Fifteen Again, in a Can

Ahoj-Brause is the fizzy sherbet powder that German kids have been emptying directly onto their tongues since roughly forever—sour, sweet, carbonated in a weird almost-chemical way that has no right to be as good as it is. At some point someone figured out that dumping a sachet into a bottle of vodka made the vodka dramatically more tolerable, and that discovery has been quietly sustaining German nightlife ever since.

Now Columbus Drinks, the company behind the brand, has released it as an actual canned drink—orange, raspberry, lemon, and Waldmeister, a sweet woodruff flavor that sounds like something from a fairy tale and tastes vaguely medicinal in the best possible way. The logic is sound: why keep the middleman when the middleman is a crinkly foil packet of powder and a bottle of cheap vodka? Just put it in a can. Done.

There’s something a little melancholy about this, the way convenience versions of childhood things always carry a faint charge of loss alongside the convenience. The powder was the whole experience—the ritual of it, the slight mess, the fact that you were adding something illicit to something already illicit. A can is just a can. But I’ll drink it anyway. Orange first, probably.