Bawls Guarana High-Caffeine Beverage

There's not much new to be said about caffeine. It keeps you awake. It makes you shaky and nervous. Geeks like it so they can have all-night coding sessions and roleplaying games. It's popular in departments of computer science. But new methods of delivering caffeine sprout up all the time. Caffeine mints. Caffeine candy. Caffeine water. And new and better kinds of caffeine soft drinks.

Bawls Guarana High-Caffeine Beverage isn't that new, having been around, at least in its home city of Miami, since 1997. But it's still relatively unknown outside the LAN party set. Lately, though, it's touched off a virtual epidemic in my department. Grad students show up clutching the midnight-blue bottles in their morning classes or eyeing the clock compulsively, waiting for their next fix.

There's more to its allure than just caffeine. When you're stuck in a yuppified college town, the vaguely sketchy appeals, from townie-frequented diners on the outskirts of town to free Web mail accounts to show you're too cool to be affiliated with the university. Bawls doesn't disappoint in this area. Its murky bottle displays only the sparest text. Its website helpfully points out that the South American berry called guarana, its main ingredient, is "generally regarded as safe" by the FDA. Unlike a certain other energy drink, you can't usually get it at the supermarket, and they don't hand it out at every multimedia art exhibit in town. You have to go out of your way, most frequently to ThinkGeek, which sells a wide array of caffeine drinks but lists Bawls as its favorite. If Bawls gives you wings, they are of the angel-of-death variety.

Which is not to say that one feels the least bit moribund while under its influence. Quite the opposite. After trying it twice under different conditions, this reviewer can report that the Bawls caffeine high is unobtrusive and seamless, with only the memory of the morning's sunrise to remind you that you've been up for 36 hours.

I first had the opportunity to sample it while hanging around one of the computer architecture offices in the department on a Friday night. "We calculated our lethal dose," one of the grad students was saying, "and you'd have to drink at least the whole bottle." Not Bawls — Sky Rocket caffeine syrup, which contains 100 mg of caffeine per ounce. Sometimes the hardware students stir it into their coffee.

Bawls contains just 80 mg of caffeine per bottle, which is about as much as a cup of coffee, although its creators claim that guarana caffeine is 2.5 times more potent then the kind in coffee. Two and a half cups of coffee is a manageable amount, so I took the bottle without question when they offered it to me.

At 10 that night, I'd been falling asleep on my problem set. By midnight, I was making steady progress. At two-thirty, I was trying to find a 24-hour breakfast place in nearby Ypsilanti. At five, I was sorting the hundreds of e-mails in my inbox. By eight, I was sleeping fitfully and dreaming geek dreams involving metaphorical liquid representations of various Linux distributions: Red Hat was water-soluble, but Debian was a thicker liquid whose surface tension separated layers of hydrophilic substances.

Clearly, Bawls was not something to trifle with.

Two days later, I had two problem sets due the next day. One bottle of Bawls at two in the morning kept me reasonably alert until about 11 pm, about 15 hours longer than an unlimited amount of coffee usually does. According to the ThinkGeek description, the kind of caffeine in Bawls isn't "associated with the kind of stomach discomforts and jitters associated with drinking too much java." This may sound like so much marketing-speak, but it was true — the strung-out, mildly nauseated feeling I get from even a morning cup of coffee never materialized.

So how does this stuff actually taste? Well, again, it beats that more popular energy drink, which can be described only as a glaze reduction of store-brand "red pop" from a Midwestern supermarket chain. Bawls has a delicate fruit taste and enough carbonation to keep the whole thing light and non-syrupy.

But why, you may be wondering, didn't I just completely finish those problem sets two days before when I involuntarily made myself stay up all night? Or any other time before two a.m. the night they were due? Wouldn't that be better than ingesting dubious substances to stay awake for unnatural periods of time?

Such a question reveals a gaping disconnect in your concept of geek culture. Stick to the decaf herbal tea; you clearly don't have what it takes to handle the insidious force of guarana.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)