Editor's note: This was uploaded twelve hours after CryptK's piece. n1ghtsh1ft wrote the entire thing in one sitting between 1 AM and 5 AM. He was drinking Monster while writing it. Three cans. The irony was not lost on anyone except n1ghtsh1ft. — VexNull
I have read CryptK's "rigorous and definitive analysis." I read it twice, actually, because the first time through I thought I might be misunderstanding him, the way you sometimes misread a sign that says "WET FLOOR" and think it says "WET FLOOR?" like it's asking a question. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to believe that somewhere in those paragraphs was a point that wasn't just "I drink the small can because the small can makes me feel sophisticated." I wanted to believe CryptK was making an argument and not just describing a personality trait.
He was describing a personality trait.
CryptK drinks Red Bull the way he does everything else: precisely, minimally, and with an air of quiet superiority that would be impressive if it weren't so fundamentally wrong about everything. CryptK is a man who carries a vegetable peeler in a Pelican case. CryptK measures salt to the tenth of a gram. CryptK once refused to use a napkin that was "the wrong texture." I respect CryptK enormously as a colleague and a human being, but I need everyone reading this to understand that his beverage preferences are informed by the same worldview that leads a person to alphabetize their spice rack and then get visibly upset when someone puts the cumin back in the wrong place. He does not drink Red Bull because it is better. He drinks Red Bull because it is smaller, and CryptK has a pathological distrust of abundance.
Monster Energy is not a blunt object. Monster Energy is a commitment. When you open a Monster, you are saying: I have things to do, those things are going to take a while, and I am not interested in making a second trip to the fridge. A Red Bull is gone in four sips. Four sips. I have swallowed pills that lasted longer. You crack a Red Bull, you blink, and you are holding an empty can and the same existential dread you started with. A Monster lasts. A Monster is there for you at minute one and it is still there for you at minute forty-five. A Monster is a companion. A Red Bull is a sneeze.
Let me address CryptK's points in order, because he organized them with numbered headings like this is a peer-reviewed journal and not a text file about energy drinks.
CryptK describes 80 milligrams of caffeine as "precise" and "scientifically calibrated." Eighty milligrams of caffeine is a cup of green tea with aspirations. Eighty milligrams of caffeine is what I consume before I consume the thing that actually wakes me up. I operate between the hours of 11 PM and 6 AM. My circadian rhythm doesn't just not exist — my circadian rhythm packed its bags in 2019 and left a note that said "good luck." Eighty milligrams of caffeine does not enter my awareness. It is a rounding error in my bloodstream.
One hundred and sixty milligrams of caffeine is not "too much." One hundred and sixty milligrams of caffeine is the starting line. It is the minimum viable dose for a person who needs to be awake, alert, and capable of sustained focus during the hours that God intended for unconsciousness. CryptK calls this "a pharmacological event." I call it Tuesday. Different strokes.
As for the "energy blend" — taurine, ginseng, guarana, L-carnitine — CryptK dismisses these as "whatever else they found in the vitamin aisle." Taurine is an amino acid found naturally in the human body. Ginseng has been used in traditional medicine for centuries. Guarana is a natural caffeine source from the Amazon basin. L-carnitine aids in fatty acid metabolism. These are real things with real functions. CryptK writes as though Monster is mixing caffeine with wishes and raccoon tears. It is not. It is mixing caffeine with supplements that have been individually studied and found to have legitimate physiological effects. The combination may be overkill for a man who measures his salt to the tenth of a gram. For the rest of us, it is simply effective.
And yes. I once drank four Monsters in six hours. And yes. I reported that I could hear my teeth. But that's not a failure of the product. That's a failure of my dosing strategy. A gun is not defective because you pointed it at your foot. I pointed the Monster at my foot. The Monster performed exactly as designed. I have since adjusted my intake to a responsible two cans per shift, and my teeth have returned to their normal, silent operation.
CryptK praises the Red Bull can for being "slim" and "understated." He says it "does not scream." This is correct. It does not scream. It whispers. It whispers: "I cost the same as a beverage twice my size. You are paying a premium for less liquid. Enjoy."
The Red Bull can is 8.4 ounces. I want to put this in perspective. A standard juice box — the kind you give to a six-year-old at a soccer game — is 6.75 ounces. The Red Bull can is one and a half juice boxes. CryptK is paying $2.50 for one and a half juice boxes of caffeine water and calling it "understated." It's not understated. It's insufficient. It's a sample. It's the free bite they give you at Costco before you buy the real thing.
The Monster can is 16 ounces. That's a real drink. That's a beverage you can set on your desk and still be drinking thirty minutes later. That's a container with presence. CryptK says it looks like "something scratched by an animal." The animal is a monster. It is on the can because it is called Monster. The branding is internally consistent. I'm sorry that this is confusing for a man who thinks the ideal aesthetic for a beverage is "medical supply catalog."
As for my laptop sticker: the sticker stays. It has been there for five years. It is load-bearing at this point. Removing it would void the warranty. That's not how warranties work. That's how my laptop works. The sticker and I have an understanding.
CryptK says Red Bull "tastes like Red Bull" as though this is a compliment. Let me describe what Red Bull tastes like for those who have never had it: it tastes like someone dissolved a Smarties candy in carbonated cough syrup and then described the result as "invigorating." It tastes like a medicine that a European pharmacist would prescribe for "general malaise." It has been the same flavor since 1987 because nobody has been able to figure out what the flavor actually is, and therefore nobody can improve upon it, because you cannot improve a mystery. You can only accept it.
