Why can I still buy Sparks?

One of the colorful ads that, according to state attorneys, was aimed at attracting underage drinkers. What they failed to realize is that Sparks was really targeting the vast Urban Manchild market share and picked up teenagers by mistake.

When I first heard about the government winning the war on Sparks, thus forcing 19-year-olds across the land to take the extra step of combining Red Bull and vodka, the press release from Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller seemed to clearly state that there would be no Sparks, no longer:

MillerCoors will stop producing, marketing and selling “Sparks,” its top-selling pre-mixed alcoholic energy drinks, Attorney General Tom Miller said Thursday.

Seems pretty straightforward, right?

On top of that, much of the Death of Sparks coverage on my radar was of a mournful, candle-in-the-wind bent: It’s gone. It’s dead. After January 10, 2009, it’s OK Cola.

Friends with whom I used to drink Sparks in college and I were therefore bummed that a historically accurate recreation of that one legendary night of the taser, the two feet of snow and the ¿Quien Es Mas Macho? contest was now off the table for future college reunions.

We made some grandiose statements about the end of an era, swore up and down we were going to buy up all the remaining cases in the city for future black-market sale out of an ice-cream truck parked behind Making Time, forgot, then promptly turned to crystal meth to make up for the loss in party stamina.

Kidding about the meth part! Meth is terrible! But when orange-and-silver cans continued to show up on shelves well after the back inventory should have run out, I shrugged, figured maybe MillerCoors had taken it to court after all and forgot about it just as completely as I forgot about my stockpile/grocery cart/Making Time plan.

But wait, have you looked at those cans lately?

It’s somewhat like seeing your mother come back as a zombie*: it looks nearly the same, and you want to believe it’s the same, but it’s eerily wrong and lacking something integral (braaaaainssssss may also be destroyed in both cases).

The battery +/- symbols are gone, because that somehow appeals to teenagers, but more importantly: the Sparks on the market post-legal action no longer have uppers. Of course they don’t! Hell, the Wall Street Journal even noticed, and I find it hard to picture them with orange tongues.

MillerCoors, a joint venture of SABMiller PLC and Molson Coors Brewing Co., will voluntarily reformulate Sparks to remove caffeine, taurine, guarana and ginseng from the product. Sparks comes in tall 24-ounce orange-and-silver cans that sell for about $2.50 at retailers.

The agreement is a blow to the company because Sparks had a built a niche following and was the dominant product in the category. London-based SABMiller acquired the brand and several other alcohol products from McKenzie River Corp. for $215 million in 2006. It is unclear if fans of Sparks will continue to buy the drink without several of its principal ingredients.

But people do continue to buy caffeine-free Sparks! Maybe they’re getting tweaked off the placebo effect. Maybe they just love the taste, in some weird Stockholm Syndrome situation. They certainly haven’t stopped doing that “Free Sparks from 9-11!!!” promo at Making Time, although lord knows free drinks at Making Time is kind of a fairy tale in the first place.

But don’t just take my word for it that people are still buying Sparks, ask MillerCoors’ First Quarter 2009 Earnings Report!

The Sparks franchise continued to generate growth in the first quarter following reformulation of the product.

Not much in the way of concrete numbers on that, but still. The brand is growing after losing its central selling point? Based on this, I’ve got to assume that there’s a ton of people like myself out there who just didn’t notice when the switch happened. So let this be a consciousness raiser:

THE SPARKS BEING SOLD SINCE JANUARY 10, 2009 NO LONGER HAVE CAFFEINE. THERE IS NO EARTHLY REASON TO DRINK THEM UNLESS YOU LOVE THE TASTE OF CHILDREN’S TYLENOL OR ARE THROWING A BUSH-ERA NOSTALGIA PARTY TEN YEARS FROM NOW.

OK, now that that public service announcement’s out of the way, here’s some weirdly fascinating extra-credit reading on the entry of Sparks into Philadelphia via Making Time founder Dave Pianka in this 2004 story in the Philadelphia Independent:

(A DJ hired to make sound clips for the Sparks website) mentioned the beverage to his friend Matthew Werth, a Philadelphian breaking into the youth marketing and promotions business after the sale of his record label File 13. Werth had hoped to strike a deal. What he found was a kindred spirit.

“The first rep I dealt with was totally fucking cool, totally on the level. She dated a guy in the Rapture,” he recalls. He declined to give the rep’s name.

The rep sent forty cases of Sparks to the Last Drop Café at 13th and Pine, where Werth’s business partner, former barista David Pianka, receives his packages. Werth later brought the 960 unopened sixteen-ounce orange and silver cans to a friend’s party in South Philadelphia. The beverage is now a regular sponsor of the parties he and Pianka promote in various cities.

That original Sparks website, which was so frenetic the Attorneys General said in their suit that it looked like it had been made by a college freshman, was one of the things the states pointed at to say that Sparks was being marketed to underage drinkers, and it was shut down as part of the agreement. Sadly, it has not been stored by the Internet Archive, so whatever that (almost certainly obnoxious) looping sound clip was that tangentially brought Sparks to Philly is now lost.

In fact, all you find at sparks.com these days is this: