Two disclaimers, right up front
First, let's get this out of the way: Drinking caffeinated drinks excessively or habitually is not good for your health. It puts unnecessary stress on your heart. It is addictive. Having acknowledged that, let's move on.
Second, because you will start wondering: This may end up sounding like a sales pitch. Remember, I don't do that. I do make some recommendations. You're free to follow them or not. Think of this more like Consumer Reports than advertising copy.
Get on with it, already
I made a conscious decision, over ten years ago, to start every day with an energy drink. My reasoning back then was sound. I won't give you my justifications here. They're irrelevant. But, being a good engineer, I did a comprehensive study of energy drinks before I started. What follows is based on the results of my study, and twelve years of experience.
In modern society, we don't get enough sleep, we deal with too much stress during the day, and we end up being constantly fatigued. We try to combat the fatigue by taking artificial stimulants. The most common stimulant in the USA is coffee. It is legal, it is socially acceptable, and it can range anywhere from a plain cup of instant coffee in the kitchen, to an artisanal brew from a coffee house -- Starbucks being the modern archetype.
I don't like the taste of coffee. I don't drink it. But the energy boost cannot be denied. Caffeine is the ingredient in coffee that gives you the boost.
Caffeine can be easily manufactured and added to so many other consumables. Caffeinated sodas are a prime example. There's just enough caffeine in a 12-ounce can to give you a decent buzz. Drinking more soda gives you more buzz. But sometimes that's not enough.
Energy drinks are formulated solely to give you that buzz: an unambiguous, artificial energy boost. The two main energy-boosting ingredients are sugar and caffeine. Everything else is just snake oil.
The amounts of sugar and caffeine vary from product to product. Let's talk about caffeine first.
Caffeine
If you read the labels carefully, you will find that a can of energy drink delivers anywhere from 120 mg to 350 mg of caffeine. This compares to 96-195 mg for an 8-ounce cup of coffee, or 34 mg for a 12-ounce Coca-Cola.
The FDA recommends that you not consume more than 400 mg of caffeine in a day. That's if you're a grown adult, and not pregnant or planning to become pregnant.
Slamming a can of energy drink can have disastrous consequences -- no, that's too strong a word. Adverse consequences. Dumping that much caffeine in your system at once can cause a pounding headache, vision problems, a racing heart, and trembling or jerky limbs. It can also temporarily affect your emotions or personality, and not in a good way. So if you're going to drink an energy drink, you need to learn to nurse the drink.
Caffeine has a half-life of about 5 hours. That means, if you consume 300 mg of caffeine, 150 mg of it will still be in your body 5 hours later, 75 mg will still be there after 10 hours, and 38 mg will still be there after 15 hours. Remember, Coke has 34 mg of caffeine, so 15 hours after you slam a 300-mg energy drink, you will still have as much caffeine in you as if you had just drunk a Coke.
But if you stretch out that 300-mg drink, and take an hour or longer to finish it, then your caffeine levels at any moment will be lower and more reasonable.
Take small sips. Okay, maybe one guzzle if it's really refreshing, but mostly small sips. See how long you can stretch out the drink.
Sugar
Although we love our sugar, it has a whole list of undeniable health hazards, chief among which are weight gain and risk of diabetes. I would put tooth decay up there as well.
Coffee doesn't have any sugar in it, unless you add it yourself. But if you don't add sugar, coffee tastes like mud -- burnt mud.
Back to our can of Coke, the benchmark we will use for all analyses: a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola has 39 grams of sugar. Most energy drinks contain that much sugar, or more, with some going as high as 56 g.
How much is a gram of sugar? Well, a level teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams, and a heaped teaspoon is 7.5 grams. 50 g of sugar is 12 teaspoons. Four tablespoons. An entire quarter cup of sugar in your glass. That's crunchy!
Most energy drinks go cheap and use high-fructose corn sweetener in place of the cane sugar that we love so much.
Many energy-drink makers, recognizing that consumers are looking out for their health (HAHAHAHA) and trying to avoid sugar, replace sugar with sugar substitutes. Sometimes they are successful at making the drink taste good, but more often they make the energy drink taste like a chemical formula.
Choosing an Energy Drink, Then
I wanted an energy drink with the following characteristics:
- Tastes good
- Sweetened with real sugar, but not too much
- Not too high in calories
- Caffeine content 150 mg or less
I ended up settling on
Bing energy drinks. Bing is made with real fruit juices, and not just a tiny amount. Each flavor of Bing has at least 5% real fruit juice. No other energy drink has
any fruit juice. For comparison, Italian orange soda contains at least 12% orange juice, by law. That's the only carbonated drink I can think of with more fruit juice than Bing.
It only has 5 to 6 grams of sugar! Compare that to all of the other drinks we've discussed! Most of the sugar content in Bing is from the juices, although some flavors add 1 to 2 grams of real cane sugar. The caffeine content is on the low end of the scale, at 120 mg per 12-ounce can.
Bing contains other additives purported to boost energy, like taurine and ginseng. You can ignore these. The sugar and the caffeine are what really matter.
