It was 6 a.m. and Brennan Grace was getting ready to pass out after a long night of partying. As he laid down with the girl in his bed, his friend barged through the door, grinning from ear to ear, Smirnoff Ice in hand.

He had been officially “iced.”

Drunk and naked, Grace took a knee on the mattress and chugged the 12-ounce bottle. Though his stomach and better judgement disagreed with him, Grace had no qualms with imbibing the sugary Smirnoff.

“Rules are rules,” Grace said. “And with a topless chick in bed next to you, you’ve got to look like a man.”

This brand-specific drinking game, called “icing,” has become popular among college-aged drinkers nationwide, as reported in the New York Times, Fortune Magazine and CNN. The New York Times called “icing” “the nation’s biggest viral drinking game.”

Almost as prevalent as the game itself is the bad reputation of the drink involved.

Smirnoff Ice is a sugary, usually fruit-flavored malt beverage. It is often referred to as “chick beer” because of its general association with the feminine palate. This drink plays the key role in the “icing” game.

The rules are simple: You cannot refuse a Smirnoff Ice. If you refuse to drink one that’s presented to you, you are excommunicated from the game and can never “ice” another person again. In your defense, you can “ice block” by pulling out a Smirnoff Ice of your own, reversing the “ice” on the initial “icer.”

In drinking a Smirnoff Ice, you must take a knee.

City College student Aaron Thule recalls the first time he heard about the drinking game.

“When I found out what this was, me and my friends spent like five hours talking about different techniques and strategies,” he said.

Those ideas included hanging a bottle from a ceiling fan “so when your buddy comes in and turns on the light, he’s like, ‘What? Aw!'” Thule laughed. “It’s perfect.”

Temoc Casanova, a Bay Area student, first experienced “icing” on his maiden trip to Isla Vista with his older brother. He remembers that first “icing” as a bittersweet moment.

“My brother took me down to I.V. and we’d just walked into a party on [Del Playa]. This super cute girl came up to me holding this little ‘girl’ drink in her hand,” he said.

“I wouldn’t normally drink something like that, but you can’t say no, and to be honest, I had ulterior motives.”

Casanova said he “iced” her back roughly six more times throughout the night, making sure to present the fruity drink in colorful ways like leaving a bottle in her Juicy Couture purse.

The originality and trickery involved in a good “icing” makes for a fun drinking game that keeps its players on their toes. But most of all, it keeps its players buying Smirnoff Ice.

After the sales increase and brand attention generated by “icing,” will other alcoholic beverage companies invent drinking games around their own brands? Sociology Professor Neil Dryden doesn’t think so.

“They can try to devise such ad campaigns, but that’s notoriously hard to engineer from on high,” he said. “They usually just look out of touch when they try.”

Dryden attributes the drinking game’s viral success to its roots in college communities, because “consumer-generated memes are always more powerful,” he said. But he also believes that media coverage added a few extra watts to the game’s spotlight.

UC-Irvine Business Econ major Josh Coyle, however, doesn’t foresee an everlasting tradition in this snarky game.

“It was a popular phase like 8 months ago but it’s not done too often anymore,” he said. “The entire point of getting on your knees is because you’re drinking a ‘bitch drink’ – that gets old fast.”

– James Sinclair contributed to this story