Vault: Drinks like a Soda, Kicks like an Energy Drink

First of all, I'm not really getting the hang of this nomenclature. I keep thinking of “Surge” when I write about Vault. Probably because it is Surge, just with a new name. In the never ending battle to knock Mountain Dew off its high throne, Coca-Cola does something interesting with this new Vault of theirs.

I have to say, I loathe the taste of original Mountain Dew. After drinking several gulps of it, I feel as if I'm going to puke lime-green liquid all over the floor. My gag reflex acts up about halfway through a bottle of it. Everytime I find myself with a can or bottle of Mountain Dew in my hand, I have to ask myself the question: Why? Why am I drinking this abhorrent beverage, riddled with so much sugar and caffeine, you feel like you are going to urinate super-concentrated yellow liquid. I never liked it before, what would have changed this time around?

Well, it's a big hit with the gaming crowd, supplying them with much needed caffeine to last them through the night. And Mountain Dew: Red Code ain't all that bad either. Since it is a soda, many people don't know how much caffeine they are ingesting when they chug down 5 or 6 cans per night. This inevitably begged someone to make a Death By Caffeine calculator, where you choose your caffeinated beverage of choice, enter your weight, and click on the truly macabre “kill me” button.

Apparently, it takes:

136.5 cans of Mountain Dew
or
107.25 cans of Vault

to kill me.

Wow, it's really that potent? Interesting...

But anyway, enough of this Mountain Dew talk. Vault is the relatively new energy soda (well, pretty much the only marketed “energy soda”) on the market, and you'd like to know how it tastes.

Well, for starters, the liquid is very crisp without a lot of lingering sugary slime; compare 7Up's crispness to Sprite's sweetness, and that's how Vault compares to a can of Dew. The all-too-familiar gag reflex was pretty nonexistant, I was surprised. The actual taste of Vault tastes exactly like Mountain Dew to me. Heck, it tastes like Surge, Mello Yello, and whatever other supermarket generic “mountain dew-like” soda is out there. No surprise there. I honestly wasn't expecting much, but I guess it tastes OK. Not awesome. Not Barq's Root Beer awesome. But pretty good nonetheless.

The real kicker is finding out that one bottle of Vault has the same amount of caffeine found inside 1.5 cans of Red Bull. Wow, you should have told me that before I went out and drank one at 2 in the freakin' morning. Hey, I didn't get any warning either, why should you? ;-)

But yeah, I drank a bottle of Vault at midnight (stupid!) one day, and couldn't sleep until about 8AM the next day in which I promptly had to get up at 9:30. Let me tell you, that was a pretty bad day. (Not as bad as today, however, where I did not get a single minute of sleep. As of this moment, I've been awake for close to thirty-five hours minus the three hour nap I had yesterday afternoon. Schweeeet.)

Oh, and get this, since it was from a vending machine, it came out in your standard 20 oz. PET soda bottle. Bwahaha, that means I had ingested ~120 mg of caffeine by the time I finished it. As you may know, an 8.2 oz can of Red Bull contains 80 mg of caffeine, and a 12 oz can of Mountain Dew has 55 mg of caffeine. After thirty minutes or so, I unconsciously started becoming uncontrollably jittery. Although, I also had a renewed vigor to work and I punched out a research paper as well as an analytical paper. All in four hours time! So, yes, I can attest to the fact that the caffeine in this stuff really works. It isn't all talk. It really does have some kick to it. It has become my primary beverage of choice when studying for exams or when I need to write a paper(s). I need to have gotten a sufficient amount of sleep the night beforehand, however, as I do not want to die of heart exhaustion or whatnot.


What would I rate it, you say? Hmm.

6 out of 10.