Each Vitaminwater flavor seems to be named after whatever quality it apparently instills in its imbiber: "refresh" promises a cool quenching experience, "revive" a return to one's best self, "focus" an amphetamine laser-focus on the task at hand. The only exception as far as I know is “xxx.” Its underlabel description is a vehicle for jokes about pornography, but there’s nothing laughable about the bottle’s contents. It is surely the outlier among the Vitamins Water, not merely for its title but also because its flavor is deep, complex, and unlike anything I've ever tasted (it contains three main components—açai-blueberry-pomegranate—rather than the usual one or two).

Typically, Vitaminwater is seen as a misnamed, sugary treat or an extravagant sport drink with exaggerated physiological benefits, but Vitaminwater xxx is something else entirely: a mystifyingly sophisticated gourmet experience akin to a sip of cool, blood-red liquid from a wineskin found in a deeply buried tomb.

If you’ve never before supped upon this interstellar ichor, you might think I’m joking here. I am deadly serious, and what’s more, I’m not the only one who feels this way. I ran a poll on Instagram, asking my friends whether xxx tasted like a potion and/or something you’d drink in a dream. 73% said yes. One friend, Bryanna, even messaged me about it, detailing that xxx was akin to “a potion from Rocky Horror” and describing it as a “queer/body transformation fantasy… if it was a flavor.” This all checks out. In their Twitter bio, Vitaminwater provides their pronouns: “they/them/it.”

To get to the bottom of the enigmatic, life-changing flavor of xxx, I thought it made sense to go directly to the source. I sent the Coca Cola company a message using their on-site portal. I thought they might be willing to dish on the production process of xxx, whether it differed from the other drinks, and any additional details that might aid my search for the truth. Worst case, I thought, they’d send some boilerplate “thanks for consuming product” message.

Nope, they fucking ignored me! Me, the biggest fan in the world of their strange, purplish beverage. But, okay. It’s a website portal. Maybe they don’t check those messages, and if so, the people they have answering defective product emails probably won’t be enthusiastic about my project. So I rolled on over to Twitter and sent them another delicately worded missive asking why xxx always tasted approximately 10 degrees cooler than the ambient temperature.

Those sons of bitches didn’t even look at it. I’m out here trying to understand the soul of their company, to have a brand engagement experience™ and they’re leaving me out in the cold. What am I doing wrong?

(ED: Vitamin Water did actually respond on twitter, but it was late in the writing process, and the response was as generic and corporate as Kit expected. Editing the piece to incorporate it really wasn't worth the effort.)

I think I’ve figured it out. Vitaminwater is a fairly young company (in 2000, it was added to the brand line of Glacéau, a privately-owned subsidiary), but its parent company, Coca Cola, has existed since the late 1800s. If I wanted to understand the arcane origin of this drink’s recipe, to approach the hidden spring of life and drink deeply of its waters, I had to first comprehend this company’s history.

So, I began reading. I learned that Coca Cola the beverage was created by a morphine-addicted war veteran and originally marketed as a treatment for indigestion, nerve disorders, headaches, impotence, and naturally, morphine addiction. As everyone knows, it contained cocaine, which I’m sure was a genuinely useful remedy for some of these ailments. In the very early 20th century, the manufacturers drastically reduced the amount of cocaine in the recipe, but kept a small amount present in the drink because they felt it would be dishonest to name a drink “Coca Cola” if there was no coca. And there it remained, until… 1929? Wait, seriously? 15 years after the Harrison Act made cocaine illegal? How the fuck did they swing that?

Anyway, I kept reading, and I learned that the company Coca Cola produces concentrate, which it then ships around the world to bottlers, who mix and package the beverage, and that Coca Cola produces its labels in 135 languages, but outright refuses to make one in Catalan, and that people in Catalonia occasionally protest this decision. I also learned that Coca Cola is the single largest plastics polluter in the world, and that a suit was filed in 2001 alleging a Columbian Coca Cola bottling plant hired mercenaries to murder three union leaders. But none of this answered my central question, by far the most important question surrounding this massive corporate enterprise: why does Vitaminwater xxx taste like that?

Is it cocaine? It has to be cocaine, right? I’m not saying I’ve done cocaine, but it probably hypothetically feels pretty similar to taking a big swig of Vitaminwater xxx. I’m right about this. I know now that that’s why they never responded to me. It’s as if they plastered it on a billboard: “Vitaminwater xxx is full of cocaine.” It’s been glaring me in the face the whole time. I remember drinking this shit during soccer games and going absolutely hog wild on those other preteen fucks. I was the goalie, and I was like five foot nothing, and I would just start throwing elbows when those motherfuckers got near me. I wasn’t a violent person. Why would I do that? My behavioral problems started in middle school, around the time I was first allowed to drink sugary drinks. I loved Vitaminwater xxx. I was terribly disruptive in class, I had this boundless energy. I would draw comics and interrupt people to tell jokes. At recess I played dodgeball with the fanatical devotion and lack of self-preservation instinct of a religious radical. I was highly spiritual as a preteen. Why do children become spiritual? I used to do parkour outside my church. Is it any coincidence that there was a convenience store a block away that sold Vitaminwater xxx? My friends and I were all 13 and totally ripped, one of them became a world-class gymnast, and we would just throw ourselves down staircases and run up walls and shit. We all had knives. What was that all about? Why did we all have knives?

The ideal conditions for consuming Vitaminwater xxx are as follows: on a hot day, remove a chilled bottle of xxx from your fridge and drink until the cold liquid begins to hurt the roof of your mouth.

(Legal disclaimer: this piece is a parody. Vitaminwater xxx, the ingredients of which are listed on its label, almost definitely does not contain cocaine.)

>this review was originally published on holism.space.