We’re geeks. We love caffeine. How else would we get through our crushingly dull lives? The thing is, there are three acceptable ways in which to get the stuff in your body. Coffee, caffeine pills, and energy drinks. Tea, if you’re British or Commonwealth. Everything else is despicable, and usually taste horrific. Here are 17 of the worst offenders, that should never have went down Caffeine Lane for a little pick me up.

17. Mints

Not only is it something of a travesty that mints need to have caffeine added to them, the actual amount in each one is trivial. These penguin mints have around 15g of caffeine each, so you need to have 6 of them to get the equivalent of a cup of coffee. That’s a piddling amount of energy in each, forcing you to scarf an entire tin to get a decent buzz. Look, the primary point of mints are for breath freshening, right? They’re created to cover up your rank mouthstink. Adding tiny bits of caffeine not only makes them taste all kinds of funky, but I can guarantee that they’ll be less effective on the whole breath improvement thing.

16. Energy Strips

Remember how a couple of years ago, everyone was making those extreme mint strip things, that you put on your tongue, and it feels like a frost demon had just pissed in your mouth? Obviously, someone thought it’d be great to take the awesome super mint flavor, and swap if for caffeine and cranberries. So now you have a strip of paste, that doesn’t taste like much, and instead gives you a minute energy increase. Those strips always had a really gross texture, and their only redeeming feature was the strength of their mint (or cinnamon). Neutering them to get caffeine in the strips completely defeats the purpose!

15. Cookies

Look, how many times do I have to say this? The key to making a caffeinated product is strength! You can’t just take an everyday object, slap an insignificant amount of the chemical, and sell it on to energy craving geeks! Or can you? These cookies cost $5 for a 12 pack, and you need to eat 4 to get the same buzz as you would from a cheap cup of joe from a shitty diner. At least you have to give them credit for adding coffee to these, rather than just pouring caffeine powder in them, and so maintaining some degree of decent taste. Even if you’ll become overweight before you wake up.

14. “Magic” Brownies

Look, you don’t fucking get to call them “magic” brownies if they’re caffeinated. That’s not what that means. You’re just building up the expectations of poor stoners, who are going to be incredibly depressed when they get a package in the mail entirely short of anything “magic”. Caffeine doesn’t do anything “magic”. It doesn’t open your doors of perception, give you particular insight, or offer visions. Instead, it gets you tweaked up just enough that you can stomach another day of your shitty, dead-end job, struggling to make rent. That isn’t “magic”, that’s life.

13. Chocolate Bars

Remember “No Fear”? For a while in the 90s, every kid had a t-shirt by them, that in retrospect was entirely douchey? “Second place is first loser” kind of shit. Since then, they’ve faded to obscurity, feebly attempting to cling to their x-treme sport aesthetic, which will become ironically cool again in about five years (hipsters — you heard it here first!) So what’s the best way of resurrecting a dying brand? EXTREME CHOCOLATE! The No Fear Caffeinated Super Bar! Cram it in your facehole! To be fair, they’re not the only ones who have tried it — both Snickers and Butterfinger have put out energy versions.

12. Slow Release Capsules

Thanks to the 5-Hour Energy jackass, we know all about how if you have caffeine, you can spike, then crash. Okay, so you need to have small amounts of caffeine throughout the day, in order to keep you in peak condition (by which I mean vaguely functional). So, you slowly sip on a coffee. Or have multiple little ones. Or cut a caffeine pill into quarters. Or eat any of the wussy, barely caffeinated foodstuffs on this list. What you don’t need to do, is shell out for a special pill that supposedly releases the caffeine slowly through the course of the day. There are much easier ways to do it.

11. Pixy Stix

Cast your mind back to when you were around 10 years old, and for Halloween the broke family down the road gave out pixy stix. And it was freaking awesome. So much better than the old dentist who gave you toothbrushes. Pixy stix were like crack for kids, giving you that heavily sugared energy rush that would cause you to run around like, well, like a kid on pixy stix. You’d break things, punch your sister, and get in trouble. So what would make pixy stix even better? How about adding 100mg of caffeine? Cunningly called “Nixie Tubes”, these cartons of flavored sugar add a huge dose of caffeine, perfect for making your nieces and nephews more tweaked out than a meth head. Good Christmas presents, I guess.

10. Breath spray

Remember what I said above about mints? That goes double for breath spray. Its purpose is to make your breath smell less funky, not to juice you up. Not to mention caffeine inherently gives everything a slightly odd flavor/taste, so putting it in a breath spray strikes me as counterintuitive. If you’ve ever actually had a spritzer of breath freshener on hand, then you know that there’s a constant desire to spray your mouth. After all, if a little of minty freshness is good, 17 sprays must be fuckwin, right? Unless there’s 1/3 of a cup of coffee in each. In your attempt to make yourself kissable, you’re much more likely to give yourself caffeine poisoning. Here’s some advice: to fix your breath, brush your teeth, and scrape that gunk off your tongue. Done, bitches.