Bing energy drinks are also fortified with additional vitamins. I smile at this: healthy energy drinks! I'm not complaining, though. They have more vitamins than other energy drinks. Coffee and Coca-Cola have zero vitamins.
I was fortunate to live in Colorado while doing my research.
Bing Beverage Company is a Colorado company, without the massive national/international reach of Rockstar, Monster, or Red Bull. It doesn't even show up in the lists of top-selling energy drinks on the Web. I might not have discovered Bing if I were living somewhere else.
Flavors of Bing
The Bing beverage company keeps the size of its product line intentionally small. They don't need the dozens of variations that Red Bull and Monster have.
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| Bing's product line in 2025 |
Here's a quick overview of the flavors, in order of discovery.
The original Bing
Bing cherry is the original flavor. This is the one that was invented in Denver, Colorado in 2006, formulated from a locally-produced black Bing cherry cider. It's still the best, and it's the flavor that hooked me on the brand -- but see Black, below.
Bing Black
This is the second flavor they came up with. Bing Black is a blend of blackberry and cherry juice. For my tastes, this one is tied with the original. Sometimes I prefer Black over cherry, because it's not as sweet as the original and is slightly tart.
Bing Raz
This is a delicious raspberry-cherry blend. It's not as available as the cherry or the Black, but if you can find it, it's good.
Bing Crisp
When I first drank this, I was disappointed. I think my taste buds were expecting a caffeinated version of Martinelli's Sparkling Cider. But it's an apple-cherry blend. The cherry takes the edge off the apple, and my taste buds weren't expecting that.
However, upon further review, it's delicious. If you want something calm and understated, Crisp is the way to go.
Bing Blu
This one was a delightful surprise. There's no cherry in it at all. It's a blend of blueberry and boysenberry, two fruits you don't usually find in the soft-drink aisle. Your taste buds are not accustomed to these flavors in a drink, and so your first taste of it may be a little off-putting. Be persistent. Stick with it until you have finished that first can. I promise, you will come back for more.
Bing Citrus
This is their most recent addition. Last summer, I suggested to the Bing Beverage Company that they consider a cherry limeade, perhaps as a limited-edition summertime drink. I mean, who doesn't drive through Sonic just to get a cherry limeade, right? Or better yet, a cherry limeade slush?
So Bing created a cherry limeade, but they added a bit of grapefruit, just to make it unique. It was a big success. On a hot summer day, the tangy Bing Citrus just hits the spot. Mix it with ginger beer and a sprig of mint, and you have a nice approximation of a Moscow Mule.
Where to Buy It
If you're in Colorado, you're in luck. Bing is a made-in-Colorado product, and so it's available nearly everywhere. You can find it at King Soopers, at Safeway, and sometimes at Whole Foods. Ironically, KS doesn't stock Citrus, and Safeway doesn't stock Raz, so you have to go to both stores to get all of the flavors.
At KS, you'd best go early in the morning. By afternoon, the shelves are empty. People in Colorado love their Bing. Safeway, for some reason, is better at keeping their stock up, although they do sell out of the more popular flavors.
Outside of Colorado, you will need to rely on the store locator at
https://bingbeverage.com/retailer-locator/. The locator isn't always up to date, and the further you get from Colorado, the more likely the stores are to run out of Bing and not replenish it right away. Outside of Colorado, look for a small selection of Bing on the bottom shelf in the energy-drinks section.
In Colorado, Bing has pride of place, at eye level on the shelf. In some stores, because of its 5% fruit juice content, you can find it in the produce section. And if you're really lucky, you can find chilled cans in the produce coolers, next to the pomegranate juice and apricot nectar.
Alternatives to Bing
If you can't find Bing, then I suggest that you read the labels on the 12-ounce energy drinks. You're looking for something with less than 40 calories, with real sugar, and with 120 to 150 mg of caffeine. Here's a good online resource for both calories and caffeine content:
Caffeine Informer.
One acceptable substitute is Alani Nu energy drinks. They come in a wide variety of very creative flavors. Some are weird, but they taste good. Their caffeine content is almost double Bing's, at 200 mg.
If you're in Canada, look for Guru energy drinks. Sweetened with real cane sugar, 140 mg caffeine, only 25 calories. They're made in Canada, and every flavor I've tasted (so far) is yummy.
Zevia is an energy drink sweetened with stevia, not sugar. That means it has zero calories. It doesn't contain any juice, but it is only 120 mg caffeine content. Some people think it tastes good.
If I have to choose a mainstream energy drink, my preference is Monster Energy Lo-Carb, the blue one. It has only 30 calories and 140 mg of caffeine in a 16-ounce can. In my opinion, all Monster drinks taste like chemical formulas, but this one is okay.
In a pinch, you can drink Celsius. Celsius has become the third largest-selling energy drink in the USA, after Red Bull and Monster. A 12-ounce can contains 200 mg, same as Alani Nu and almost twice what Bing has. But every Celsius I've had tastes like a chemical formula -- every single one. And, to be honest, the ingredient list on the can reads like a chemical formula as well.
