NOS Energy Drink: First Gulp

Of all the things I've been sent to review, the one I've least wanted to try was not the Mitsubishi Galant. Instead, it was this: NOS Energy Drink. I've got NOS, dude!

I'm not a huge energy drink imbiber, so when the giant NOS box with a canister-like blue bottle and ugly t-shirt showed up I turned to the one place I was sure to find numerous caffeine addicts: a political field office. The job of a field organizer on a political campaign is to identify every potential voter within a given geography and then turn them out on election day.

It involves long days of knocking down doors/making calls and longer nights of entering the information into database. Therefore, it involves drinking a shit ton of caffeine at every turn. I selected Cameron as my victim tester because he exclaimed "Oh, I've never tried that one."

Because it wouldn't be a real review unless I actually tried it, I warmed up with my palette with an appropriate amuse bouche (a Shipley's Bulls Eye Do Nut, which is a yeast donut filled with creme, topped with chocolate, and then topped with whipped creme). Pouring the NOS into a white cup you get to see what you're drinking and it's pretty clear why they've done all they can to disguise it with an opaque bottle.

It looks like radioactive piss.

Fortunately, it tastes better than I can remember radioactive piss tasting (ahh... college). It's clearly citrus-based, sort of a Fresca meets Mountain Dew with an undeniable hint of Flintstone's chewable vitamin you get in any drink that's got a high Taurine content. Cameron rates it a 7/10 but I could really give a shit what he thinks about how it tastes. He's here for one reason: to see how long before he can enter data before the crash.

He downs the drink at around 8:00 pm and we're making bets on just how far he can make it while entering voter IDs into the voter database — a job about as interesting as watching flies fuck. My guess was the witch's brew of taurine, inositol, ginseng, B vitamins, and L-Carnitine (whatever that is) would keep him juiced for a couple of hours before the inevitable crash.

Having ingested only donuts but also involved in boring labor, I worked as the lame control group and decided to check in every 30 minutes. Through the first couple of hours there was no discernible crash and he continued on with an extra bit of zest. Unfortunately, having not ingested an energy drink I wasn't able to stay up long enough to track just how long Cameron went before passing out — but he claims 2 AM, which isn't bad.

Overall, it's not the worst tasting energy drink. it's certainly better than Monster but not quite as refreshing as Bawls. In terms of energy it does the trick, providing about four hours before a crash. The t-shirt I got with it wasn't great, but Cameron was happy to take it off my hands as a reward for his work. And the packaging works if you're mostly an idiot, and I'm guessing mostly-an-idiot is going to be the demo buying this.

Send an email to Matt Hardigree, the author of this post, at matt@jalopnik.com.