Purplesaurus Rex Was a Top-Tier Kool-Aid Flavor

Introducing Haterade, a Newsletter and Beverage

The Liquids of My Youth (sorry, Jo Ann Beard) were mostly solids that lived in confusing places. The freezer was full of tubes of concentrated orange juice that plopped into the pitcher like a soft poo. The pantry had an ancient box of powdered milk. The cookie jar was full of packets of Kool-Aid.

As an adult, I no longer reconstitute a majority of my fluids. But I long for a specific powder: Purplesaurus Rex.

Purplesaurus Rex was Kool-Aid’s short-lived grape lemonade and honestly, the crowning achievement of the powdered beverage industry. It had the bold, Jello-y roundness of artificial grape and the cavity-plumbing pucker of a lemon cleaning solvent. It poured an unsettlingly opaque, dusky purple—the kind of purple you could disappear a body into. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

My mom would stock up on Kool-Aid whenever Fareway had a 10/$1 sale, and you wanted to be sitting in the shopping cart that day. Left to her own devices, she would choose packets with an eye toward balance, wasting valuable real estate on useless flavors like Lemon-Lime.

When my sister and I chose, it was Top Tier flavors only: Red, of course, and Great Bluedini, a color-changing blue raspberry that Kool-Aid discontinued when the nation’s strategic reserves of RazzApple Magic Fun Dip ran low. Sometimes, we’d throw in Sharkleberry Finn, which had a flavor I do not remember and a name I cannot explain except as an aquatically confusing Mark Twain riff (“Don’t try to ‘sivilize’ me with your premium premixed beverages, Widow Douglas!”)

Most of the time, it was Purplesaurus Rex.

Kool-Aid has resurrected the flavor a couple times over the years for “retro” campaigns, and you can find overpriced packets on eBay. But you can also find individual packets of grape Kool-Aid and lemonade Kool-Aid at the SunFresh. What you’re really losing out on is the Purplesaurus Rex brand. The packet design features a purple dinosaur with eyebrows and two teeth and a thick ass. The Kool-Aid man is sliding down that ass like it’s a banister. He’s having a great time, oh, yeah.

This is my roundabout way of telling you that this newsletter is trying to be Purplesaurus Rex.

I am neither a serious person nor a serious writer. I’m not a “foodie” or a “food snob.” I like simple, sophisticated displays of technique and I like maximalist ranch-soaked novelties. If there’s one consistent fact of my short and ordinary life, it’s that I like leaning into an experience, good or bad, and finding its purest, most concentrated expression. I like when the thing is good at being the thing it’s trying to be.

So I’m using this newsletter to explore food and drink ~experiences~ and I’m using this post in particular to explore an adult, 2020 version of Purplesaurus Rex. I’m calling both of them Haterade.  

I’ve only ever heard “Haterade” used in negative contexts—when someone’s being petty or jealous, we say they’re “drinking Haterade.” But the term is too silly to have any real bite to it, and semantically ambiguous to boot. It sounds more like a balm than a poison. If you’re experiencing cynicism and disaffection, ask your doctor about Haterade.

Haterade also sounds like the next logical Pokémon evolution from Purplesaurus Rex—goofy, prickly, acid-sweet, absurd.

So here’s a recipe for a drink that hits the same experiential notes for me as an adult as P-Rex did for me as a kid.

Haterade: the recipe

1 quart Gatorade G2 (grape flavor)
2 cups vodka
½ cup sugar
1 packet grape Kool-Aid mix
1 packet lemonade Kool-Aid mix
Juice of one lime

You know what to do. Dump the the ingredients in a pitcher and stir. Essentially, you’re making double-strength Kool-Aid with half the sugar and swapping the water for Gatorade and vodka. You’re not going for church basement, Vacation Bible School Kool-Aid here. You’re going for maximalist flavor. You’re going for Peak Taste.

The lime is there to remind you that you are emphatically NOT FUCKING AROUND.

The low-sugar Gatorade is there because you’re an ADULT who feels BAD IN THE MORNING when she drinks too much sugar.

Haterade: the experience

I love costumes. If I put on the right clothes and pump the right music through my headphones, I can convince myself that I’m almost anything for an hour. So I decided to lean in to the gutterpunk vibe and pretend to be cool and funky and mean, like a dinosaur with a thick ass.

I mixed the Haterade in a two-quart pitcher, poured it back into the empty Gatorade bottle, and sipped it while I walked through the park by my house. It wasn’t late, but the sun was fading and the streetlights had already turned on. I plopped on the grass, ready to spend a pleasant evening replenishing my disrespectrolytes and listening to TOUGH MUSIC and glaring at anyone who walked by. I briefly fantasized about finding a pack of cigarettes on the ground and smoking one of them, hotly.

But I’d chosen a spot near a playground, and it was getting dark, and I was starting to feel a bit creepy drinking vodka alone out of a plastic bottle while kids were swinging on monkey bars. Someone’s Dad gave me a suspicious look, and the small, rude voice in my head started up again. It was saying things like It’s 65 degrees. Why is the hood on your sweatshirt up? and That hoodie is too small. You look like a cobra with gout.

The old asshole who lives in the parking lot across the street started blasting Nazi propaganda from the speakers of his red panel van, and I started to feel deflated.

I guzzled a big swig from the bottle and put Thundercat’s “Dragonball Durag” on over my headphones to drown out the Nazi stuff. The right costume snapped into place. I had been trying to be tough, but what I needed was to be confident, like a dinosaur with eyebrows.

I galumphed home in a kind of half-dance, making a lot of embarrassing, seaweed-like arm movements. I got a little drunk on my porch and looked at pictures of cobras. I went to bed with purple teeth.

There are many beautiful experiences in life. Haterade is a newsletter about the rest of them.