Five students from the Dutch Helicon Vocational Institute have come up with their senior project. Powdered alcohol. Add water and you have a lime-flavored fizzy drink with 3% alcohol. They already have a target audience that they plan to market to.
The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gramme packets that cost 1-1.5 euros (70 pence-1 pound).
Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-coloured and -flavoured drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.
"We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks," 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters.
Van Elderen and four classmates at Helicon Vocational Institute, about an hour's drive from Amsterdam, came up with the idea as part of their final-year project.
"Because the alcohol is not in liquid form, we can sell it to people below 16," said project member Martyn van Nierop.
The legal age for drinking alcohol and smoking is 16 in the Netherlands.
In Germany, alcopops — sweet drinks containing alcohol and in powder form — caused quite a stir when launched on to the market. Alcohol powder, classified as a flavouring, was sold in the United States three years ago.
This is just plain wrong on so many levels.
If they could bump it up to about 40 or 50 proof I might start backpacking/fly fishing again. Not really, but it would have been great in my 20s and 30s.