Barrel Drink, Anyone?

When your favorite flavor is a color, and makes you cough when you drink it...

We got soda, purple stuff, SUNNY D! Affectionately know as 'Little Hugs, or quarter juice,' these barrels of goodness take me back to a time before PBR had a glimmer of meaning to me. I remember going to the grocery store with my mom when I was younger, and for some reason the little barrels of artificially-flavored, high fructose corn syrupy tastiness called out to me. They were novel, neon colored, barrel shaped, and tasted like the liquid inside one of those wax bottles you bite the caps off and drink. My mother, after much protest, would eventually give in to buying me a few quarter juices (even though they contained less than 1% juice) because I would usually threaten to knock over one of the aisle displays in defiance if the barrels were not placed in the cart. I then had my own little bottle of forbidden wonderment, slowly peeled the foil off and escaped into sugar coma Nirvana.

Later in life, I have come to notice that all the kids that had barrel drinks in their lunch boxes at school are also the craziest raging alcoholics I know, and that's a tall order in LA. Coincidence? Is there a link between barrel drinks and alcoholism? They just look so innocent.