The "High Caffeine Guarana Beverage". The bottle pretty much tells you that this drink is nothing but carbonated water, corn, syrup, guarana, and caffeine. The bottle is all blue, because we all want blue Bawls.
As most LAN party attendees can tell you, Bawls is (or at least used to be) the drink of champions. They even have a website for gamers (and paintball), the Bawls Guarana Communications Group. With online gaming becoming more popular, I see someone else putting serious money into marketing to online gamers, and making the payouts bigger in tournaments. I realize paintball is big, but relative to online gaming? In fact, I'd guess most paintball players are also online gamers. Anyway, an overlooked market, and one that I don't think Bawls is targeting enough.
Nonetheless, for me, the taste is bland, but extremely enjoyable. It's fizzy, and very easy to drink when cold. I love to down a couple when "hacking", "coding", "powning", "w00ting", and being "1337". Seriously, it is one of my favorite programming drinks, followed by the regular green monster, and full throttle.
The energy for me is high. I've seen charts saying that it's caffeine potency is not that high, but it really keeps me keyed up for some time. Sometimes a couple of bottles can give me the shakes.
If you buy these by the case, they are a pretty good value. At less than $1.50/each and 2oz. bigger than a Red Bull, it's a great LAN party beverage choice.
Update 4-26-07
I found Bawls in 16oz. cans somewhere in Hickory, NC. I think they were $2.19.
Bawls is a really great tasting drink, but I?ve never really been personally thrilled about it, and I?m not sure why. It has a pleasant Sprite like taste with a good decent amount of carbonation. It?s rated as second or third highest in caffeine content on most lists of energy drinks. I?ve never seen any Bawls energy drinks sold separately, except for the Sugar free Bawls and thank goodness we didn?t have to buy a whole case of those. So we?ve always bought them in cases from CompUSA. And who better to know what has the most caffeine than computer guys? I believe I would buy more energy drinks from CompUSA if they were offered.
The initial taste of Bawls is so light and refreshing. But after there is nothing else to drink my mouth is thick and yucky tasting. Maybe this is just a really great marketing idea, because now that I have a whole case I can just drink another one. This may be pure genius. I don?t like the glass bottle. I feel like I have to pay more attention to drinking out of it for fear of hitting my teeth or bumping my lip into my teeth.
So I have all of these petty problems with the product. But in the end I scored Bawls highly because it really is a good value and great tasting beverage. The name is so catchy because who hasn?t made some joke about the name? Marketing genius.