ZOMG, Candy!

There Puré gummies were another gift that my friends Emma and Jason brought back from Japan. They brought back three flavors: grape, lemon, and “fresh peach”.

Each stand-up bag of gummies was resealable, which was a touch that I appreciated. The gummies inside were heart-shaped, about an inch across, and covered in tart and lightly fizzy sour sand. They had a firm bite and a bouncy chew, which is my favorite texture of gummi.

Grape was described as “grape juice that is sweet sour tasting with the texture of fruit.” The sour coating on the purple gummies was immediately puckery tart.

After the sour coating melted away, the gummy tasted of concord grape juice. Its flavor was genuine and intense, avoiding any hint of artificial cough syrupness that often dogs grape candies.

Lemon was “lemon juice that is sweet-sour tasting with the texture of fruit.” It started off tart with an edge of lemon zest, then became surprisingly mellow and sweetly lemon citrusy, like lemonade.

Peach didn’t get a full description like the other two. It was just labeled “Fresh Peach”. It was a pale yellow gummi that was virtually indistinguishable from the pale yellow lemon flavor (both seen above).

Fresh Peach, after that fizzy sour coating dissolved, was sweet and floral with a spot on white peach flavor. It was so precise that I could even taste the peach fuzz.

These were a fun set of gummies. The fizzy sour sugar was a nice twist, and the gummies’ flavors were genuine and intense. Fresh Peach was my favorite and gets an OMG. I love citrus candies, so Lemon also gets an OMG, and grape was tasty enough for an OM.

Some people get extremely worked up about how buying Mambas can mean playing a lottery for which 3 out of the 4 flavors you get. Fortunately, when they gave out samples at Sweets and Snacks, they gave them out in single-flavor packs, so I was easily able to get one each of these Mamba Sours.

Like regular Mambas, they came in raspberry, strawberry, lemon, and orange. Each flavor pack contained 6 rectangles of the individually wrapped candies, which looked identical to the regular Mambas.

The candies were softly chewy and quite sticky. They melted away if I just held them in my mouth.

Orange yielded a juicy burst of orange flavor that was brightly sweet and quite tart. The bite of tartness lingered in the finish with just a hint of tongue-numbing.

Lemon was even brighter and even more sour than the orange. It really captured the puckery flavor of a real lemon. Here, too, the sourness made me salivate.

Strawberry had lovely floral undertones that I greatly enjoyed. It carried a slight tartness but wasn’t nearly as sour as the citrus flavors.

Finally, raspberry had the seediness of artificial raspberry candies that I usually find off-putting. In this case, however, that seediness was buried in enough generally fruity flavor and that I didn’t mind it. Here, like the in the strawberry, the sourness was noticeable but mild.

I really enjoyed the intensely bright, fruity flavors and tangy tartness of these chews. The citrus fruits were my favorite, but the other two were nice as well. OMG.

Last week, I reviewed Sour Jacks’ original candies. Today, I’ve got a review of their watermelon gummis.

The Watermelon Jacks had a completely different texture from the Sour Jacks. While the latter were stiff, the Watermelon Jacks had a pleasantly sproingy chew that bounced against my teeth.

They tasted of classic candy watermelon flavor: sweet with a bright jewel-toned flavor, and also wholly unlike anything approaching actual watermelon’s flavor. They were also much less sour compared to the Jacks.

I enjoyed the texture and found these to be a solid effort for a watermelon gummi, but watermelon gummi’s have never been high on my preference list, so these get an O.

I’d never heard of Sour Jacks before I saw them at Sweets and Snacks earlier this year. It seems like they fight Sour Patch Kids for sour anthropomorphic candy gummi territory. I picked up free sample bags of their original Sour Jacks and their watermelon gummis at the expo.

Sour Jacks came in orange, lemon, green, and red, like Sour Patch Kids do, and they were similarly covered in sour sugar. The Jacks’s sour sugar packed quite a puckery sting.

The Jacks differed, however, in their texture, which was not as chewy as Kids. Instead, they started off stiff, then softened and became a bit squishier and a little molar-sticking.

Orange was lightly sweet and citrusy with a brightly zesty finish. Yellow was lemon. Sometimes citrus candies end up tasting similar to each other, but this lemon was distinctively lemony with a strong edge of lemon zest.

Green, on the other hand, lacked distinctiveness. It may have been lime, but it lacked any zestiness and only tasted vaguely citrusy.

Though green was blah, red was worse – it tasted medicinal and bitter. Hooray for artificial colors! I think it was supposed to be cherry?

I really enjoyed the yellow and orange half of the mix, but I found green lacking and red repulsive, so let’s say it evens out to an O.

