(rating for the non-diet version)
Rubyy Energy Drink and I get along pretty well, for obvious reasons. For one, it wears a lot of black, as do I. For another, it has a strange extra consonant at the end of its name, as do I. The main reason, though, is that it’s distinctly different from your average energy drink. It tastes like the oranges, blood oranges and tangerines that it has listed, in concentrate form, on its ingredient list. Which is not your average energy drink and which makes it taste about five steps removed from a regular soft drink. And the carbonation gives it a unique feel. The whole package was pretty easy to drink…and drink quickly, because it was tasty and hard to sip. I can imagine this is probably used as a mixer in bars with good reason: partly because of the taste, but the bottle looks posh as hell, so that’s attractive to those bar-people.
I think part of the reason it’s so unique is that it, well, tastes like it’s actually good for you. Granted, the drink is only 8% juice, so don’t plan for it to provide your RDA of everything. You do get 100% of Niacin, B6, B12 and Biotin (B complex). According to Energy Fiend, it sports 80mg of caffeine. More than a soft drink but decent for most people. The regular version is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and inositol. And I will say this as well: I normally can taste inositol–though it’s not as repulsive as sucralose–but in this, it didn’t give me pause at all. So bravo.
[ad#longpost]Alas, we come to the diet version. And I want to make it clear I hold no bias for this drink even though it’s in a white bottle and thus it doesn’t go with anything I own. No, it has the same attempt at fizzy orange goodness but the first sip of an inositol/sucralose one-two punch will mug you and take your lunch money. It’s, in my opinion, undrinkable. I realize some people don’t have the sensitivity to sucralose that I do, and they might want to give it a try, but I’d say stick with the extra 26g of carbs and go jogging after rather than assault yourself with the diet version. This is a shame, since the unleaded version is so very good.
Special thanks to JasterIsFett, who sent me the drinks to review. Give him love.
I liked the original Rubyy, but can’t find a source of it any more and even their website now points to a domain-parking spam thing. And yeah, the diet version is vile.
Bill: I think they must be an ex-parrot. Their Twitter account hasn’t been updated since 2009. That’s a shame…anyway, thanks for the headsup.