With a Mystery Kick

Another year brings another round of tasty Halloween treats. It is fun wandering down the specialty Halloween aisle and seeing all the tasty snacks on offer, with many of them featuring the promise of a sour kick. That’s my sweet spot (no pun intended), where I find the most deliciousness. I grabbed three of the most promising delights on offer (avoiding anything too no-name or sketchy looking from the Wal-Mart I was at) and brought them here for you all to enjoy. Maybe.

Sour Punch Frankenstraws

Be ready because we have a double-dose of Sour Punch straws. I’d consider that cheating normally since we’re reviewing a bunch of the same candy, but these two were at least different enough in context that I felt going over each separately made the most sense. And we start with the more Halloween themed of the two, the so-called Frankenstraws. What makes these “Franken” in nature? Just the color. That’s really it.

The chewy, candy straws come in three colors in the package: an orange melon flavor, a green pear flavor, and a very dark purple that’s called “Midnight Mystery”. These are three flavors I haven’t seen before from the candy maker, so I was intrigued to see just how good or bad they could be. And, thankfully, the two main flavors were pretty great. Both were more subtle in tone than I expected, lacking the strong, somewhat fake, bite of the standard Sour Punch flavors. Melon had a slightly more citrus tone to it, while pear was more like a quieter apple. I liked them both and if I saw them in other mixes during the year I’d absolutely get them again.

Midnight Mystery was a different bag. It wasn’t bad, at all, but it also wasn’t a flavor I found I craved as much. Because the package doesn’t tell you what it is you have to try and figure it out on your own and, honestly, I’m still not sure. My brain wants it to be blackberry because the straws were purple, and certainly there was a berry element to the flavor… but there was also a citrus tang as well that I couldn’t place. Maybe it was orange berry, or perhaps some kind of weird, tropical flavor. I don’t know, and while I liked it well enough I was never truly happy with the experience.

On the plus side, these Halloween straws were nice and fresh, recently issued so they couldn’t slowly get more firm on the shelf. I do love a really soft batch of Sour Punch straws, and was very happy to get these almost as soon as they were issued. It made for a nice, candy snack that I mostly enjoyed without qualms. I would probably get this package again, but I’ll look side-eyed at the Midnight Mystery straws the whole time.

Sour Punch Ghost Pepper Roulette

Our second batch of Sour Punch straws were much more intriguing to me. The trick with Ghost Pepper roulette is that while the straws come in four flavors (although more on that in a second), they’re all the same, dark purple color. That means that you can’t tell any of them apart so if you wanted to, say, avoid the ghost pepper flavor there’s no easy way to do that. The other three flavors in the packages are Boo Raz, Chilling Cherry, and Ghoulish Grape, and, yes, you’re going to end up eating some ghost pepper straws if you sample this set.

Let’s get to the main event first: the ghost pepper is pretty good. It has a subtle, berry flavor at the start, and for the first couple of chews you probably wouldn’t even realize you were eating a spicy straw. That’s the trick of it, actually: the flavor builds over time so if you were going through the package, licking each one to see if you could avoid the ghost pepper straw, there’s no luck there. It’s only as you chew on it that the spicy kicks in, and then it’ll give you a light singe. Well, I say that, but I like spicy food and I found these to be lightly spicy but not so bad that I found them actually hot. I’m sure if I’d given one to my wife to sample she would have said it burned, but she doesn’t like spice and I knew better.

As for the other flavors, the color change on the straws once again messed with my brain. I could easily pick out the cherry flavors because it had a very bright pop alongside the very obvious cherry vibe. But when it came to the blue raspberry and grape flavors I really couldn’t tell them apart. Generic berry won in both instances and it wasn’t even until I looked back at the package halfway into the candy that I even realized there were four flavors in the tray instead of three. I legitimately couldn’t tell there was blue raspberry in there as well as grape. It wasn’t different enough.

Still, I did find these enjoyable. A tray full of berry flavors is always tasty, and since I didn’t mind the spice I actually found it kind of fun to eat them. They were solidly bright in flavor, light and tasty, with a good sour kick and, occasionally, some heat. It was an experience I’d go back for again and again, if only they weren’t a special edition and limited in time.

The Nightmare Before Christmas Sour Bugs and Grubs

This is the closest I got to a no-name brand. The candy itself is made by Flix Candy, who I had never heard of before, but it did have The Nightmare Before Christmas branding on it, making it a perfect item to select for this Halloween themed edition. So along with my two Sour Punch selections, which I won’t lie I was most excited about, I also grabbed a box of Bugs and Grubs because, honestly, how bad could they be? (Insert lightning and subtle foreshadowing…)

Functionally these are like Sour Patch Kids, little, colored blobs of sweet and chewy candy with a sour powder on the outside. Instead of being in the shape of weird little kids they’re shaped like insects, of course, but the comparison is apt. It also does these candies no favors because, unlike Sour Patch Kids, these Bugs and Grubs aren’t sour at all. Whatever powder Flix Candy used on the outside, it barely tastes sour at all. It’s mostly just sugar, making these taste less like Sour Patch Kids and more like those fruit-flavors Os you can get at the grocery store or convenience mart.

They’re also very firm and not as chewy as I’d like. Sour Patch Kinds are soft without giving too much bite back to your teeth, but these are hard and not very yielding. Either this was intentional or these candies have sat around too long and got firm over time. I would guess they’re just meant to be firm since they’re a Halloween candy and should have been issued for use this year… but maybe they sat in a box for a year and are now getting released again. Whatever the case, they weren’t good.

It’s a big sin for me if sour candy isn’t sour, but The Nightmare Before Christmas Bugs and Grubs commit this sin. Too firm, too sickly sweet, and not sour at all made for a very bad candy. I ate a few of them and then threw the rest out. My recommendation is simply to not get these at all.

Final Thoughts

It shouldn’t be a big shock that I chose the two Sour Punch straws flavors over anything else. They’re a market leader in sour candy and the company clearly knows what it’s doing. The best bet is to stick with something name branded that you like, and then find the flavors that work for you. Frankenstraws are good, but I think the Ghost Pepper Roulette was even better, so long as you can handle the spice. Just avoid anything no-name because, every time, it proves to be awful.