Much like our experience in Boston, the nasty weather lately speaks to the needs of convenient caffeine. With buses running behind, traffic slowing, or possibly just a desire to stay home and keep dry, opportunities to visit a coffeehouse may be limited. You can surely make coffee at home, but there may be other occasions to check out caffeine on demand, caffeine ready made, caffeine over the counter. After all, as caffeine is the most commonly used drug in the world, we can't let a little thing like "lack of convenience" stop us.

The final impetus behind writing about OTC caffeine drinks was a conversation with a reader that happens to work for Anheuser-Busch alerting us to the fact that Bud would soon have a product that could be fodder for the Trimethyldioxypurist. Awww, yeah -- beer with caffeine. We'd been studying the shelves in our corner grocery ever since; the product finally showed up there a few days ago.

What follows are three quick product reviews of drinks readily available from your corner store that contain caffeine, listed in order of "conventional" to "less so."