Until they manage to find a way to juice up rainbow unicorns, the next best fictional beast to make energy drinks out of HAS TO BE dragons! I have tried all sorts of drinks named for real animals; Red Bulls, Blue Oxen, Blue Frogs, blue rebels, black bears, Black Scorpions, not to mention little pussies, big cocks, and a giant Commando Bear, but never have I had the pleasure of trying a full on Dragon.
Now I have had a couple Dragon Tails and the Soul of a dragon in tasty mint form, but they are not quite all of the cool of a full Green Dragon. Unfortunately, even though I was excited to see this can in a big delicious box of goodies from Brandon, purveyor and reviewer extraordinaire at Caffeine - The Energy Blog ( if you have not checked out his site yet, I would be sure to get there as soon as possible), it turns out that Green Dragons are really not as exciting as I hoped they would be. Figuring as they picked a green one, and not the more dangerous black or even grey dragons I guess it is to be expected. According to my friends that play both Warcrack and Runescape, green ones are a dime a dozen - the weakest of all the dragons, and according to Mr. Rose's posts found sniveling in WinCo stores in the western part of the US.
Turns out this is the value drink made by Unique Beverage, the ones behind the time-tested Wired Energy drinks. I love many of Wired's energy drinks, and they have about a dozen different flavors. While I get that they were probably commissioned to make these for WinCo stores, that also means that I know that they do know how to make a serious energy drink f they so desired - and just chose not to.
Packaging:4
I think companies that are contracted to produce store brands go out of their way to create ugly products so they look like they are more of a value than their brand name counterparts. I know Kroger got in trouble a few years back for making their store value brand products look too good - and bigger brands complained. Well, energy drink companies do not have to worry about that going on here. Green Dragon looks like the cheap knock off that it is.
Stretched serif font instead of a logo stock dragon head on a bare aluminum background. You can tell that this whole concept and subsequent artwork probably took the Wired Art team 20 minutes to come up with the entire brand, with can layout done in Microsoft Word. Of course there is no listing of caffeine, the printing job is not so hot and there is no listing of website or energy ingredients. It is like Unique worked very hard to make a sub-par drink package, because I know they can do much better.
Taste:5
Firstly, it does not taste at all like green dragons. That is unless they taste like Red Bull Clone - although not exactly like a clone. This is more bitter and sour than your average clone - and replaces the usual bubblegum/apple/citrus flavor with a syrupy grapefruit-y flavor that is not really that enjoyable. Unique's Wired drinks were very hit-and-miss when it came to their flavorings, and this one is a miss. It is not a bad flavor, but it is just mildly displeasing as you make your way through the can.
Buzz:6
As for the ingredients list, it is pretty run of the mill. They use HFCS for a sweetener, and then pack in the usual suspects with no real surprises. There is taurine, caffeine and B Vitamins, along with inositol and Yellow #5, but somehow it does the trick.
I really don't know how much of anything is in here, but it is a pretty decent buzz - more than what I was expecting from a tiny cheap can. It could be that they upped the caffeine content - I have no way of knowing. What I do know was that I expected a standard cheap 75mg boost of energy - enough to calm the caffeine cravings but not much else. Instead, I was pretty energetic and pumped for a good couple hours. Still, I think I will stick to their soul and tail for my energy needs instead.
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