Will Prilabs never learn? This is the same drink as Re5 and 24:7, only this time in an awful can with little marketing. With so much money to be had, it is hardly surprising that drinks like this are released to mom and pop gas stations, with the abject hope they will become winners. However, there needs to be an actual product behind it, or the energy drink bubble is going to pop and you are going to find yourself out of business faster than you could say Xenergy.

Prilabs is hocking the same wares in all their cans, and barely making enough of a marketing splash to try to separate themselves from the rest of the gazillion energy drinks in the market.
How does this drink appeal to their audience, the “music lovers – musicians, artists, and listeners?” do they give out MP3s, have headphones in a can, or shaped in an ipodlike can? Nope. Boring can with a boring idea. I won’t be sad to see this one disappear into the ether.

Buzz/Nutrition:4
This is basically a vanilla flavored Red Bull, with a meals worth of calories in it. There is just a lot of B vitamins in here, but no other normal energy drink nutrients, like taurine – and like the other prilabs products, they actually list Carbon Dioxide as an ingredient. Isn’t that a gas/non-digestible? Basically, this is a very very sour pop with an undisclosed amount of caffeine ( my guess is around 60-80 per can) and 130 empty calories. At least they knocked down a bit of the unhealthy by using sugar to sweeten it rather than High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Taste:6
Vanilla Red Bull. in a 16oz can. Really, seeing as this is made in Austria too, I would not be at all surprised to find out the company making this was Red Bull. About as original and unique and Red Bull is.Why not just buy Red Bull?

Packaging:3
Prilabs did right with re5, but this one is a big FAIL. Hard to read lime green lettering, and these lime yellow bars supposedly an equalizer is not even noticeable. From the font choice to the color to the layout – this drink will not be bought by anyone. They do get points for adding their website ( which is pretty but lacks any info) to their phone number ( which they do not return calls or ever answer ( and yeah – I tried calling them aver 8 times) – but it is SO hard to find them in thin white letters on bare aluminum that it might as well not be there at all.

Website:www.encoreenergydrink.com: 4
For being a site with absolutely no information, and not having been updated in 2 full years, the site still looks surprisingly clean and nice. The design is clean – and they have 1 good song, that I hope they actually paid for. Why the low score then? Well, if you are going to have an update section, it would be good to use it sometimes, as opposed to all the coming soon screens. There are sections stating “coming soon” which it is now painfully obvious is never going to work. Shame this nice bit of marketing died for this drink so long ago – the site, like the drink, had some real promise.