Venga Energize Review

Yesterday I went to the local gormet grocery store in the hopes of finding some unique and awesome caffeineated and non-caffeineated drinks. I came across a display of Venga products, one of which I already tried and reviewed last year - Venga Brainstorm. I laughed when I saw one of their products carry the "Energize" title so I decided to pick it up and demolish its energizing credibility. The joke is on me though. When I went home, I had a second look and found out that this product actually contains taurine, caffeine and a bunch of other ingredients that are found in regular energy drinks. That got me excited.

Taste

Venga Energize is said to have red apple, sea buckthorn, dragonfruit and mate tea, almost all of which I have tried on their own, except for the sea buckthorn. The aroma is not strong, but apples and mate are easily noticeable. The taste is right up my alley with the mate flavours overwhelming pretty much everything else. If you are not a fan of mate, you will not like this, but if you are, you should definitely try this.

The mate flavour is earthy and slightly bitter, but sweet notes from the red apple help offset the bitterness level. To me dragonfruit doesn't taste like anything when it is firm, but when you let it ripen a little, it starts to turn sweet. There are very faint hints of ripe dragonfruit in the drink, and mostly in the finish once the mate/red apple flavours have settled. Since I have never had sea buckthorn on its own, I clearly don't know what I am supposed to be looking for. If it is sweet and taste like berries, then there might be a little bit of it in the aroma, because it does have a berry-like undertone. The sweetness and earthy bitterness balance nicely and neither build up.

There is no bitterness from the active ingredients, just the earthy tones from the mate. That might be due to its size - 532 mL is a lot of liquid to dilute some medicinal ingredients in. Overall, this is a great tea based drink, which has enough caffeine to give you a nice jolt.

Energy

There are 114 mg of caffeine in the drink, which is the equivalent of a medium sized can of Red Bull, or slightly less than a tall can of Hype. The energy comes in relatively fast and it is clean. I started to feel something within 15 minutes and did not experience any negative side effects, such as jitters. When I started to experience the effects, I felt calm, wide awake and focused on what I was doing. The caffeine kicked in fully around the 30-40 minute mark and I was completely energized and ready to be productive. Unlike many of the sweet and carbonated energy drinks, the energy was focused and useful for mental work as well as physical work. The boost lasted for almost 2 hours and was very good and clean. At the end, there was no crash or anything horrible, the energy just stopped being there.

Scores:
Cost - $2.59
Taste - 8.6/10
Energy - 6.8/10

Overall - 15.4/20...great tea flavour with fruity notes and a decent performance for such a drink