The Summer of Loko, 15 years later

Editor’s note: The column below was originally published on April 18th, 2021, when the boozeletter was much, much smaller. With the unofficial kickoff to summer 2025 coming up, it dawned on me that it’s been 15 years since the mayhem of Four Loko’s final summer in caffeinated form. I’m chasing a couple deadlines headed into Memorial Day Weekend, so I figured this was an ideal opportunity to dust this piece off and give it another airing. Hope you enjoy!

Programming note: No Weekender this Sunday, I’m taking a breather for the holiday. Hope you’re able to as well. Fingers returns to your inbox next week!—Dave.

The year is 2010. Barack Obama is two years into his first presidential term in and about to get clowned by the Tea Party. In the next few months, “Airplanes" by B.o.B. feat. Hayley Williams is poised to receive 3.2 bajillion minutes of play on your iTunes account alone. Vaping is in its fringe-y, pre-Juul phase, and Big Tobacco still hasn't totally given up on capturing America's lungs of tomorrow with innovative new combustibles, so if you frequent the right (read: wrong) bars, you might score a few promo packs of Camel Crush, those cigarettes that allow you to downshift from regular to menthol from one drag to the next.

Enter Four Loko, which hit the barely legal drinking scene—and the underage one, too, to be clear—like an absolute freight train at the turn of the last decade. (Technically it arrived on store shelves in 2005, the brainchild of a bunch of Ohio State frat heads on a quest for the "energy beer" grail, but it didn't achieve mass distribution for another few years.) With fruity flavors, an inscrutable name, and enough caffeine to fire up even the poopiest of party-poopers, it was THE drink of twenty-something "heavy users" during this heady era. And make no mistake, this was THE era for heavy-using twenty-somethings, too.

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