The borg — "blackout rage gallon"

February 24, 2023 12:42 PM

Health educators praise college students for less dangerous binge drinking. A borg is perceived as a more sanitary alternative to the communal “jungle juice” vats that many may remember from their high school or college days. Bon Appetit questions if this is a viral wellness trend. And a recipe for those who are curious/ insane/ ready to party this weekend. And don't forget the punny name!
posted by Word_Salad (53 comments total)

Faderade, is that you?

I will never forget, if indeed I remember, the kickball league midsummer tournament day where the person who mixed our faderade cooler did half and half water and vodka instead of a 1:8 or so ratio. Catastrophic.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:05 PM on February 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

.....Honestly, the name "Borg" suits the old "jungle juice" formula better, because the Borg assimilated everything else.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:09 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yikes at some of the old school stories about drinking shit (pun intended) out of dirty frat house bathtubs and trash cans. Admittedly, I never went to any frat parties in my university days, but at least the legal drinking age here is 18 instead of 21 like the US, so we could party and shitty dive bars and nightclubs like god intended.

Sure, it was more expensive than going to house parties, but that probably also helped prevent alcohol poisoning.
posted by asnider at 1:22 PM on February 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

I do not remember "jungle juice." I mostly drank beer (at parties) or 40s of Old English. And of course frozen margaritas every Friday at Mad Mex (RIP). But I also wasn't in the frat scene at all. And the parties I went to had kegs an long DJ line ups.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:24 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

So we're just gonna pretend we didn't all mix Tang and vodka in college and call it a screwdriver? Ok.
posted by solotoro at 1:34 PM on February 24, 2023 [18 favorites]

The health pitch would be slightly more convincing if it didn’t have “black out” in the name.
posted by atoxyl at 1:36 PM on February 24, 2023 [17 favorites]

I mean, everyone is going to make their parties their way. I was my fraternity house's bartender and punch master for a good long while back in the early/mid 90's. Being a bunch of MIT nerds and me being trained in kitchens, I was always super careful about sanitation, but the stuff I made was pretty much bog standard jungle juice.

- Clean, new trashcans
- Food grade liners
- More cheap nasty vodka than is responsible
- A mix of various Kool-Aid and Country Time lemonade flavors
- Water
- Ice
- Sliced up oranges and lemons.

Mix and serve.

Got really good at making it so that you could drink it and not realize it was a stiff drink. Learned that for the first party of the year, I needed to make weaker because fresh-people went through it way faster than one should.

This looks like a formula for -tailoring to your own preferences in terms of flavor and strength and maybe possibly keeping yourself safer from nefarious assholes trying to slip you something in the mystery drink they're handing you. (good lord that never occurred to me back in the day that people would do that)
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:44 PM on February 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

Like grumpybear69, I also mostly drank beer at house parties, as did most people (or coolers, Smirnoff Ice, etc). Are these big vats of "jungle juice" mostly a frat thing? Because I wasn't really into that scene but I also think the frat scene in Canada is somewhat different than in the US, in part because of our lower legal drinking age.

Sure, they still throw big keggers and such, but the availability of legal alcohol tempers things a little bit.
posted by asnider at 1:46 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

We called it "Hairy Buffalo" at my university, but it was the same basic recipe (fruit, vodka, Kool-Aid, etc.).
posted by cooker girl at 1:49 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Are these jugs literal gallon jugs? Because I like drinking, but half a gallon of vodka does not seem like a good amount to drink.
posted by snofoam at 1:51 PM on February 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

so we could party and shitty dive bars and nightclubs like god intended.

When I lived in residence they had a shitty bar on the mainfloor, which was convenient(?). The bar served the cheapest beer that could legally be considered a beverage and didn't care that not everyone at university is over 18 (I wasn't). It also was not open during the summer and would have a huge blow out drink everything party at the end of the spring semester.

My memory is hazy but I think the Garneau pub used to serve "jungle juice" which always struck me as not a thing you sell at an actual bar which can make real drinks for people. I think/hope that was just marketing.
posted by selenized at 1:52 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, yeah, everybody knows that if your serving vessel's provenance is suspect, you compensate by mixing your death-punch with enough cheap vodka to ensure that it functions as a topical antibiotic. The vessel of choice for my idiot friends and myself in undergrad was a paint can, and although we always got a new one for every major occasion, some bio major friends of mine also did some in-depth testing of what concentration of ethanol was necessary to guarantee sterilization of the major pathogens of concern. We did some fantastically stupid things after drinking from said paintcans, but no one ever got tetanus and (to the best of our knowledge) the term "superspreader event" was never used to describe one of those parties.
posted by Mayor West at 1:57 PM on February 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

intransigence is futile.
posted by clavdivs at 1:58 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