Monster has forty-seven flavors because Monster understands that human beings are complex creatures with varied preferences. This is called "meeting the market." CryptK calls it a "personality disorder." CryptK also eats the same lunch every day — grilled chicken, brown rice, steamed broccoli, measured to the gram — so his threshold for variety is not what I would call representative of the general population.
Monster Ultra White tastes like a slightly sweet, citrus-adjacent sparkling beverage with zero sugar. It is clean. It is crisp. CryptK objects to my use of the word "crisp." He says "crisp" is for apples. CryptK does not get to gatekeep adjectives. The English language is a shared resource and I will deploy it however I see fit. The drink is crisp. It is also refreshing. It is also better than whatever Red Bull is doing, which is, as established, dissolving candy in cough syrup and charging $2.50 for a juice box of it.
Monster Rehab is named "Rehab" because it contains tea and electrolytes and is designed as a recovery beverage, not because you need rehabilitation after drinking Monster. CryptK knows this. He chose to misrepresent it because misrepresentation is what you do when your argument doesn't survive contact with context. Rehab is an excellent post-workout drink. I do not work out. But if I did, I would drink Rehab afterward, and I would feel rehabilitated, and I would not apologize for it.
CryptK says Red Bull sponsors Formula 1 and a man who jumped from the stratosphere. This is true. Red Bull also charges $15 for a four-pack at the gas station. If I wanted to fund Felix Baumgartner's skydiving hobby, I would donate directly. When I buy an energy drink, I want an energy drink. I do not want to subsidize a man's decision to fall from space.
Monster sponsors motocross, MMA, gaming tournaments, and musicians. These are activities performed by real people in real environments that Monster drinkers actually participate in. I do not drive a Formula 1 car. I have never jumped from the stratosphere. I have, however, sat at my desk at 3 AM playing Counter-Strike while consuming an energy drink, and in that moment, Monster's cultural positioning is significantly more relevant to my lived experience than Red Bull's aspirational nonsense about pushing the limits of human achievement. I am not pushing limits. I am pushing keys. Monster understands this about me. Red Bull does not.
CryptK says Monster's cultural footprint says "We believe in adrenaline and also Kyle." I don't know who Kyle is. I assume he is a hypothetical person CryptK invented to represent a demographic he considers beneath him, which is: most demographics. CryptK considers himself above approximately 97% of the human population and the other 3% is just people he hasn't met yet.
CryptK anticipated that I would bring up price and preemptively dismissed it by comparing Monster to boxed wine and gas station hot dogs. This is a rhetorical technique known as "false equivalence" and also "being a snob."
Monster and Red Bull are the same category of product. They serve the same function. They sit on the same shelf. They are purchased by the same people in the same stores. One gives you 16 ounces for $2.50. The other gives you 8.4 ounces for $2.50. This is not wine versus boxed wine. This is the same wine in two different containers, one of which is half the size for the same price. CryptK is paying double per ounce and calling the people who notice this "unsophisticated." He is the energy drink equivalent of a person who pays more for a smaller apartment and calls it "minimalism."
Price matters. Value matters. Getting twice as much of a good thing for the same money is not a compromise. It is mathematics. Mathematics is not sophisticated or unsophisticated. Mathematics is just correct. And mathematically, CryptK is getting robbed.
CryptK conceded this point in his own document. I accept his concession. I have nothing to add. This is the only time in recorded history that CryptK has conceded anything, and I want it preserved for posterity. Screenshot it. Frame it. Put it next to his wife's PGP-signed love letter. This is a moment.
CryptK calls Red Bull "the AK-47 of energy drinks." The AK-47 was designed in 1947 by Mikhail Kalashnikov because the Soviet Union needed a weapon that was cheap, simple, and could be operated by anyone with minimal training. It is reliable. It is effective. It is also, by modern standards, obsolete for anyone who has access to better options. Red Bull is the AK-47 of energy drinks in the way that CryptK did not intend: it was great for its time, it still works, and there are better things available now.
Monster is the M4. Updated platform. Modular. Configurable. Forty-seven configurations. You can outfit it for any situation. CryptK may prefer the AK because it's what he knows. I respect tradition. But I also respect evolution, and Monster has evolved while Red Bull has spent thirty-seven years selling the same 8.4-ounce can of mystery-flavored carbonated determination and acting like that's a virtue.
CryptK is wrong. He has always been wrong. He will read this and he will not change his mind because CryptK does not change his mind about anything once his mind has been made, which is why he still uses a flip phone from 2018 and considers this a "security decision" rather than what it actually is, which is stubbornness.
The prosecution rests. I'm opening another Monster. It's going to last me forty-five minutes. CryptK's Red Bull lasted him four sips and a sense of superiority. We are not the same.
CryptK's original: Why Red Bull Is Objectively Superior to Monster Energy
d4rkfl0w's addendum, submitted unsolicited at 6 AM: "I drink Bang and I think you're both wrong but I know better than to get between you two about this. Also CryptK is right about the sticker. It looks terrible. Also n1ghtsh1ft is right about the price. Also I'm going to bed."
VexNull's addendum, submitted at 8 AM: "I drink water. This entire argument is beneath me. I'm locking the channel."
SsSnake's addendum, submitted at an unspecified time from an unspecified location: "Coffee."