At some point in your adult life, you were probably gifted a box of liquor-filled chocolates. Chances are these chocolates came from a brightly-lit duty-free shop after a trip devoid of souvenirs. They say, “I may have forgotten about you during my travels, but I’ll never forget about your unending desire to become intoxicated.” So sweet. But is there enough real booze in them to even get you drunk? Do these candies do anything a few Rolos can’t? I decided to find out.
I procured a few boxes of said chocolates and a BACtrack S80 Professional Breathalyzer, which is one of the finest breathalyzers you can purchase for under $200, to add some legitimacy to this test. Then, on a Friday afternoon when I had little to accomplish, I tore into the first box.
A few things became immediately clear. First, the chocolates aren’t filled with straight booze. Rather, they’re filled with some sort of sweet gel made from the booze on the wrapper—Remy Martin, Jim Beam, Grand Marnier, or Sauza. This added to my initial worry that the sugary sweetness would get to me before the booze could. Second, after careful inspection, it appears these candies are just 5% alcohol by volume, which is a fact not listed anywhere on the site. That’s far from a sip of straight Jim Beam. That’s far from a sip of any hard alcohol. I imagined candies filled with straight hooch. Still, since I was curious, and since I dropped over a hundred bucks on a state-of-the-art breathalyzer, I decided to continue.
I was somewhere around 10 chocolates in when the sugar began to take hold. It’s funny how quickly your stomach can turn when you don’t eat that much candy on a regular basis. I started to feel a bit off and, dare I say, a bit buzzed? Not like full-on buzzed, but the kind of buzzed you feel after that very first sip of beer, that kind of great-things-are-to-come buzzed. It could have been psychosomatic; it could have been the sugar. All I can tell you is I felt something.
After 15 chocolates, I started to feel sick to my stomach, and I realized there’s absolutely no way I could eat a full box, let alone two. To eat a full box would mean consuming 1,200 calories and some 72 grams of sugar. Sure, Joey Chestnut scoffs at those numbers, but I’m no Joey Chestnut. I’m not even the dude who came in last in a competition against Joey Chestnut. I’m about as far from a competitive eater as there is. Still, while feeling beyond full, potentially nauseous, and buzzed to the point where the world started to smear at the edges, I trudged on in hopes of eating at least a few more to solidify this test.
Here is how I felt at 20 candies: sick, more sick, and pretty buzzed. Buzzed like I drank two beers. Buzzed like I had a lunch cocktail on an empty stomach. The kind of buzzed where you decide which way the rest of the day is going to go—back to a desk or back to a cooler. If I wasn’t a little drunk, I sure as hell felt like it. The sickness, however, was too much. I tapped out at 20 chocolates. It wasn’t my proudest moment, but I felt like shit. You know how you got sick from Jägermeister one night in college and now you won’t touch the stuff? Yeah, that’s how I feel about liquor-filled chocolates. Anyway, all that was left was to check in with our trusty new breathalyzer to confirm my slight drunkenness.
I fired that bad boy up and…
0.00%
Yeah.
My Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) was 0.00%.
I was perfectly fine.
Well, minus feeling the tremendous amount of chocolate laying waste to my innards.
Conclusion: Your stomach will give out long before you pass out from these chocolates.
