In theory, jungle juice is great. It's cheap to make, it tastes good, and it's just flat out easy. As I said though, jungle juice is great in theory. However, the fact of the matter is that the bad aspects of serving it far outweigh the good, which is why jungle juice should not be a staple at parties anymore.
Jungle juice is cheap. The main reason for this is that the usual alcohol of choice for creating it is Everclear. For those who don't know, Everclear is grain alcohol the type usually served in jungle juice is 95% alcohol, which is higher alcohol content than rubbing alcohol. It's very strong and usually people's bodies aren't used to consuming alcohol that pure, especially younger people. Even though it gets diluted throughout the entire container, it is still dangerous.
Jungle juice is great tasting. I guess I would use the phrase "great tasting" loosely, but for how cheap it is, jungle juice is pretty decent tasting. This makes the drink dangerous though. Typically when people make jungle juice, the drink can end up around 15% alcohol. The average ABV (% alcohol by volume) for beer is 4.5%. That would make one red cup of jungle juice roughly the equivalent of drinking three beers, and rarely have I seen anyone only have one red cup. That especially becomes unsafe whenever you start chugging jungle juice, because as I said it's decently tasty. I don't care what anyone says about being a "lightweight" or "heavyweight" when they drink, if you chug the alcohol equivalent of three to nine beers in a short span, you would be extremely intoxicated, no matter how your body handles alcohol.
Before I start this next section, I just want to say I'm not necessarily condoning underage drinking. Nor am I saying that I've never done it for legality's sake. Underage drinking though is something that has happened for a long time in college, continues to happen, and will always happen. With that, jungle juice is the last thing you want to serve to younger students who have never had any experience with alcohol before. Like i mentioned before, it's extremely strong and because of its good taste, people who haven't really drank before will just assume that jungle juice has far less alcohol than it really does and drink way too much. The negative repercussions of that are so far and wide that I won't even get into it, but many times have resulted in ambulance rides and much worse.
At the end of the day, I'm not telling you not to drink. Maybe next time you think about throwing a party though, tell people BYOB.
