BAR REVIEW: RED BULL CREATORS CLUB

by Jarrett Green

Generally speaking, I am anti-club music when it’s not paired with club alcohol. That is to say, heavy pours of cheap booze mixed with supermarket private label-quality mixers that strike the perfect mix between acrid death sauce and performance enhancing drug. The kind of shit that can convince a younger me that this 10 minute mash-up Jersey club bangers that the DJ clearly just stole from the Diamond Cuts drive time radio mix is good actually.

This year, PAX and Red Bull teamed up in a way that produced an alarming surplus of canned speed for the low price of for free, and an attempt at a VIP lounge for media and content creators to… do something. It’s certainly not to chill – the DJ was turned up to 11 both in volume and in energy regardless of the amount of people in the room – but there were plenty of spaces to do just that scattered from wall to wall. There were couches in one corner, some arcade cabinets with modest seating along the wall, and some tall tables with barstools spotting the floor both inside and right out front of the building. On the three separate occasions I visited the Red Bull Creators Lounge across the four days of PAX East 2025, I found that most people choose to risk their peace at any given sitting station more often than shake what their mommas gave them. You’ll find a lot of pictures from that very room on social media showing the exact opposite. The lounge packed shoulder to shoulder with folks feeling an altogether different, more energetic vibe than I personally did. 

Could I have checked the schedule of events to know exactly when micro celebrities were slotted to be in the zone to turn the party up, or when giveaways or other events were meant to go down? Of course! Did I? No! Why? I’m terrible at partying.  Two Americas, I guess.

What I was most interested in during my time with the Lounge was the refreshments. Tucked in the back corner across from the aforementioned couches was the Red Bull mocktail bar, a 7-Eleven coffee bar but bathed in bisexual lighting and featuring some very pleasant attendants who got increasingly more concerned every time they saw me. Because this bar had two drinks available featuring the popular energy drink, and I ordered them both three separate times. If you three, whose names I deeply regret not recording for posterity, are reading this: yes, I lived through my experience and I’ve been working towards living a life my loved ones can actually respect since.

The menu was strict and featured two different concoctions, Like and Subscribe and Pogchamp Peach Punch. For as far as game-related cocktail names are concerned, I would certainly see worse over the course of the weekend, but after seeing one of the attendants eyes lose a few lumens of spark after saying them out loud, I just resorted to pointing at the pictures of them going forward. The bulk of both drinks were pre-batched in carboys standing dutifully behind the staff. Upon ordering, hitting the switch splashed the stuff over some ice inside a plastic cup, and they would add the finishing touch of a splash of Red Bull on top, and slide patrons both the mixed sauce and the remaining can of wings, to do what you will with it after. 

The first potion, Like and Subscribe, was a chimera of flavors: a pineapple tail, a set of cherry lime wings, all overshadowed by the massive mane of the regular Red Bull’s lion head. Existing in the shadow of the signature funk of an OG Red Bull is any non-alcoholic beverage’s destiny. That sweet, sour, tannic, pungent thing that makes it so unique is a hard thing to upstage. While the syrup mixture did do its part to mute the somewhat acrid nature of Red Bull’s aftertaste, it was very tough to taste anything else with any real vibrancy. Also, Red Bull’s light touch when it comes to carbonation really let this whole package down, as more aggressive bubbles would really create a texture and lift that a drink with so many muted ingredients could really benefit from.

Pogchamp Peach Punch dresses up what was a debuting new white peach flavor of the caffeine tonic at the time. It’s particular take on peach isn’t bad, but I think getting artificial peach to taste like real peach has been a solved issue for a while now. All of Red Bull’s competitors have a peach flavor, and they all taste pretty decent. Most importantly, they all kind of taste like this one. And, like Red Bull’s summer formula, would be likely the only thing that you taste in this cocktail. The white cran peach juice that serves as the body of the punch forms a tag team with the energy drink to take down every other flavor in the ring. The mint and ginger lend the minor tongue tingles, but I’d want more of either to add some actual complexity. The lime juice doesn’t do enough to cut through the cloying sweetness of it all, but if I time traveled back to this room during this weekend and needed to order a third round, I would certainly choose it over the former.

Despite what my tone might suggest, I think this side club experiment is a worthwhile one. Whether intentional or not, the Red Bull Creator Club is one of a few official convention-related gatherings that aren’t booze heavy affairs and more and more young gamers are choosing to abstain from alcohol in social settings like this.  Even I, someone who is never more of a lush than I am when I’m convention mode, enjoyed the option to say no to spirits for the day. Maybe next year they’ll address all of that caffeine.