On Wednesday, I covered the cordials from my free sample of online candy boutique Sugarfina‘s Cocktail Hour Tasting Bar. Today, I’ll go through the gummis in that assortment.

The gummi half of this assortment included Hard Cider Pints, Belgian Ale Pints, Champagne Bubbles, and Champagne Bears.

The Hard Cider Pints were yellow bottle-shaped gummies coated in a mild sour sugar that also carried a tinge of effervescence. The chew was super firm and not at all sproingy, and the flavor was that of a mild apple juice.

I didn’t get any booze notes, though I suppose the slight pseudo-fizz from the sour sugar was meant to simulate the carbonation in hard cider.

The Belgian Ale Pints were on the opposite end of the gummi texture spectrum – they were super soft and sproingy. The scent was strong and incredibly beery. It was pretty cool to get that bitter, wheaty scent from a gummi!

The gummi tasted sweeter than I expected. It had a sweet and fruity berry flavor with a light beery aftertaste that was probably due to the strong scent.

Though it definitely smelled like beer, the flavor wasn’t very beery to me, but I still enjoyed it. In fact, I’d probably drink more beer if it tasted like this gummi.

Champagne Bubbles were white gumdrop-shaped gummis covered in little white nonpareils. The nonpareils provided a crunchy shell, while the center gumdrop had a soft and instant give when bitten into, with no bounciness.

I enjoyed the bright sweetness of these bubbles. They were just shy of being tart and tasted like ripe green grapes, sort of like de-alcoholified champagne, I guess.

Finally, the Champagne Bears were pink and gold gummi bears that were soft and sproingy with intense flavors. The pink bears tasted like a mix of strawberry and peach, while the gold ones were brightly sweet and fruity.

I didn’t get any alcoholic champagne flavors from the Champagne Bears. To me, they’re more like Bellini Bears. With their pleasantly sweet and strong flavors, they were still quite enjoyable.

The gummis in this assortment were tasty, and though none of them carried the flavor of actual alcohol, they were a good approximation of the booze they represented. The Belgian Ale Pints were unusual enough to warrant an OM. The rest get Os.

These candy Farts made a big splash at the Expo, with tons of people milling around the Leaf booth saying things like, “Hey, can I get some Farts?” and “Oh I’d love to try the green Farts.”

Let’s face it: it’s fun to talk about Farts. Of course I had to ask for some free samples.

The Sour Farts were coated with a stridently tart outer layer that made me wince (in a good way!). That sourness took on moisture quickly, making the Sour Farts clump together a bit after I left the package open through some humid days.

The Sour Farts were basically little bits of multicolored rock sugar candy, like Nerds but with an easy, almost soft crunch that was easier on the teeth. As you can see from the photos, they were far from uniformly sized.

Each color corresponded to a different flavor, but those flavors dissipated quickly. Plus the candies were so tiny that it was hard to isolate specific colors. The overall effect was that of sourness followed by sweetness.

The Fruiti Farts of my sample were all one uniform army/watermelon green color. They lacked any sour coating, and their matte shells were enough to protect them from the humidity effects that the Sour Farts felt.

These, too, were basically just little bits of rock candy coated in a sugar shell (again, like Nerds but softer). There was a flash of red underneath that green, so I’m pretty sure they were supposed to be watermelon flavored.

To me, they just tasted generically of artificial red candy flavor and lots of sugary sweetness with a little flash of brightness. I think if I had some other flavors of Fruiti farts for contrast, I could’ve detected some subtle differences, but really, these Farts are less about the flavor integrity and more about a tasty, sweet treat with a silly name.

I liked these better than Nerds because their softer texture was more pleasant to chew on. I never buy Nerds (though I’ll make an exception for a post-holiday Nerds Rope that’s on sale), but I’ll eat the occasional fun-sized Nerds box out of a Kiddie Mix.

I feel similarly about these Farts, but they have the added bonus of a nicer chomp and a funnier name. I think I know some little boys and girls who’ll love these and find them hilarious. An O.

Original Warheads hard candies made their splash on the U.S. market when I was a kid. My friends and I used to compete to see how many we could stand to hold in our mouths at once and – more importantly – how long we could keep them there as their sour coating burned holes into our mouths. Oh the joys of childhood!

These Warheads Sour Chewy Cubes were a new-to-me product that were being handed out as free samples at Sweets and Snacks. The sour meter on the back of the wrapper placed these at “sour”, a step above “tart” but below “super sour” and “extreme”.

They turned out to be little centimeter cubes in psychedelic, not-found-in-nature colors. Their texture was a cross between Starbursts and gummi/jelly candies – they had a long-lasting chew that sometimes got stuck in my teeth but had the softer, slightly grainy squish of gummi/jelly candies.