9. Root Beer

You know that feeling you get when you hear they’re making a Thundercats movie, but it’s live action, and Shia LeBeouf is playing Lion-O? That’s how I feel about caffeinated root beer. The whole thing smacks of ruining people’s childhood memories in an ill-advised attempt to grab cash. You know it stopped being okay to have root beer when you turned 14. That’s okay, you can now drink grown up drinks, like real beer! And this root beer isn’t just taking something that was awesome when you were a tyke, and adding caffeine. Oh no, they’re also attempting to tap the internet pirate market. I’m sorry, but pirates haven’t been cool for at least three years. Ninjas even longer than that. If you want to get the cool geeks right now? Narwhals. All about the narwhals.

8. Fake Blood

I’m sorry, but there is no way I can condone supporting people who believe they’re vampires. I don’t fucking care if you’re a Californian goth from the 80s, who has ruffled lace everywhere; a millennial dance-house techno day-glo vampire; or a twilight sparkle in the sun vampire. You are a bad person, and a stupid human being. Guess what, you’re not undead. You’re not a vampire, psychic or otherwise. You’re a lonely individual, struggling to fit in, and clinging to the only people who will accept you, even though you hate them all. You don’t drink blood. Not even fake blood. I refuse to enable this behavior any more. Unless your Monica Bellucci, in which case you get a pass, and can suck anything you like of mine.

7. Soap

Caffiene isn’t absorbed through the skin. Remember that, it’ll come up again soon. Caffeinated soap does not work. You’d have to leave it on your skin for around 4 hours just in order to get around 1/3 of a cup of coffee. There are many things we can absorb transdermally, but you know what? Caffeine ain’t one of them. This is a blatant example of pandering to us caffeine addicted geeks, but at the same time assuming we’re too stupid to just fucking google if this even works or not. We may be lazy, but we’re also stingy, so we will research this stuff. And we won’t buy it from you.

6. Face Wash

I’m sorry, but did you not hear what I just said? Rubbing caffeine on your face is about as an effective way of waking up as licking toads is to get high. As in “not at all”. Sure, there’s a psychoactive drug there, but that’s not how you get to it. So you’re just wasting perfectly good caffeine by smearing it on your face. Here’s a protip: you can crush up aspirin, and use the salicylic acid as an acne remedy. That works on your skin. Again, caffeine does not. Don’t by this crap, it doesn’t work, and is just a money sink.

5. Lip Balm

What? Again? That’s it, I quit. Screw this whole list business! What? Contract?…goddamnit. Okay. Once more, from the top. Caffeine doesn’t work through skin. If you have chapped lips, just use freaking chapstick. And calling it Spazztick? Not helping, guys. Okay, we’ve covered all of this. Next section.

4. Maple Bacon Lollipops

Lollipops. Not just any lollipops, but maple-bacon lollipops. Okay, we get it, the internet loves bacon. Yes, it’s delicious, and it makes morning, noon, and night infinitely better. But it does not need to be in a goddamned lollipop. And it does not need to be caffeinated. Frankly, both caffeine and bacon are overplayed, and it’s pretty pathetic how quickly we’ll latch on to anything with either, let alone both. There’s not a single thing that can convince me that this combination would be tasty, energizing, or desirable in any way shape or form. It just sounds disgusting. You have to give them some degree of credit for using real bacon, and then drowning it in high fructose corn syrup and 80mg of caffeine. Gah.

3. Water

Hey, you know what water needs? Absolutely nothing, it’s water? Wrong! It needs caffeine. Woohoo! Yup, lets take the colorless, flavorless, free liquid that courses from our taps, throw in some powdered caffeine, and charge an absolute fucking mint for it. They claim that this jazzed up agua doesn’t taste any different from the normal stuff, in which case I thoroughly recommend just, you know, drinking water and having something caffeinated. Seriously, if you really don’t like the taste of caffeine, take No-Doz. You won’t taste a thing. Then just follow with a giant glass of water, in order to stay hydrated. Don’t forget, caffeine is a diuretic.

2. Beer

Beer? Caffeinated beer? Is nothing sacred? Would you so desecrate the liquid of the gods? Surely, you risk inciting the wrath of all the heavens, by tampering with such beauty. Seriously, though, how is this not an utterly disgusting idea? First of all, you’re mixing stimulants and depressants, uppers and downers, which is never a good idea. I’m honestly just utterly offended by this whole concept. Beer is just such a wonderful thing, the culmination of thousands of years of experience and experimentation to create such a perfect nectar — and here people go and ruin it by throwing in caffeine. You know the ancient Egyptians invented beer? True story. I’m pretty sure whoever put together this concoction is going to very specific hell, them and the bastards behind Sea Dog Blueberry Ale.

1. Jerky

Oh, God. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. I like jerky. At a very specific time and place, I do enjoy the feeling of chewing on a bit of meat that feels like roadkill that got magically melded with the tire that hit it, and then doused in liquid smoke. Like when doing a road trip, or I decide my digestion has had it too easy for too long. But adding caffeine? And making it guarana flavored? That is vile. You know how people always go on about “two great tastes that taste great together”? This is the polar opposite of this. Two okay tastes, which when combined taste approximately like licking the taint of a 60 year old truck stop hooker. I think I’ll pass, thanks.