burger and cola together at lastAny­one who refers to bur­gers as “dude food” clearly has nev­er had their uter­us scream­ing at them for meat before. Accord­ingly, I was bloody happy to be invited along to the launch of the Karmaged­don bur­ger – Karma Col­a’s col­lab­or­a­tion with Grill Meets Beer.

The Karmaged­don bur­ger is made with Karma Cola braised pulled pork, beef pat­tie, homemade BBCola sauce (also made with Karma Cola), habanero mayo, smoked Cheese, shred­ded lettuce, jalapeño and pickles in a bun to get that per­fect bur­ger mix of soft, savoury, sweet, crunchy and sour.

We’ve tried Karma Cola before and love it (it does­n’t have caf­feine in it! Hur­ray!), but I’d nev­er been to Grill Meats Beer before, because I’ve always been put off by their sex­ist sand­wich boards (they’ll babysit your men for you while women be shop­ping, ha HA, hil­ari­ous). I thought I knew for cer­tain that my favour­ite bur­ger in all of Wel­ling­ton is the Four Horse­man from Nanny’s Foodtruck, but damn if this isn’t a ser­i­ous con­tender to the crown. A big thick juicy beef patty AND pulled pork? And chili fries with amaz­ing dip­ping mayo? OMG. My uter­us is totally appeased.

And so is my brain and heart, because one dol­lar from each bur­ger goes to Karma Col­a’s found­a­tion sup­port­ing farm­ers in Sierre Leone. So far the found­a­tion has donated over $60,000US to the vil­lage where they source their kola nuts, which has been used for build­ing a bridge, AIDs edu­ca­tion, a rice mill and a seed bank, to help the vil­lage towards a sus­tain­able future.

“Although the world drinks about 2 bil­lion cola branded drinks a day, the people who ori­gin­ally dis­covered the stuff haven’t made a cent from all that cola drink­ing. Karma Cola is try­ing to set this record straight. After a ten years of civil war and more recently ebola the people who grow our cola in the 8 vil­lages we work with in Sierra Leone need a hand. The money we send them from the sale of every bottle goes to much needed infra­struc­ture, rehab­il­it­a­tion of roads and plant­a­tions, bridges and schools,” says Simon Coley, co-founder of Karma Cola.

The bur­ger­’s on sale for the rest of Novem­ber, and if you’re into this sort of thing, you should most def­in­itely go and eat it. Oh, and if your kind of karma does­n’t involve eat­ing meat, we hear that TV Disko’s guest vegan pulled ‘pork’ (actu­ally appar­ently jack­fruit) bur­ger at Laun­dry is the bomb dig­gity too. Woo!