The most innovative punch mixology I encountered in my youth was the one-off my friends improvised that… bore a definite family relation to sangria, except that instead of fresh fruit and sparkling water it used Dr. Pepper, plus a significant dose of homemade “green dragon” cannabis tincture. This is also a safer way to drink, as everyone will be asleep on the couch two and a half hours in and unable to get in any trouble.
posted by atoxyl at 2:00 PM on February 24, 2023 [18 favorites]

I went to a crunchy hippie college that did not have any frats, and we made plenty of handcrafted, organic, artisanal jungle juice. Couldn’t really claim it was locally sourced though.
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:10 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Borg drinking is a great way to get your daily dose of vitamins and minerals. It’s like having an energy drink, but without any sugar or calories! Plus you feel awesome after doing this because all that water chugged keeps the body hydrated so it feels good in every way possible."

I don't think that's how this works.
posted by slogger at 2:16 PM on February 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't think that's how this works.

Never let the facts get in the way of the stories humanity tells to justify getting out of our heads for a while.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:23 PM on February 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

Presumably nowadays lefty hipster kids are drinking The Laborg Theory of Value, David Graeborg, Community Borganizing, Borg Joon-Ho, etc
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:23 PM on February 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

"Brown vs the Borg of Education" the kids are all right.

Honestly this sounds delightful except that the artificial sweetener in those powders would give me a migraine long before a hangover had a chance to kick in.

I don't think that's how this works.

Absolutely no question though that it's probably closer to achieving what it advertises than the handle of Jack Daniels I carried around on my 18th birthday. (I was not in Canada.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:28 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

The most innovative punch mixology I encountered in my youth was the one-off my friends improvised that… bore a definite family relation to sangria, except that instead of fresh fruit and sparkling water it used Dr. Pepper, plus a significant dose of homemade “green dragon” cannabis tincture.

ok so slightly off-topic secondhand story:

I used to work at an organic grocery store on the premises of a dairy farm in buttfuck nowhere Wisconsin run by a punk hippy from the Santa Cruz hills & his equally hippy if more subtly punk wife, so, anything you're imagining about this setup is probably correct

one Saturday on which I was not working, the other two clerks who were on shift were lamenting their hangovers, & H mentioned it'd be really wonderful to have a bloody mary

D, who is very sweet & we love her, offered to run into the farmhouse & see if she could assemble bloody maries for the two of them, H was super on board

D returns with two bloody maries, she & H drink them, a short while later H starts feeling off & asks D "uh what did you put in these bloody maries"

"We were out of the clear vodka so I used the green vodka," she replied

D was not aware of this at the time, but "the green vodka" was a green dragon tincture so powerful that even the most resilient cannabis enthusiasts on the farm had declared it not for consumption by humans & they kept the bottle around to dose sick calves, I shit you not

as H described it to me later: "I smoke a lot, right? Like I smoke a lot... I could not feel my legs"

she wound up serving customers high off her ass for the rest of the shift while D lay in a field & stared at cows or something
posted by taquito sunrise at 2:36 PM on February 24, 2023 [42 favorites]

I invented the Russian Jockstrap. Vodka and Gatorade. I am not proud.
posted by Splunge at 2:47 PM on February 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

Metafilter: anything you're imagining about this setup is probably correct
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:16 PM on February 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

As I was pedaling to work this last fall, I saw a bunch of college students decked out in their football-watchin' wear, (UO Duck t-shirts and other assorted collegiate gear), while toting these big plastic milk or juice jugs full of liquid in weird, not-found-in-nature colors. I knew there must be booze in the jugs, but I didn't know it was a national trend. The more you know! Oh, and the jungle juice that was traditionally served at my hometown's parties was mixed with Everclear, (95% proof), never vodka. Kids in Northern Nevada went for broke, apparently.
posted by but no cigar at 3:21 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

I went to house parties in college ('90-'94ish) and many afterwards. I never saw a giant tub or garbage can filled with booze/punch. We almost exclusively drank beer. House parties would have kegs. And people would bring some of their own preferred beer. I can remember some people making mixed drinks in kitchens, but they used plastic pitchers and cups. Some of these house parties were pretty degenerate, but... trash cans of mixed booze and Kool-Aid/whatever? Yikes.