The sour sugar that coated the cube was mild, definitely far below what I’d expect from the Warheads brand. I’d call it tart, maybe, but it was really mostly just sweet. It added a little bit of sandy grit to the chew.

The package that I unwrapped had pink, orange, purple, and blue cubes. It looks like I missed out on green and red, which were depicted on the wrapper.

Pink was maybe watermelon, maybe strawberry? Lightly sweet and generically red-fruity tasting. Purple was grape, I suppose. Really it just tasted like a purple SweeTart.

Orange was orange and packed a surprisingly zesty punch with a spot-on orange soda flavor. And blue was who knows? Some mysterious artificial fruit flavor, maybe fruit punch or something.

Most of the cubes had a slightly bitter finish that was stronger in some colors than others. I’ll chalk that up to the artificial colors and flavors that these contained. Yummy!

These weren’t great, but they weren’t awful. Innocuous and not something that I’d spend money on. An O.

These Dorval Sour Power Straws were a free sample of a new flavor: Pink Lemonade. The rest of their line-up includes blue raspberry, watermelon, strawberry, and green apple, which I’d tried before under their Sortz name.

I really enjoyed these Pink Lemonade straws. They didn’t have any of the stiff plastic taste or over-wheaty flavor that put me off the Sortz and that you get in Sour Punch Straws.

Instead, they were soft and pliable tubes, about 6-7 inches long, with an easy chew. They were much softer, and thus much more texturally pleasant, than Twizzlers. Also unlike Twizzlers, they didn’t get stuck in the cracks of my teeth.

The sour sugar sand on the surface of the straws was mostly sweet with a little tartness. The pink lemonade flavor of the actual straws was sweet with a light, mild citrus note.

There was no lemon zestiness, but a definite lemonade/lemon drop flavor persisted throughout the chew. The sour came through in the middle when the sour sand started melting on my tongue, and the final finish was just the sweet fruitiness of the straw.

I thought these were quite well done for a relatively simple treat. The texture was spot on, while the taste was sweet and sour – but not too sour – without any off notes. An OM.

Dorval will be at the Sweets and Snacks Expo. I plan to revisit the Sortz to see if my original batch was past its prime (though I did taste it before its best-by date).

Here are some more bulk candy treats that I received as free samples from Ingrid’s Candy Shop. I reviewed a couple on Wednesday.

The Sura Körsbär were thick cherry-shaped gummis covered in sour sugar. They looked similar to Haribo sour cherries, except that the Swedish cherry pair was smooshed together, which made them look more… anatomical.

The gummi was extremely stiff to bite into. There was no squishiness to the chew, though it did stick to my teeth.

The sour sugar coating packed quite a hit of tangy sourness. Once that initial sourness passed, though, the treat just tasted generically sweet and fruity.

The sour sting was great, but I wished this had more fruitiness. An O.

Sura Soda Pops were sour gummi soda bottles. With two sura data points, I’m now confident in my assumption that sura is Swedish for sour.

The blue soda shaped gummis were covered in a zesty sugar sand. The gummis’ chew was stiff and non-sticky, with an instant give.

The flavor was that of lemon-lime soda and was quite spot-on. Somehow, the chew managed to finish with a little punch of effervescence in the back of my throat.

I loved these for that effervescent fizz. Flavorwise, they were my favorite treat of the 10 that I was sent, but the texture was a bit off. If they had the sproinginess of the Gellehelon, I would’ve been completely sold. As they are, an OM.

I was really excited when I got this bag of Rips Bits as a free sample via the National Confectioners’ Association. Could they finally be an easily, locally available version of my filled licorice?

The bag did describe them as “filled bite-sized licorice pieces”, and they certainly looked the part!

Survey says… yes! With the slight quibble that these were covered in a “sweet and sour sugar-sand” that turned out to taste much more sweet than sour.

The licorice shells were chewy and stiff while the “cream” centers were on the grainy side. Each was about an inch long.

The red ones were strawberry and cream. They tasted like your standard fruity red candy, with an intensely bright and artificial strawberry floralness tempered with a slight creaminess from the center.

Green was green apple and cream. Its flavor was more muted and more artificial tasting with plasticky undertones, very similar to those of green apple Sour Punch Straws. I liked the red ones better.

These are by no means a high-minded candy, yet I love them for their sweet and chewy intensity. An OM.

The only downside is that they still may be rather hard to track down. They’re made by the Foreign Candy Company, which doesn’t have the widest distribution. I haven’t seen them in stores yet, but hopefully they’ll turn up someday!