Pints and Panels on Instagram, and check out the whole shop for a variety of Em’s original artwork, merch, and more. And thanks to everybody for your suggestions on boilermakers! Let us know what we missed in the comments… maybe I can convince/beg Em to do another one of these.
📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately
Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.) Also sorry for the screenshot. Apparently Instagram embeds are also broken on the platform I use to publish Fingers. Thank you to our billionaire website oligarchs for destroying the internet’s basic functionality in pursuit of infinite profit!
Yes, Irish coffee and rum-and-Cokes and Buckfast exist, but those feel fundamentally different in where, when, and how they’re consumed.
Punch offered no specific alternate timeline, however.
Though it’s worth noting that the drinking age in the UK was, and is, 18.
Fact check: this appears to be mostly true, and guarana cultivation, for use in energy drinks, has become a major industry in the region.
Dave here: make that a dataset of two.
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Ah, I remember Hooch, it was suddenly EVERYWHERE in the summer of 1995. Honestly, even as a 16/17 y.o. it seemed incredibly sweet, but it was a popular drink of choice at teenage house parties and fresher's week dorm gatherings. I remember alcopops seeming cheaper than beer by volume, but Diamond White and White Lightning (both ciders) still felt like better value as you could find them in bigger bottles and they had a higher ABV. Through the 80s and 90s, I think naff cider remained the gateway drug for underage drinkers in Britain, but maybe that was just my peer group.
By the early noughties I do recall being slightly bemused by the range of brightly coloured alcopops available, stuff like WKD and various Barcadi Breezer/Smirnoff Ice knockoffs. I remember being at the pub with a slightly younger colleague in 2003 and he tried to convince me a half-and-half of Guinness and blue WKD was a good combination. I simply watched in revulsion as he drank it. 😄 It did make me realise alcopops were mostly a sideshow for my formative years of under- and appropriate-age drinking, but I imagine for those just a few years behind they absolutely defined it.