I guess we had standards. Didn't seem like it at the time. Except we drank the better beer before the crappy beer.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:23 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

(I meant 95% ABV. Even today, that apparently boggles my mind.)
posted by but no cigar at 3:27 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I hate feeling like a buzzkill ex-drinker when I read stuff like this or the accompanying discussion. Surely there should be some room amidst the warm glow of remembered hedonism to acknowledge that alcohol consumption at any age kills a lot of people and destroys the lives of countless others, drinkers and bystanders alike, and that for many people drinking habits acquired while young can seamlessly transition into full blown alcoholism? I've also been thinking about potentially counterintuitive studies like this one (more drinking is associated with higher socioeconomic class, but lower SES individuals experience worse consequences and that is further worsened by other forms of marginalization like being nonwhite).
posted by derrinyet at 3:35 PM on February 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

(I meant 95% ABV. Even today, that apparently boggles my mind.)

I have a college freshman in the family, and I stopped keeping Everclear on hand (to make Green Dragon) because I know what grade she got in highschool chemistry and she's just not up to the challenge of titrating her dose without ending up in trouble.

With the spectrum running from "WTF is this 'punch'?" to "I don't want to get roofied", I understand why she's filling a water bottle with vodka when she goes out.
posted by mikelieman at 3:36 PM on February 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

@SoberHighland - at least for me when I was mixing that stuff it was for parties of a few hundred people and was meant to supplement the kegs we had on hand.

One year, MIT banned kegs from campus. So for our big annual party that brought folks from all around New England, we special ordered some ungodly number of cases of the cheapest rack rate beer we could find. It was awful stuff and I'm fairly certain that didn't matter.

And @derrinyet - I don't think it's a buzzkill thing at all. Booze like any other intoxicant/habit needs to be thought about carefully. Since I'm on the periphery of the brewing world, it's also interesting to note that in general - trend data from Gen Z shows that they drink way less than the previous generations. (a trend shared across multiple western countries), so I think people are definitely growing up with a message of "don't be too much of an idiot, please"
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:40 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought for sure this was another corny story by out-of-touch reporters, but I texted my nephew who's in college asking about it and he responded with photos of several photos of him and his friends with their borgs, so in case anyone was wondering- yes, this is real.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 3:54 PM on February 24, 2023 [15 favorites]

>, and the jungle juice that was traditionally served at my hometown's parties was mixed with Everclear, (95% proof), never vodka. Kids in Northern Nevada went for broke, apparently.

This is (or was in the 90s) common in many places. They added water too, so the result wasn't stronger than vodka, it's just that everclear plus water had less off-flavor than vodka at that price range.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 3:56 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

At my alma mater the standard bathtub/kiddie pool concoction was named Purple Jesus, and when I was a frosh in 1992 my orientation group leaders spent most of that week openly trying (and in most cases succeeding, although not in mine because I didn't really start drinking until my third year) to get us drunk on the stuff. I'm guessing that is very much not the way things roll these days. There was also a "fun" party game they more or less browbeat us into which consisted of guys and gals pairing off and pressing a water balloon between their chests until it burst, which I also doubt happens in that context anymore.

Once I did start partying I leapt in with both feet, and have *mostly* good memories of that period of my life, but pretty much everyone in my circle of friends was drunk every weekend (and between 0-3 weekdays on any given week), and that sort of atmosphere made it difficult to even think about the prospect of any given person possibly having a problematic relationship with alcohol. Basically, aside from people who were violent drunks and/or habitually created unpleasant drama at parties, pretty much anything in terms of of boozy behaviour was tolerated and often celebrated within my peer group, and it's sobering (pun intended) how many people I know from those days who either quit drinking altogether or (in a couple of cases) absolutely should. Also, a guy in residence I lent my ID to a few times because he wasn't 19 when first year started wound up drinking himself to death before he was 30.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:02 PM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wow, Purple Jesus! My parents are divorced and don't talk to each other, but when I went to college, they both independently pulled me aside and told me "Never drink anything called a 'Purple Jesus.'"

(I didn't get invited to that kind of party. I was hanging out with the people trying to sneak entire pizzas into the midnight showing of Lord of the Rings.)
posted by blnkfrnk at 4:37 PM on February 24, 2023 [27 favorites]

My favorite drink to prep for the (admittedly too frequent) parties we staged in grad school was Tropical Punch.

Two half-gallons of Dole Pine-Orange-Banana and a fifth of Bacardi white rum. Served in a punch bowl, because we were civilized people.

Delicious! And it was so smooth, as one of our guests remarked, “You can drink it like milk.” It was very easy to get WAY into your cups before you realized it.

I don’t know that I ever would have carried around a gallon jug of personal beverage all night at a party, but whatever works!
posted by darkstar at 4:54 PM on February 24, 2023

pffft
You young yuppies with your upscale jungle juices and your purple Jesuses.

