Hitting the Sour Highs and the Sugar Lows

It’s been a little while since I did one of these, but that’s largely because I’ve sampled most of the sour goodies in my area and have been forced to dig further afield for sour treats to tickle my senses. Thankfully, on a recent road trip I managed to find a few oddities, and now we can once again tear up our tongues with sour powder sprinkled on various hard candies. It’s time for another sour roundup:

Sour Patch Kids Red White and Blue

We’ve reviewed Sour Patch Kids before, both in their singular, chewy candy version as well as their gel snacks (which are really good and, when zI feel like eating like a six year old, I will still get them from time to time). I honestly would have let yet another box of Sour Patch Kids skip past me since we all know the flavors and generally there’s nothing surprising about another pack of Sour Patch Kids. Red White and Blue has your usual flavors, right? Fruity red and fruity blue, which both vaguely taste of candy red and blue. Not quite fruits, but not quite not. We could blind taste test these and say, “yep, that one’s red and this one’s blue. Fruit? No clue what they are, but they’re red and blue.”

But then there’s white. What is Sour Patch Kids White? That’s not a color I’ve seen before, and I had to wonder, just what is it that Sour Patch Kids is passing off as white? Is it lemon just without the yellow coloring? Is it pineapple, vaguely clear just like in a pack of Life Savers or a bag of gummy bears (and we all know the white color is hands down the best flavor). I had to know, so I grabbed the box and, after confirming that red and blue were the standard defaults and there was nothing important to see here, I popped one of the white candies in my mouth to determine.

Yeah, it’s just lemon. Sad as that is, with the promise of some new flavor we hadn’t seen before, we just have Sour Patch yellow without the yellow. Kind of a let down, really, but on the other hand I did like the flavor mix. A standard bag of Sour Patch Kids will have orange and green in as well red, white, and blue, and I’m not as much of a fan of either of those flavors (aka vaguely orange and disgustingly fake lime). Just having berry blue, berry red, and lemon white in a bag together actually narrows the flavors to just the ones I liked, and I found I enjoyed them more. So while I was disappointed that the white was just lemon, overall the flavor mix was nice.

Face Twisters Apple Bubble Gum

Like with Sour Patch Kids, we’ve actually reviewed something from Face Twisters before, namely their sour taffy. Of note, when I found this bubble gum I also grabbed more of that taffy and it was as good and sour as I remembered. But the bubble gum was different enough that I felt it was worth reviewing on its own. And I’ll start this with a big caveat: I didn’t even realize I was getting gum. Yes, it says it right on the package, but the gum comes in long little tubes that look like Sour Punch Straws, and I grabbed the package before I even noticed what kind of candy I was getting, so I was surprised when I looked a second time and found gum. Oops.

Regardless, this is a package of long gum tubes covered in slightly sour powder. I grabbed the apple flavor and, yes, it did taste of apple. That perfect kind of fake apple that you expect from a Blow Pop. It had that right sweet flavor, the proper weirdly fake twinge that was still very tasty, and it came with a light pop of sour. It wasn’t very sour, I will note, not anything to the level of Face Twisters’ taffy, but it was a good flavor, one I enjoyed while I chewed the gum for a little while.

Also worth noting, the gum’s flavor lasted a decent amount of time. I’d give it a good five minutes or so that I chewed on it where the gum still tasted of apple. One stick (or tube) wasn’t really enough to get a good wad of gum going for bubbles (this is ostensibly bubble gum) so you’d likely need to chew three sticks to really get going for proper blowing. If I can’t blow a bubble within a bubble, with a half-hearted bubble within all that, then the wad isn’t good enough. Still I did enjoy the chewing experience.

I don’t know if I’d get this again, especially since I really wanted candy and I ended up with gum instead. If I were in the right mood though, perhaps, but it would have to be the perfect mood. That’s not going to happen very often.

Barnetts Mega Sour Raspberry Bombs

Okay, this one I didn’t get while on a road trip. Amazon, knowing my tastes way too well at this point, advertised this to me while I was ordering some new release movies and I just had to get a bag. I grabbed them in the blue raspberry flavor (which was all that was offered to me at the time), and then waited a couple of days for them to show up. And, like a six year old with shaking hands high on sugar, I ripped open the bag and immediately popped one in my greedy mouth.

Let me just say, this was the high I’ve been chasing since I first had a Warhead all the way back when I was nine years old. This hard candy was sour. We’re not just talking Warhead sour, which some will say is sour but my tongue has long since got numbed to that level of mild sour pain. No, this was a level of abusive sour I haven’t felt in decades. It was so over the top that I thought if I gave one of these to anyone else, they wouldn’t be able to keep it in their mouth for more than a second before they’d spit it out in disgust.

Naturally, I sucked in it until I had dissolved all the sour flavor off of it, let the candy dissolve in my mouth for a while, chewed it up, and then went back for another. It was delicious and I’m just sad I didn’t realize these things existed sooner because, damn, these are so sour. I love them so, so much.

I will state that unless you are a glutton for sour flavor, like I am, these will not be tasty to you at all. They are coated with an absolutely obscene level of sour powder, and even after you get past that outer layer the inner hard candy still has some mild sour flavor to it (although not to the extreme of the coating). Supposedly there’s also a sour powder inside the candy, giving it a kind of fizzing texture (thus the “bomb” part of the name) although I will admit I hadn’t really noticed that part. All I tasted was very sour candy and, man, it was just so good.

These are not for the faint of heart, so only eat them if you’re a sour candy extremist, like me. If you are, though, these are really good. And, supposedly, there are other flavors of these candies as well, so now I have to go and track them down and abuse my mouth even further. Sounds like it’ll be a good weekend…