- by Owen Morton
I went out last night on a bar crawl with the Outdoor Society, and by the end of it, I must have been pretty drunk, because I ended up in Ziggy’s nightclub, which is never a good idea, as anyone who has ever been to Ziggy’s will be only too happy to tell you. (The place has to be a fire hazard, what with its hundreds of narrow windy staircases, and since there’s some foolish one-way system in operation round these staircases, it’s pretty much impossible to find your way out – and moreover, it is made even more unpleasant by the fact that even the walls in that place seem to sweat.) Fortunately, after probably about an hour in this hellhole, I’d sobered up enough to leave.
A discussion about Ziggy’s, however, isn’t what we’re here for today. At some point over the course of this bar crawl – at an embarrassingly early stage, actually – me and my friend Kate had a bottle of Reef each. Some may recall from my Little Mermaid article that I’m not especially fond of Reefs, to put it mildly, so quite why I had one remains a mystery to me. Perhaps the fact that it cost only 99p had something to do with it. Anyway, I was relatively fortunate in that the Reef I found in my hand was a red one, which, though it is of indeterminate flavour, is not entirely unpleasant. Well, okay, yes it is, but it’s not quite as entirely unpleasant as other Reef flavours, if that makes any sense.
Kate, on the other hand, was foolish enough to try the new blackcurrant flavour Reef, and having sampled it myself to see what it was like, well, I would say that buying it was probably the biggest mistake – other than coming to Ziggy’s – she made all night. A blackcurrant flavour Reef, my friends, is one of the most foul drinks I have ever had the misfortune to come across. I’ll say one thing for it: it doesn’t taste like blackcurrants. It doesn’t even taste like alcoholic Ribena, as I had expected it to. The closest thing I can compare it to, and even this isn’t quite right, is a cold blackcurrant Lemsip, which are pretty nasty – but the Reef was nastier still.
Kate didn’t have much luck with her drinks last night, come to think of it; she had this blackcurrant Reef in Wetherspoons, and in the Red Lion she ordered a blue WKD under the mistaken impression that she was ordering a blue VK. I can’t particularly see the distinction – I tried the WKD last night, and it was extremely nasty, and I’ve had a blue VK before, which was also extremely nasty, so in my view, Kate should have known she was going to end up with a bottle of blue unpleasantness, whether she got a VK or WKD, but voicing this opinion didn’t exactly make me popular, so I decided in future to shut up about such matters.
Anyway, the point I would like to make is that there seems to me to be little purpose in the manufacturers of such drinks as Reef and WKD making such unpleasant concoctions. I’m sure if I asked a random sample of the students at this university – or indeed, asked all the students at this university – whether they like blackcurrant Reefs, the answer would be pretty much 100% “no”. I’m sure of this because blackcurrant Reefs form such an uncompromising attack on the taste buds that no one could possibly enjoy drinking one. So why do they get made? And, more to the point, why do people encourage them to continue being made by buying them?
All right, they’re cheap. This is the only point in their favour. It is perhaps uncharitable, but probably true, to suggest that they’re cheap because absolutely no one would buy them if they ranged towards the upper end of the price scale. But just because something’s cheap isn’t necessarily a cue to buy it. A striking example of this is the recent Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, which came out last week and, on the basis of recommendations in NME, I bought cheaply, and found it was absolutely dreadful, perhaps the worst album I actually own (worse even than the S Club 7 Karaoke CD, because at least that is aware it’s awful, whereas the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would seem to be under the misapprehension that they’re actually good).
Okay, so I imagine we’ve established that people buy Reefs because they’re cheap and such people want to get drunk cheaply. Another problem is that Reefs won’t really get you all that drunk. I’ll admit I was drunk last night, but I suspect that was more something to do with the two glasses of interestingly flavoured wines that I had in the Maltings rather than the Reef. Manufacturers continue to make Reefs because people will buy them because they’re cheap. The only way to weed out these disgusting drinks from the shelves of our pubs and bars is to not buy them. Think of your children. When they ask you, “What was your favourite drink when you were at university, Daddy?”, do you really want to have to answer, “Blackcurrant Reef, my son”? The answer is, no you don’t. And therefore, I urge you to stop drinking them. I’m certainly going to stop drinking them myself, partly because they’re extremely nasty at the time and partly because I really don’t like feeling as ill as I do now, which I’m blaming solely on the Reef.