Penn State
Early 70's
MadDog

You really haven't ever had a real hangover until you've had enough MD 20/20 to paralyze an elephant.
posted by BlueHorse at 6:23 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is more or less what I made up while hike camping on an island once but mine was Malibu (clearly, I came of age in the 00s), tablet purified lakewater and a packet of Crystal Light for flavour, all in a Nalgene (again, clearly the 00s). It was delicious, but only while camping. I called them Island Pops, for obvious reasons.
posted by urbanlenny at 7:09 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I tried this during Superb Owl, despite being way too old, and using an age-appropriate portion of ethanol. I understand the kidneys eliminate no more than 1L of water per hour, so a gallon of liquid is going to take about five hours to process, unless you're day-drinking in the hot sun, which I was not. By the end I was feeling like Violet Beauregarde if she had drank Tang instead of blueberry.
posted by credulous at 7:31 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Went to a major party school (Playboy #1 the first year I was there), but not to any major parties.

But I did get drunk for first time at a sit down dinner party hosted by the Dean of Admissions and Records.

I thought it was some kind of school thing, but when I got there, it was me, the Dean and his wife, and three other male students of uncertain provenance. We drank white wine with hors d'oeuvres, red wine with the main course, and cloudy after dinner drinks in front of the fire tasting incredibly intensely of licorice, and that I assume must have been ouzo.

The after dinner scene somehow devolved into the Dean's wife and one of the other students, who was on the school tennis team I think, having an extended wrestling match on the thick white rug in front of the fireplace. I glanced around the circle trying to assess whether I was the only one to whom this seemed a little out of the ordinary for a dinner party.

Was the Dean's benevolent smile a bit fixed, perhaps? I thought so. Did the other boys struggle to tear their eyes away from the couple on the rug long enough to contribute to a coherent conversation? Clearly.

And then the lights went out. I had reached the visual memory blackout stage, and though I remembered subsequent conversation pretty well the next day, the rest of the night might as well have taken place in the depths of a cave before the invention of fire, as far as I was concerned.

Three years later I was pushing a shopping cart behind my girlfriend in the King Soopers when I saw the Dean's wife coming toward us down the aisle — ahead of a cart pushed by the student she'd been wrestling with on the rug.

She looked vital and happy; he looked … trapped.

I’m pretty sure that was a scene from the second act of a three act tragedy, and I consider it a privilege to have avoided being present in the audience at the final curtain.
posted by jamjam at 7:47 PM on February 24, 2023 [27 favorites]

I have a friend who always yells "Safety THIRD!"
"first is hydration, second is friendship." BORG seems to fit those rules.
posted by Grandysaur at 7:57 PM on February 24, 2023 [15 favorites]

Purple Jesus!

For real though, early college was a lot of Boone’s Farm and Vodka+juice. Later college, I could order a couple gin and tonics in bars and then, like, go home or whatever.
posted by thivaia at 8:06 PM on February 24, 2023

I can't remember what we called our version of this when I was in school. I've been trying to think of it, but I can't. Classically we'd mix it in something like a bucket using something like grapefruit soda(?). I think it was a one-word name that sounded kind of sophisticated, like it almost could have been like "Faulkner" or "Orwell."
posted by grobstein at 8:12 PM on February 24, 2023

I invented the Russian Jockstrap. Vodka and Gatorade. I am not proud.

When I was 21 I invented a fantastic drink made of red Gatorade, vodka and peppermint schnapps. It did not have a name because I was hitting bottom and always drank it alone.
posted by bendy at 9:54 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

nestor_makhno's University famous Jungle juice.

1 gallon orange colored Tampico
1 gallon pink colored Tampico
1 handle (1.75 l) vodka

Pour into water cooler, add a block of ice and serve.
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:25 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Somewhere and -when it was called Yuccaflux if you scrumped a potato sack of oranges and grapefruits from the nearby groves and squeezed them into the bin with the fruit juicy, the neon lemonade and the mineral spirits.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 12:36 AM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Recovered alcoholic here, and the experience I had first week of freshman year (I was just turned 17) with one of those big vats of high-alcohol stuff was a horrible blackout (think throwing up violently in the shower while classmates tried to help me without drawing the attention of the RA). This may sound paradoxical, but I avoided those kinds of things going forward because I would have died, being incapable of moderating my drinking at all. As a result, I only had one other blackout by the time I stopped drinking at 22, and that too involved a party and punch now that I think of it.

