Now with Flavor!

It’s Easter time, a time when all the (Christian) kiddos get their Easter baskets out and see what candy the Easter Bunny (read: their parents) decided to stock for them. A traditional snack of the Easter basket is the jelly bean, a candy-coated chewy confection that looks a little like an eggy pellet, a little like a candy-colored bunny turd. Hell, in some depictions of the Easter Bunny you can see a train of jelly beans left behind him, which I think indicates all we need to know about where (mythologically speak) jelly beans come from.

But since they’re so ubiquitous for the holiday, I thought it would be fun to pick a brand of jelly beans and go in depth on the candy to see if they measure up. Hitting the grocery store I saw Welch’s Jelly Beans which, on the package, noted they were made with apple juice concentrate. You know, as if this somehow made these sugary bunny pellets actually healthy for it. They’re not, but we can at least see if they taste good:

Concord Grape

Welch’s is known for two main juices: apple and grape. Interestingly, while all of these jelly flavors are made with apple juice concentrate, they don’t have any other fruit juice concentrates in their mix (not even grape for the grape beans). Stranger still, there isn’t an apple flavor in the bag, which I found mighty confusing. Still, they’re known for grape juice so I figured I should start with the grape flavors from Welch’s.

Credit where it’s due, the grape flavor does taste like grape juice, even if there’s no grape juice in the mix. Presumably the “natural flavor” listed on the bag covers there (there’s also “artificial flavor” listed as well, but we’re trying to be kind here). Many of the grape beans pop with flavor, tasting just as you’d hope and expect, and they’re pretty yummy, honestly. With that said, I don’t think the flavor distribution is perfect in the bean mix as I got the occasional one that had an odd, sharp tang to it, as if I was mostly tasting “bean” and not much “grape”. That is something to be mindful of, that these are imperfect at best even if, by and large, they do taste good.

White Grape Peach

These ones are good, but not necessarily as good as the Concord Grape beans. The White Grape Peach beans are certainly fighting a flavor battle, and I’m not sure it’s one either side properly wins. The white grape flavor is muted, coming across more as just a sugary flavor than truly grape. But it is there because it does offset the peach flavor. There’s a subtle hint of peach that grows, and then it becomes the whole thing, but that flavor is muted out by the grape-ish tang at the outset.

And, again, I noticed that not all of the beans were made equal. Some were more peachy, some had more of the white grape flavor, and some were just “jelly bean”, mostly sugar and not really fruity. If I have to guess, this is caused by the real fruit juice in the mix not mixing evenly, a byproduct of using natural ingredients in an unnatural food.

Altogether, this knocks the White Grape Peach flavor down a couple of spots, from “craveable” to merely “okay”. And that’s sad because I generally love peach flavor, but not this time.

Orange

I sampled Orange next because I figured it was the least likely to be saved by apple juice flavor. Orange and apples are very different, in tone, flavor, and style (hence the saying of “comparing apples and oranges”) and I figured if any flavor was going to fall flat, it would be orange. You can kind of fake berry flavor with apple juice, but it’s hard to fake orange without it tasting foul or acrid. Apple juice simply doesn’t lend itself well for that.

And I was right. These beans are bad. They don’t taste like orange juice, they taste like sweetened orange zest. They’re sharp, acidic, and fairly unpleasant. They have none of the light, sweet flavor I found in either Concord Grape or White Grape Peach. They’re the flavor I’d leave sitting in the dish while I eat everything around it, like licorice flavor beans in a Brach’s bowl of jellies. They’re just awful.

Strawberry

So I’ll be honest: there are two berry flavors in the bag, one red and one pink, and I’m only guessing that the red was Strawberry and the pink was Raspberry. It’s hard to tell because neither of them taste like real fruit, they’re both fake berry flavors with maybe a hint of apple on the back end. So we’re going to say that the red beans are Strawberry flavored and go from there. And where we’re going isn’t that good, but it’s still better than Orange.

The flavor of the bean is strong, with a surprisingly tangy bite, but in a good way. It tastes like a fresh, generic, red berry, with a tangy, almost sour flavor to it. I like sour, and I think it’s nice to have a flavor like this in the bag. I wouldn’t call it strawberry flavor at all, more like red berry like you’d get in a Sour Patch Kids bag. Still, it is a nice flavor that stands in tasty contrast to the Concorde Grape. It’s not a realistic flavor at all, but for a jelly bean that’s not necessarily bad. I enjoyed these for what they were, which is more than I could say for Orange.

Raspberry

Finally we have pink, which honestly may have been Strawberry or it may have been Raspberry. It doesn’t matter. It had a slightly different flavor, more subtle and less sour, and that’s really about the only difference between the two. Again, it’s not a realistic flavor, more what I’d call “pinkberry” than any fruit I recognize. It has that taste that reminds me of fruit, berry soap. The smell of it, not the taste. These taste how that soap smells, if that makes any sense. It’s fruity, but fake, but still kind of good.

But again, it is fake. So if you were hoping that Welch’s Jelly Beans would have real fruit flavors to them, you probably should look somewhere else. But then, we really shouldn’t be looking to candy-colored bunny pellets for realistic flavor, or for health for that matter. These are brightly colored candies so just accept them for what they are. Raspberry (if that’s even what pink is) tastes good, as does everything in the bag other than Orange, so I consider this a pretty solid win, by and large.

The beans are good, and maybe there’s someone in your house that will like the Orange flavor. If there is, then Welch’s Jelly Beans are a solid purchase. Certainly, in comparison to really fake beans (like Brach’s) these come out far ahead.