Action Figures & Their Beers Boozes – Fully Metal Alchemist

by Beedo Sookcool
on 2025-12-10, 05:51:42

AU VODKA COCKTAILS

Those of us who were born in the 1970s and grew up in the 1980s, no matter what fandom(s) we’re part of, all now have at least one problem in common: the stuff we like has been around for about 40 years, and they just keep adding more stuff and complicating the mythos. Transformers is one of those IPs that makes things even more complicated by having every update and reboot happening in a different parallel universe. And sometimes, they cross over or intersect, or sometimes they have a singularity that unites them all, and then that one unifying aspect then gets retconned into NOT tying everything together. Which is a bit of a long-winded way – but nowhere near as long-winded as it could’ve been – of introducing the subject of today’s article: Alchemist Prime.

One of The Original Thirteen Primes created by the creator god, Primus, Alchemist Prime was responsible for bringing science to the Cybertronian race. Depending on who you ask, he went incognito (or lost his memory), settled down, and became the bartender Maccadam, who ran a popular pub – Maccadam’s Old Oil House – where violence was not tolerated, OR ELSE. And / or he’s the robot avatar of famous Transformers brand influencer and YouTube celebrity, Thew Adams, who has given our site a few shout-outs in his videos over the years. There has been one non-transforming Build-A-fFigure of Maccadam (made up of parts included with EIGHT Transformers over two waves, some of them fairly hard-to-get), and two figures of Alchemist Prime – a dinky little Prime Master spark-cube avatar sold with Submarauder Decoy / Pretender armour in the Power of the Primes line 2018, and this one.

This is a nifty figure, but it’s not what I was hoping for for the character, to be honest. In the Cyberverse cartoon, which ran from 2018 to 2021, Maccadam is a big, burly, bearded, bespectacled barkeep, brimming with bibulous bonhomie, who enforces the No Fighting rule in his bar by transforming offscreen into something so huge and horrific that he terrifies even Megatron into behaving himself:

And then there’s this guy, who’s not very big, and turns into a fairly ho-hum, dark green Cybertronian armoured van-like vehicle. But he comes with a set of translucent blue magnifying techno-lenses that double as energy blades, so that’s pretty cool.

Here on Earth, alchemists were multi-disciplinary scientists and natural philosophers who tried to unravel the secrets of the universe. Chemistry, physics, medicine, nature – all the sciences ran together for the alchemists, and they often dabbled in a bit of everything. And for centuries, they definitely helped add to the sum of Human knowledge. But they also tended to get things wrong, or repeatedly run down dead ends. The most famous cul-de-sac they are known for revisiting was experimentation in transmuting base metals into gold.

Which is why Alchemist Prime, who later became a barkeep, is getting paired up with these golden-tinned Au Vodka Cocktails. These 330 mL offerings are 5% ABV fizzy drinks made with Au Vodka, flavourings, sugar, and . . . aw, crap – sweeteners. That means that if I drank these, I’d be suffering unpleasant and uncomfortable . . . digestive repercussions. So the plan was that I’d just take a few sips of each to get the taste of them, then the rest will be drain-pour. I found the following flavours at a nearby supermarket, and the drain-pour plan proved way more prescient than I’d anticipated:

Black Grape: Absolutely disgusting, but then, I despise Concord grape flavour, anyway. I only took one sip, and I couldn’t even swallow it. I swished it around my mouth for three seconds and immediately spat it back out, and the rest of the tin was an enthusiastic drain-pour. Also, despite the dark purple on the label, the drink itself is actually the same fluorescent blue as windscreen-wiper fluid. It tastes like someone added a lethal dose of Aspartame to Dimetapp liquid decongestant. While this is not the most horrible drink I’ve ever put in my mouth, I think it might be the worst drink I’ve ever reviewed for AF&TB, and that includes Pavan, so I’m deadly serious about how revolting this stuff is. If you actually like Concord grape flavour, though, this might be up your alley, but I’d recommend an intervention and some therapy, instead.

Cherryade: This stuff is the same shocking electric pink as the kind of industrial-strength cleaning solution that has to be diluted to 1/100th its shipping concentration before it’s just barely safe enough to come into contact with human skin. It tastes like cherry cough drops. And not the good ones, either – the cheap ones. I did manage to swallow one mouthful, but couldn’t face another.

Blue Raspberry: It is the same kind of intense neon sky blue I associate with anti-freeze or window cleaner. This was the only tolerable flavour of the three . . . until the artificial sweetener aftertaste kicked in. Managed two swallows before the aftertaste nauseated me into giving up. If they’d just mixed it with sugar instead of adding sweetener as well, I might’ve happily bought a case of this stuff and spent a weekend getting “tired & emotional.”

Hoo, boy. Between the vile artificial sweeteners and the violent artificial colouring, I don’t think I’d ever want to touch this brand again, even if every flavour they made was amazing. It’s almost as if I can FEEL the chemicals in it giving me mouth & throat cancer.

I’m fairly certain this brand is just another alco-pop targeted at very young drinkers, with the sweeteners added to delude the girls into thinking that they can down lots of this stuff without getting fat. And wouldn’t you know it – two days after I bought these tins, and a mere 14 hours before I got to the stage of writing where I actually start looking up stuff about the brand for the article, the BBC reported that Au Vodka had an ad pulled from TikTok, and two ads pulled from Facebook, because the ads were deemed to be targeting under-18s. The TikTok ad featured some thirsty “celebrity” bint I’ve never heard of from the “Reality” TV show, Love Island, and the Facebook ads featured people who seemed to be under 25 years old, another no-no in booze advertising here in the UK.

What surprised me most is that Au Vodka is actually a Welsh brand, founded in 2015, with its headquarters in Swansea. Because, frankly, Concord grape and “blue raspberry” are such American flavours – you just don’t see them anywhere else in the world. Those flavours, combined with all the fluorescent, oleaginous, laboratory-made ingredients, and I’d’ve expected this to come from a skeezy fading American celebrity who’s desperately trying to stay relevant with the youth, via a line of cheaply-made drinks manufactured in a dirt-poor foreign country that doesn’t have health & safety or environmental protection laws.

Kid Rock. If someone had told me this was Kid Rock’s newest venture, I’d’ve believed it without hesitation.

. . . And, oh, this is just too rich! A little more digging turned up that Au Vodka paid Jake Paul $200,000 to have their standard vodka bottle temporarily tattooed on him ahead of a fight for promotional purposes. Because of course they did. And at this point, I am not surprised in the least.

So, time for the verdicts, then.

Alchemist Prime: Great character, acceptable toy. Au Vodka alco-pops: Vile drinks, appallingly tacky company.

Drink this if you also like: Alco-pops, old-person candy, masochism, extreme tackiness. Actually, just don’t. Don’t drink these canned chemical spills.