It's deliberately dysfunctional drinking by people who have no reason to drink dysfunctionally. I've never understood it. The idea for me was to be able to keep drinking, not to destroy my stomach lining.
Note to add that destroying the stomach lining was a byproduct but not the main point
posted by Peach at 5:12 AM on February 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

This story brought back some memories. Full disclosure: I don’t use alcohol and never have.

I worked on the Alfred University student newspaper in 1978. On a cold February night I got a 2am call saying that “somebody at Klan Alpine is really f**ked up” and that I should “do a story about it.” Shocked and mystified, I dressed and headed for the frat house—where the tiny college town was overwhelmed by flashing lights and people in uniforms.

Chuck Stenzel, a pledge, died that night after aspirating his own vomit. I had friends in the frat and knew their party philosophy (rage hard, get laid, throw up, pass out) so was sadly unsurprised.

Just a few weeks earlier the Jonestown Massacre inspired University students to have a party where folks were greeted and offered spiked Kool-Aid from a trash barrel, then led to another room where they sat on the floor as a drunk bro with a Mr. Microphone exorted everyone to drink up. This was all considered quite amusing.

Did Chuck’s death change anything? No. It wasn’t until another frat-related death a few years later that University officials decided to eliminate the Greek nonsense, though I’m sure alcohol experimentation continues. College-age kids have never had any real sense of mortality or danger and likely never will, if this article is any indication. Wow, an easy, sugary way to get trashed? And this is considered “wellness”? Damn.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:22 AM on February 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

"I have a friend who always yells "Safety THIRD!"
"first is hydration, second is friendship." BORG seems to fit those rules." - Grandysaur

I was taught "safety third, after money and good looks!" This was when I frequently had to climb tall ladders for work. This happened to coincide with my early party drinking days.

Most of my high school friends all went to college the same year, and to the same college with a fairly large frat system. I was still at home and working. They all made it into the same frat. The drinking and substance use was intense, and led to negative outcomes for many. What they would do was have frat members be on duty throughout the night as bartenders pouring out hundreds of tiny individual shots of terrible vodka into plastic cups. Next to these were similarly sized shots of chaser - Kool aid, soda, juice. It varied. Also available was the cheapest possible beer. You just walked up and grabbed them off the bar. They sometimes did themed stuff with jungle juice (called spodie) but I don't think trash cans were involved, the frat house had a commercial kitchen in it.

The shots were probably .5 oz pours? It was common to brag about how many you had, but the numbers would never make sense if it was a full bar style pour. Then again I did used to chug water bottles full of vodka. Things you can do in that brief period before your body has memories of what the consequences will be. We did not add water to the vodka bottles...

Later I started bringing my own slightly nicer booze, and then a bit after that I stopped being invited/going down for parties.
posted by jellywerker at 5:46 AM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re "sense of mortality." I wonder at what age the "I could have died" realization sets in and how it correlates with the onset age of attempts to eat, drink, exercise, and otherwise try to live longer.
posted by Peach at 6:37 AM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Now I'm gonna have to contact the Reed College alumni to see if they can help me find the guy who brewed beer from blue raspberry Kool Aid.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 4:24 PM on February 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fresh-people living in a dorm. Friday night. The over 21 pair have returned from the hall liquor run and the drinking was about to begin. A friend of mine insisted that he needed ice for his drink. I asked him, wasn’t there an ice machine in the chemistry building just across the street? Yes, he said and grabbed something to fill with ice. Upon his return, he started to make his drinks. The next day he suffered from severe intestinal distress of the liquid variety. On Monday, he mentioned to the guy who managed the chemistry supply room (this guy was known as the water pipe kit provider) about the ice machine. Oh, he said, that’s just industrial grade water, you can’t drink that shit!
posted by njohnson23 at 4:50 PM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re "sense of mortality." I wonder at what age the "I could have died" realization sets in and how it correlates with the onset age of attempts to eat, drink, exercise, and otherwise try to live longer.

Well, I had that realization some 20 years ago but I'm still waiting for the onset of any attempts to try to live longer.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 6:04 PM on February 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

BoC

(Box of Crayons, any Cornell College alumns here?)
posted by porpoise at 8:35 PM on February 25, 2023

I grew up in Colorado where at least in my neck of the woods jungle juice (with everclear, fruit, and kool aid) was more of a high school thing. By the time I got to college it was all microbrews at parties or cheap yellow beer at the bars that didn't card.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:33 PM on February 27, 2023

I just chatted with my college senior who asked me if I'd heard of Borg and thanks to this thread I had.

She was very disappointed that several young people she talked with at the "darty" (day party) she was at did not get her Borg's punny name: Lyndon Borg Johnson.
posted by vespabelle at 6:34 PM on March 6, 2023