Howdy all, I'm your benchmarking platform and test coordinator, Aaron McKenna. Over the course of the last few weeks we've had to reinvent the wheel, developing the highest quality benchmarks to precisely calculate which beverage is the best suited to fulfilling your needs. In true THG style, we've come up with several highly advanced and technical tests, from the "How sick do I feel after drinking this stuff?" questionnaire to the "How much productivity is lost due to running back and forth between the bathroom and your desk?" metric.

The tests are outlined in much greater detail below.

Test The Second, Reaction Times. Err, What Happened To The First One?

The second test is far more scientific than the first, entirely fictional and non existent test. What was it? What happened to it? Err, I went on something of a bad caffeine trip and couldn't tell you. Moving along swiftly...

Using this approved and validated flash game , which I found totally randomly on the net, I test reflexes by shooting sheep up with heroin... err, a tranquilizer. The sheep dash forth like little buggers in their attempt to escape the man-made animal brothel that is the Isle of Man, and it's up to yours truly to stop them in their tracks. The longer you take to shoot the woolly jail breakers, the worse your score is - but shoot too soon and you get a nasty 3 seconds put on your reaction time.

The first test of the second test is conducted just after waking up, before breakfast and the first drink of the day. Then tests are taken immediately after drinking the beverage under test and also on the following strict schedule: 15 minutes after drinking, 30 minutes after drinking and an hour after drinking. The results are correlated to make a funny line on a graph that shows you something.

Test The Third, The Buzz. This Time 32.5556% More On The Ceiling.

Energy drinks give you a buzz. That's why athletes use them as well as geeks. The problem for us is that we're not going to be running a marathon, and it is actually quite essential that we stay at our desks. Drinks that wake us up, focus us and then make us want to prance about like Freddy Mercury in front of 72,000 people are not going to be very conducive to the kind of work we do.

Thus, I monitor just how capable of doing work I am, and the amount of fidgeting that is caused by the energy drink. Oh, and if I happen to spontaneously run a marathon, I'll let you know about that, too, though don't hold out much hope; there's only so much that caffeine can do to someone's brain.

Test The Fourth, The Crash. A Human Blue Screen Of Death?

The human body is a bigger sucker for good looking things than your teenage daughter is, and when it gets a little of something even remotely pleasurable or stimulating it'll crave it to the point of destruction. Give it a stimulant and then suddenly stop, and it'll let you know in a big hurry just how annoyed it is at you... think of it as like having a wife, except you shake more.

It doesn't take much to put you down and out either - after almost casually drinking two mugs of coffee one day, yours truly spent the rest of the evening in withdrawal.

So this simple test looks at how capable of continuing with work (and life in general) one is after the buzz has worn off.

...And All The Miscellaneous Stuff...

Did I miss anything? Ohh, terribly sorry... the little things such as the social experience of making coffee versus exploding a can of Red Bull all over your boss will be explored here, among anything else I can come up with. Hmm, what about those mugs where the wimmen take their clothes off as you put hot liquid in... not that I use them, mind you. I have butterflies and flowers on my mug, and they stay that way when I put the coffee in. I swear.