Those of you who know me know that my favorite color is orange. You might also know that I quite enjoy coffee. Nothing wakes me up in the morning like my alarm, and nothing dulls the pain of waking up too early like a cup of joe. So you're probably asking yourself "why buy a coffee alternative, then, you dolt?" And to answer your question, I didn't buy it. Rather, I have a generous and wonderful friend who offered to pick me up some coffee while she was in Gardiner.
Gardiner, MT, for those of you successful enough to not work at Yellowstone, is essentially the Hogsmeade of the park. It is the nearest real town to the Yellowstone village of Mammoth Hot Springs, where I and a bunch of other wonderful weirdos work. If I run out of a crucial supply like coffee, I can either buy it from the general store between the hours of "screw you" and "get off work earlier if you want to shop, idiot" o'clock (Mountain Time) or take a hidden passageway underneath a statue to Gardiner. Without a Marauders Map, I was hopeless to venture to Gardiner myself. Luckily, other people were smart enough to bring a car, yet dumb enough to let me take advantage of their car-having. So I texted this lady, asking if she could pick something up for me.
"What do you need? "
"Just some coffee"
"What kind?"
"Doesn't matter"
The next scene opens with her hand-delivering the groceries to my room out of the kindness of her heart, only for me to absolutely roast her for buying coffee alternative. Why do people hang out with me? A question for another day, and many sleepless nights. Anyway, it turns out the coffee isn't real. It's disguised as coffee, hidden in a coffee-like bag, lurking in the aisles of the Gardiner market, just waiting to be picked by an unsuspecting victim like a mushroom that gives you real death instead of ego death. Regardless, I wasn't about to subject myself to the unknown abyss that is coffee alternatives just yet, and so I purchased genuine coffee while on my next outing.
Cut to me, a week or so later, finally brewing this stuff. I open the package only for my nose to be sweetly greeted with the delicious aroma of delicate chocolate. I have to resist the urge to eat the grounds straight like the little piggy I am. As I brew it, I'm delighted to see a wonderful bloom start to form over the grounds, typically a sign of some truly dank coffee. Could this imposter be even better than the original, like Oreos and that cleaning-solution-sounding other cookie they copied? I prepare my olfactory organs for the pleasure they're about to receive. I take a sip - my spine begins to contort itself into a knot and my head embarks on its voyage to travel 360° around my neck. I had just given my mouth the taste-equivalent of slamming one's finger in a doorway.
The taste of this coffee alternative is more akin to a lead fishing sinker than it is to any form of coffee. I've had influenza that tasted better than this - and with a better mouth feel, too. The stuff was thinner than a Soviet's food ration. It felt like liquid fiberglass insulation on the tongue, but without a lovable cartoon mascot to dull the pain. In my beverage power rankings, Crio Bru is placed just above hydrofluoric acid, and just below that carton of orange juice from 2007 I found beneath my bed in 2016. I highly recommend everyone double check their coffee bags at the grocery store next time they shop for coffee to ensure they won't legally assault their loved ones by serving them a cup of this hogwash.
4/10
TL;DR: This cocoa bean-based coffee alternative has delicious scents of chocolate and sweetness. This is contrasted heavily by the sour taste of what I can only describe as concentrated afterbirth and tree bark. There's a soft hint of chocolate if you can force your taste buds to ignore their alarms blaring with every sip. If toilets had taste buds, drinking Crio Bru is as close as humans could get to feeling their pain.
(This review was typed and posted on a smart phone, using the world's slowest internet, in Yellowstone National Park. Excuse any typos or formatting errors. As always, please address all complaints to your mother.)
