I wrote this from a world of pain.

I embarked on a journey that can be summed up with one word: whoo. I took a ride on the white girl roller coaster and it left me beaten and broken. I achieved maximum white girl wastedness by mixing all of the malt beverages available at Graby’s Mini Mart: Mike’s Harder Lemonades, Twisted Teas, Hard Arnold Palmer, Bud Light Lime and Scorpion Poison. Or at least it felt like Scorpion Poison when I was done.

Mike’s Harder Lemonade is available in three varieties — all of which are remarkably painful — packing 8 percent alcohol by volume. I started off with the classic Harder Lemonade. This tasted like I had poured 160-proof vodka into a glass of Crystal Light. The flavor is light, the malt is bitter and the sugar is pervasive. There’s no escaping how incredibly sweet this is. The Cranberry Lemonade was less sweet thanks to the cranberry, which masked the alcohol slightly better. My “favorite” of the three was the Black Cherry. I’m a fan of this because the black cherry masks the booze the best even though it’s just as sweet. These left me hyper and unable to concentrate on beer pong, but it’s a solid way to get really drunk really fast and get out of extended periods of drinking game play.

The Hard Arnold Palmer was much more disappointing than the Mike’s, though. I was excited about this one on the way home, but I was crushed after my first sip. There’s not enough Arnold Palmer flavor to go with the really boozy aftertaste. It’s not pleasant, and I would have preferred to just grab a soft Arnie and pour one to five shots of happiness in.

Because I will always suffer for my art, I tried some Twisted Tea Half & Half. I’m not going to lie: I couldn’t finish it all in one night. I’m just one man after all. Oh, it’s bad. The Twisted Tea Half & Half wasn’t much better than the Arnie, but it was more drinkable. The regular Twisted Tea was just as drinkable, only it tasted like iced tea.

Bud Light Lime came next. This one is the winner of the evening and that’s probably because there’s beer in this one. Even with the slightly too-sweet lime flavor, I enjoyed this as much as I could in my sugar-crazed state of spontaneous beer pong. That’s when you slam dunk pingpong balls into random people at the party’s Solo cups.

Ouch. My head.

—Compiled by Dylan Sorensen, staff writer, djsorens@syr.edu

Published on November 7, 2012 at 1:04 am