Caffeine Examiner

Zipfizz mixes up an effervescent winner

Zipfizz started producing their drink line back in 2003, and have now branched to half a dozen different items. The energy drink mix still seems to be the most easily found. It comes in 4 flavors, pink lemonade, orange soda, berry and citrus. They do have the one thing which all these drink mixes can not avoid, the use of the dreaded baking soda. Coffee drinks have them as preservatives, and if you add citric acid you got bubbles. As most of these energy drink mixes want to get carbonated, baking soda is a cheap and effective way to go. Of course the flavor is not helped by this, but can be masked if you find the right sweeteners. Fortunately, Zipfizz found the right combo - getting this powder so good you can eat it right out of the tube!

OK , I know you are supposed to mix these with water - and I totally meant to - but one taste of their delicious orange candy and my coworker and I ate it up like a big 'ol pixie stick. The xylitol and fizzing on your tongue is a fantastic candy treat - to heck with mixing it with water! This stuff can outpop pop rocks, get you more buzzed than a crushed sweet tart and gets you more buzzed than a can of Red Bull - what more do you want?

Taste-Lemonade: 8
The lemonade is a nice flavor, very tangy and sour, yet the sweetener is not so overpowering to hide the caffeine bitterness

Taste-Orange Soda: 10
This is not only one of the best flavors of all their mixes, this is also one of the best orange flavored energy drinks I have tried. This is the one which you could eat down like a giant pixie stick, pouring it into your hand and licking off the pieces. The carbonation is very mild, and the flavor is very orange and very delicious. If I was a box of these in the store I would not hesitate to grab some. I would definitely rank this higher than any orange flavored energy drink I have tried. I would not reccommend eating the others dry, but this is a real treat!

Taste-Citrus: 7
Although the taste is close to the lemonade, there is some differences that make this the least of my favorites. It is pretty sour and sharp, and although it definitely had lemon, it was a very different lemon than the lemonade flavor. It was by no means bad, just not the one of the four I would go to first.

Taste-Berry: 8
This powder rocks. Seriously, the flavor wakes you up and goes right to your head! The sweetener comes of strong and not at all oversweet, and the caffeine bitterness was completely masked by the fantastic berry flavor. for some real fun, use this as a topping for raspberries (you can fill them in the little pocket in a raspberry perfectly) or sprinkle it on ice cream (made vanilla taste like a lemon/orange creamsicle). The berry even tastes like berries - which I really did not expect from a powder. I enjoyed eating this as much as I enjoyed the substantial buzz I got from it. The baking soda is there, but not too overpowering.

Buzz/Nutrition:9
This candy not only has 100mg caffeine in each small tube, but is very high in a number of vitamins and nutrients. The caffeine is extracted from Guarana seed and Green Tea - not lab grown.There is all the energy drink suspects in here with Taurine and OVER 41,667 times the amount listed in the RDA! I loved that this is sweetened with xylitol, instead of opting for the less healthy sucralose. There is also vitamins: C, E and folate. There are tons of electolytes and nutrients in here too - but you forget that so easily when you are eating in like a Fun-Dip. I have tried these after workouts and runs, as well as just needing a morning pick-me-up and they have never failed to deliver a punch and help quench thirst too.

Packaging:5
love the design, hate the label. These come in great little vials with cute little caps for easy storage. Problem is with the bland label they stick on, which has lots of little tiny text, but still does not list caffeine content or website, and the contact info is almost invisible. With a tasty treat like this - I would completely punch up the color and layout for these packages. The vials they come in are the right size, and the caps and colors are fine - but they lack some pretty basic information on here - and instead opt for some silly dot matrix computer fonts, instructions on adding it to water

Website: 5

Full of information, but ugly as sin. This site is definitely function over form. The look is pure 1999, with big ol' images , unselectable text and bubbles bubbles everywhere.The site clocks in at half a meg in size, which is HUGE for something so simple. Every button has a big rollover image so it moves or pops. The inner pages are in flash for no apparent reason. Not interactivity, certainly, as nothing on the site moves or is intricate. Its just a really big flash movie. If you need to know any information, it will be on here - but in terms of design and layout this is really an amatuer offering. I mean, there is a scrolling calendar, with obsolete information running first - so you have to wait a couple minutes to see if anything is going on lately. If this was designed in house, Ill cut the designer some slack. If they paid actual money for this, I hope they paid in trade for powershots...

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