At this point, I’m fairly convinced that there’s something wrong with me. An ungodly streak of masochism, perhaps, or simply an insatiable curiosity with no regard for consequence. Regardless, we’re here again with another energy shot review, this time some cheap-looking product I picked up at the train station while waiting for some friends to arrive. Yes, lacking in any familiar brand name and inspiring little confidence, it’s Quick Energy. Feel it in minutes, apparently. Feel what, I dread to think.

Backtrack. When I was a kid, I used to take empty pill bottles — those little white ones with the snap-on lids — and mix up all kinds of disturbing concoctions in my grandparents’ kitchen, which consisted of all manner of ingredients procured from around the house, both originally edible in nature, and various cleaning products and the like. Into the cauldron they’d go until they became a grim, viscous green fluid which bubbled with sentience. I’d then bottle the stuff in those little white bottles, and try to sell them to relatives as weed killer, or whatever else I came up with at the time.

Quick Energy, beneath its inviting wrapper, comes in a bottle that looks an awful lot like one of those. Some small part of me wonders if I wasn’t the only one to have that idea.

Cracking open the little bottle reveals a vaguely bubbling (it did say to shake well) clear fluid with the tinge of used washing-up water and a distinct odour that reminds me of hospitals and… oh dear. Well, I’m not going to say what else it reminds me of, but it’s not something I’d want in an energy shot. As always, a quick, experimental sip reveals the blatant, terrible lies emblazoned upon the wrapper: Orange flavour? Perhaps if I was transported to The Matrix and the machines — with no sense of taste or smell of their own — did their best to recreate the illusion of citrus, it may be a similar sensation. As with the Relentless variety, there’s the aftertaste of dish-washing fluid, though it seems to linger and transform into something distinctly brackish and bitter in the back of the mouth.

Regret rears its head like an ugly, deformed whale bursting up from the surface of the ocean, as if to say, I told you this would happen! I told you! Part of me wonders if this is truly a karmic event, the scent of this pungent formula bringing back sharp, vivid memories of my potion-mixing childhood witchcraft endeavours. Surely the cost for this fluid is already enough to repay my ill-gotten juvenile gains?

Nonetheless, I press onwards and chug this fateful elixir with whatever vim I can muster. And that’s when the regrets hit me with the force of a ten-ton hammer. Imagine, if you will, the antiseptic stench in the air from hospitals, the machinated pseudo-orange of a faux world, and the bitterness of dry, brackish sweat combined into a single overpowering flavour, a flavour which seems content to linger and cling to the taste buds as long as possible, before slowly sinking like a heavy wave of lead-lined nausea to the stomach.

If it was possible to experience something worse than the Relentless Energy Shot, then surely this must be it. Next time, I’ll take the blue pill.

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