Well, color me wary. 24 juice drinks for the low, low price of $3? Without any pandering and possible blowjobs to the American Beverage Company? Sign me up.
Their alibi seems to check out. They're the first and oldest kid's single serve beverage in the United States. That seems plausible, meaning that they've remained quietly under the radar like a Soviet Spy, letting the other drinks take the flash in the pan spotlight, or that they're so potent they're on par with Plutonium and nobody dares take down the beast.
Spoiler alert, it's option two. They're cheap, but they're nothing to shake a stick at. Writing this review even has me at a loss of words. At 12.5 cents a barrel, as they're iconically shaped, I am quite positive that the exact cost of ingredients equals what you paid for. There's nothing flashy on these. The plastic barrel is vaguely opaque, reminding me of the equally gross Nik-L-Nips, and comes adorned with disturbing Kool-Aid spawn shaped like barrels, which you will soon tear the heads off and drink their life juice from.
I don't understand how the Kool-Aid friends play and frolic, because they contain absolutely no source of energy. What I'm talking about is sugar. Each juice is violently colored so that when you imbibe, you're trying to pretend that it's flavored like the color, when in reality, they dyed water and called it an afternoon. Let's start with the least offensive.
Aaaaand, that would be orange. It tastes a little like my childhood, at least when my childhood traded childhoods with a kid who ate at McDonald's twice a week, bringing back a weak, weak flavor of Hi-C orangeade and St. Joseph's baby aspirin. It's kind of sweet. It's relatively harmless. And it only gets worse.
The grape color travels faster than the "flavor," and before you know it, you have a torrent of purple liquid running hell down your throat. Shit. This is water and food coloring. And possibly a variation of cancer. When you look at a full bottle, it sort of resembles a hand grenade. And that's when you should have stepped back and just said no.
There is literally no taste to this other than the bitter hatred of citric acid. It's a saccharine no man's land. This should only be used in Gitmo.
Little Hugs hears your complaints and bitch slaps you. You want sugar? Okay, here's sugar. All the sugar that could have been evenly divided between grape, orange, blue raspberry, and your dentist's cavity bill is shoved into fruit punch, a philosophical quagmire that manages to be watery and intensely sweet at the same time.
Is it sweet or diluted? It's the Schrodinger's Cat of the bunch. Mac from Always Sunny would call it the wild card. The underlying notes, ha ha ha, are Smarties and cough medicine. It's a delicious hobo cocktail and, again, is so far removed from fruit punch in its original form. Like chicken rings.
Last, but not good enough to cure your diabetes, is blue raspberry. I never really understood such a concept. Is raspberry so freaking boring that it needs to go to fat camp over the summer and start high school as the sexy new kid? The Wikipedia article is disturbingly sparse. What kind of a mutant marketing firm would commit such an atrocity?
I'll be frank. Blue tastes and smells like antifreeze, but is nowhere as palatable. I've written a living will and it's in the third desk drawer on the left.
For fun and in accordance with the side effects of Stockholm Syndrome, Swagger and I mixed each flavor together and created Satan's cocktail. Grape dominated all of the flavors and we both promptly fainted from the chemical overload. Goodbye, cruel world.
I take it back. This isn't for college students. This isn't for humans. Or animals. Leave the Little Hugs alone and go buy some Capri Sun. We're not made of money, but this is getting ridiculous.
Potted meat.
Oh god, it smelled like cat food and leftover Spam. On the Wikipedia article, the fun fact of the day was that different varietals have different ingredients- beef tripe, mechanically separated whatever, the stuff they use to grease Rosie O'Donnell into pants every day. What have you. Ours listed mechanically separated chicken, so I thought we were safe.
We spread it on a Saltine and made ourselves Sunny D cocktails. And then it was down the hatch for the potted meat. My first impression was that it wasn't nearly as greasy as the cadre of videos made it sound. The texture wasn't soft, but something entirely more terrible. It was creamy. It was very wet and very creamy. Meat. Should. Not. Be. Creamy. Even a cheese dog isn't creamy. This had like, a whipped texture that minced prettily on the Saltine. And then, the taste. It didn't taste like meat, really, but it did taste like salt. Closest I can liken it to is Spam. That's a lie, actually, I've never had Spam. But it would probably taste like that, and Swagger, who has Spam, says it's close to Spam.
