bruno

"mr storylets"

writer (derogatory). lead designer on Fallen London.

http://twitter.com/notbrunoagain


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Bluesky
brunodias.bsky.social

My current energy drink of choice is Monster Energy Pacific Punch, which, like, that there is a hyperreal fucking object. When I say the words 'Pacific Punch' to you, what actual flavors come to mind? Pineapple, surely, right? Maybe coconut? You could list off some other tropical fruit: Mangos, kiwi, pitaya, etc. Like you think of, you know, a non-alcoholic take on a tiki drink.

The dominant flavor in Pacific Punch is cherry. It has maybe a hint of peach in there too? It mostly tastes of stone fruit. Just absolutely no fucking relationship between what it tastes like and how it's marketed. Now, I happen to really like the taste of artificial cherry flavoring, so I drink the stuff, but it is very funny to me.

They could have called it 'Cherry Pie', or something, right? They could have called it 'Sakura Smash' or whatever. But somewhere deep in the bowels of Monster's marketing department someone just made the call that actually putting something on the can that induces an observer to envision the contents of the can semi-accurately wasn't in the cards on this one.

Like most Monster flavors either accurately advertise what they contain (Dragon Ice Tea tastes like ice tea, or an approximation thereof) OR they are so abstract they make no real promises. Pacific Punch as a name is just connected enough to some kind of semantics of flavor that it's surprising when you take a sip and learn that it's the Cherry Coke of Monster.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

Fun fact: the reason Monster flavors are weirdly good is that they actually use a LOT of real juice. And that's because Monster was originally created by the Hansen's Juice Company, before their little experiment with energy drinks became so wildly popular that it took over the whole business.

I used to drink it all the time back in college, and I remember being amazed that like the Kaos flavor had more real fruit juice than most drinks actually being sold as fruit juice. It was like 60-70%, something around there, not sure if it's still that high for modern flavors.

What’s funny is that I drank a lot of this for the better part of a year and never put the “cherry” thing together. That’s not what the blurb on the side of the can says, and save for the occasional craving for the medicinally-artificial cherry icee, I don’t like cherry flavored stuff.

The official marketing translation is that it’s Hawaiian pog juice— pomegranate, orange and guava if memory serves

I mean maybe if you mix pomegranate, orange, and guava together you get something that tastes remarkably like artificial cherry flavor. It definitely has citrus-y notes but every soft drink has citrus-y notes. Pomegranate tastes of so little that it's hard to characterize. I cannot imagine someone drinking it and coming up with guava to describe it tho