When I first tasted Red Bull, I thought I'd rather drink frog and beetle soup. Actually, I still would. But my friends, all of whom concurred with my original prognosis, have become traitors to their tastebuds. Now they all drink it. All the time. Why?

Those of you hunched over a pint of best and a game of dominoes in a shires tavern saying "Red what?", allow me to bring you up to date with the strange ways of the millennial metropolis. Red Bull is a fizzy, rust-coloured energy drink that makes your teeth feel funny and sticky. It tastes remarkably similar to the way it looks - sweet and rusty. In the UK it's marketed as Red Bull Stimulation, presumably because those who toil long hours in offices and on trading floors are always on the lookout for the next energy hit. Basically, it's drunk for the same reasons that people take cocaine. Its caffeine content stimulates. Glucose and sucrose provide rapid energy and two other substances - taurine and glucuronalacton - "have a detoxifying effect" (according to the official website, anyway).

The father of Red Bull is a Thai pharmaceutical called Krateng Dang. Packaged in a small, brown vial, this non-carbonated syrup is thicker and more cloying than the western version it spawned. Apparently, in the east it is drunk as a tonic (rather than for pleasure: please note) by everyone from executives to rickshaw drivers. We have the Austrian businessman Dietrich Mateschitz to thank for bringing the idea over here and creating a version for European palates.

Red Bull as we know it arrived in the autumn of 1994 when it was test-marketed in selected areas of Scotland. My first encounter with it was at a Cambridge May ball the following June. Red Bull's marketing department had been kind enough to provide us with a mountain of cans, but few of us persevered beyond an initial sip. Instead, to make sure we stayed awake until dawn, we all carried on drinking and reached for the Pro-Plus that had got us through finals a couple of weeks earlier. For 18 blissful months, Red Bull bombed.

But what a difference a shot of vodka makes. Someone had the bright idea of mixing Red Bull with Absolut and, suddenly, we all caught on. Within no time, this insidious drink had become a staple of my management consultant flatmate's diet. Each Friday she returned home pale and sunken-eyed from the endurance test of her million-hour week determined to go out and Enjoy Herself. Close to collapse, she'd sit in the kitchen swigging alternately from a cup of Batchelor's soup (dinner) and a glass of vodka and Red Bull (energy and action). Thus revived, she would venture forth into the maelstrom of neon and over-excited suits released prematurely into adulthood that is London on a Friday night.

Now this repellent city cocktail is chalked up on pub blackboards along with pound-a-pint offers. At house parties people arrive with supplies of vodka and Red Bull rather than a six-pack. In wine bars it's ordered in jugs and the synchronised flush of energy that hits the table minutes after glasses have been drained is like an erupting volcano.

I've been waiting ages for the Red Bull social phenomenon to pass its peak and doing everything I can single-handedly to redirect the zeitgeist. ("What, not still drinking that? How very January 1997.") But it's no use. Like the hole in the ozone layer, Red Bull just keeps on growing.Two years ago, 12 million cans were sold annually in the UK; this year, they're on target for 160 million.

For heaven's sake. It's vile stuff, and even Red Bull is under no illusions about it. "Let's be frank," concedes a spokesman. "If it was about taste, we'd have been here today, gone tomorrow." So isn't it time we all returned to hard drugs - or at least to Lucozade - for energy and treated our palates to something a little more sophisticated? Like a Babycham.