Posted: April 29th, 2002
Written by: Tuan Huynh

Introduction

Most of us at one point or another have most likely struggled to stay awake. Whether it is staying up late to study for your finals, doing your homework, LAN parties, or you just plain want to try and attempt to stay awake, it is somewhat hard to fight your body when you’re very tired and drowsy. While coffee can only help you stay awake for so long, it doesn’t seem to be enough if you’re pulling an all-nighter for homework, or in our case, LAN parties. Sure there are also caffeine pills, but they’re addictive and have undesirable side effects.

When you’re at a LAN party, the main point of it is to stay up all night to play games. While most of us can stay up for half the night, you’d most likely not trust the people around you enough to fall asleep right next to them, as they’d most likely do something stupid to you such as draw on your face, put shaving cream on your face, or drag you out somewhere.

This is where Bawls does its trick…

Bawls comes only in 10oz bottles that look somewhat like a blue beer bottle. The main ingredient of Bawls happens to be a nut-like seed only found in the Amazon called Guarana, which provides up to 2.5x that normal coffee, tea, and pop does. So pretty much it translates into a whole lot of caffeine. While you’d think such a large amount of caffeine wouldn’t be healthy, Guarana holds a Generally Marked as Safe status by the government, but they also have a warning that states like all other caffeine products, people who have heart problems or high blood pressure should use with caution.

The Taste

Bawls carries a hard to explain taste. It is sweet, but unlike anything I’ve ever had before, it doesn’t hawe a bad after taste. Unlike coffee and tea, Bawls doesn’t leave your breath smelling bad and doesn’t stain your clothes if you accidentally spill it. Nonetheless, it tastes vesy good in my opinion.

Real world use

While I haven’t tried to drink any Bawls at LAN parties, I chose the next best thing. On a night where things weren’t really going too well for me, I decided to drink a bottle of Bawls at around 9 PM. This was not a very good idea, boy did I regret doing that. With the massive amount of caffeine that eventually went through my bloodstream, I was able to stay up to 4:30 AM. Again, this was not a very good idea, as I had to wake up for school at 6:30 AM.

Bawls allowed me to stay up for approximately 7 hours, which is very good, as coffee only allows me to stay awake for an hour or two. But since I had school the next morning with only 2 hours of sleep, I decided to drink another bottle of Bawls. This allowed me to go throughout the school day without falling asleep no matter how hard I tried. I tried falling asleep in class, but that didn’t work, as there was still a lot of caffeine in my bloodstream. So before you drink Bawls, proceed with caution on what you have to do the next morning.

Other then testing Bawls on myself, I also gave my friends a few bottles to try. Let’s just say they were very tired the next day….

Conclusion

Bawls is a really good caffeine solution, coming in at $26.99 per case of 24, Bawls is relatively cheap, as it is comparable to drinks such as Sobe in terms of price and does a better job providing you with energy to stay awake for the night or day. If you’re going to have a LAN party, don’t forget to stack up on Bawls, or bring your own Bawls to help you stay awake, as Bawls sponsored the last CPL with a whole lot of Bawls for the attendees.

And lastly, I know Bawls is a drink and you’re probably wondering why it’s being reviewed on a Tech site. The answer is simple; do you expect me to review hardware 100% of the time? That and Bawls has sponsored a lot of large scale LAN parties in the past and I thought it’d be of interest to Tweak3D readers. If you do, uh, just think of this as a Staying Awake tweak guide and move on ;).

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