Sour Skittles Gummies

"Friends, Readers, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Skittles, not to praise them.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Skittles."

I'm paraphrasing Shakespeare here, but I feel like it holds up. I don't know how appropriate or relevant the quote is, it mostly just sounds cool. In the play, it's the opener for a pretty cutting monologue where Marc Antony yells irony at the audience from 1600 years in the past. Real "ain't shit changed" vibes, which was kind of Shakespeare's whole deal. And, now, from 400 years in the future you'd think he was right.

Or maybe not. I never thought I would mention the word Skittles on this blog: surely not in a title. Plus, I want to avoid negativity here usually, but sometimes a thing's true nature is revealed through its inverse. Sometimes, further, faults can be fixed stronger than if they were never broken. Or, as Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet, "Virtue turns vice, being misapplied, and vice sometime by action dignified."

That's right, it's a second Shakespeare quote.

What were we talking about? Skittles, right. Skittles are nice enough in isolation but essentially it's just an oblate spheroid of extreme sweetness. Inside the sugar shell is a tightly packed sugar sand that quickly breaks down into a chewy mush. Don't even get me started on Sour Skittles, which are as unpalatable but with the added coating of one of the most aggressive sour coatings available for a "normal" candy. If Sour Skittles were good at all, they might have made it here on their own, but they're essentially a gag gift for most of the population.

So, how did we get here? What makes this candy so different, and yes, so rad? I'll give a little bit of begrudging respect to Skittles because this does feel and taste like it's in the Skittles family. This isn't just some random gummy with a brand name slapped on; no, this feels like a real refinement and evolution of an idea.

There are five distinct flavors, which I can describe in brief, but I'm going to shortcut you there by mentioning a candy from the 1950s: orange slices. The grape tastes like grape-flavored orange slices,  and the same goes for lemon, green apple, and strawberry. This comparison was unlocked for me when I tried the orange flavor: almost indistinguishable from an orange slice candy. Each flavor has its own emblematic clean sweetness of a Skittle, but more pronounced, and one that retains its strength and identity without being washed out.

And if you eat them together, they retain their profile, combining in an additive quality rather than degrading to a homogeneous mush like normal Skittles are destined to do. The mild sourness is not destructive or caustic like it is in actual Sour Skittles; here it is more refreshing and pleasant. They're so much less sour than I was expecting, and while I would have been happy together in the middle, they're still incredibly rad as is.

Overall, despite some stickiness issues i ran into, the addictive quality of these, along with the improvement on the form factor and flavor profile of a classic (yet overrated) candy like Skittles, left a strong impression on me that will be getting me to try every other flavor they make.

I give it 90 radicals out of 100, and 4 hype out of 5, making it "super hype"

Albanese Sour Gummy Bears

 I don't believe in a lot of things.  I find reverence a mostly hollow gesture, and for a while I even drew a sick sense of pride from that. I treated my cynicism as a virtue and I considered myself separate from those currents of influence and thus unbound by their patterns. Time would prove me the fool, though, as I began to curate webs of my own dogmatic fervor. However, instead of being occupied with any grand concerns about ethics or reason, I found myself deeply interested in the concept of "choice."

You see, one of the things I do believe in is the scientific concept of determinism. Since all things have a causal relationship, one could trace backwards or forwards throughout history to perfectly record the past or to perfectly predict the future. This seems counterintuitive to a thinking mind, because from our locus of perspective, we are a being with free will and can obviously express our agency. So how does one reconcile these two disparate truths: that we have the freedom to choose and yet we could have never chosen differently?

Yeah, it's a head-scratcher. Like a zen koan, the problem arises from how language and logic interface with each other; we expect thoughts to map perfectly onto base reality but this is never the case. So I've shifted the area of attack; instead of asking why I make the choices I do, I began simply trying to observe and then study those choices. 

With that in mind, there is no clearer example of a choice than Albanese Sour Gummy Bears. This is, hands down, the greatest gummy candy I've ever had. It's not even close. Even the other products in the Albanese line, while good, cannot touch the heights of their 12-flavor (Cherry, Pink Grapefruit, Watermelon, Strawberry, Orange, Blue Raspberry, Lime, Grape, Green Apple, Mango, Pineapple, & Lemon) collection. And good news for anyone out there like me who doesn't believe in anything: these gummies are unbelievable.

i give it 100 radicals out of 100, and 5 hype out of 5, making it "legit hyphy"

Reese's Pieces

In the early 1920s, H.B. Reese worked as a foreman in the shipping department of the Hershey Company. As a father of 10, he had a lot of mouths to feed, so though he was a creative businessman, Reese worked diligently at this stable job to support his family.

Harry Burnett Reese was a candymaker at heart, however; after his shifts at the chocolate warehouse, he returned home to his basement workshop laboratory where he made various candies and confections, including two candy bars named for his children. By 1923, he had launched his own candy company where hand-coated candies were sold on consignment. 

In 1928, when one of his customers was having trouble sourcing chocolate-covered peanut butter candy, Reese (then a father of 16!) decided to tackle the challenge personally. After developing an automated process to manufacture them, he integrated individually-wrapped peanut butter cups into his product line, leading him to greater heights of success. Once WW2 shortages forced him to streamline his business, these best-selling peanut butter cups became his only product.

After his death, the former Hershey dairy farmer, Hershey shipping foreman, and Hershey competitor had his legacy come full circle when his candy company merged with Hershey's in 1963. I've discussed at some length Reese's position in the market, but they obviously make a rad product that I'm a fan of, so I tend to give them a lot of runway. 

In 1982, an auteur director wanted to use M&Ms in his little alien movie. The Mars company wasn't interested, so they pivoted their pitch to a new candy with the same oblate spheroid shape. The director was Steven Spielberg, the movie was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the candy was Reese's Pieces.

Reese's iconic peanut butter coated in a candy shell colored orange, yellow, or brown. That's it. That's the whole candy. No need to gild the lily here; no need to reinvent the wheel. This is a candy utterly without nuance, though it honestly benefits from that absence. To me, though this is hugely subjective, Reese's Pieces is a candy that carries nostalgia. It feels inexplicably bound to my ideas of the movie theater experience, perhaps due to that cinematic lineage, but perhaps just because it's such a good movie snack.

I give it 86 radicals out of 100, and 3 hype out of 5, making it "yeah, hype"

LIFESAVERS Gummies Sours

 

Candy isn't a meal; it shouldn't be, at least. By even the most generous of definitions, candy is a snack, an indulgence akin to (yet wholly separate from) dessert.  While sweet candies might embrace and reformat the same palette notes as a traditional dessert dish, though, sour candies occupy a relatively foreign space. With no meal analogue and no nutritional value, how can one explain the ubiquity of sour candy in modern culture?

Well, because it's so rad!

LIFESAVERS Gummies Sours are not sour. They have a delicious citric acid coating, and they are obviously more sour than any other gummy LIFESAVER. They are sour candy, but the acidity is simply in service to larger flavor profiles. To explain further, I guess I'll get into the flavors included:

Our first clue comes in the first flavor - Tangy Cherry. A bright, juicy sour cherry flavor that incorporates hints of lime to stitch the citrus theme together. The tangiest of the bunch, this deep red gummy ring harkens back to it's namesake's classic cherry flavor, operating as both the nostalgic touchstone and as the tonal center for this flavor collection.

Next is Watermelon.  The bright green gummy is the sweetest and most delicate of the bunch. While the flavor does echo the idea of real watermelon, it resembles more the saccharine syrup of a watermelon Jolly Rancher.

The operatic third note is our beloved Orange.  What can I say about Orange? It looks orange, it tastes orange. A pure citrus blast that tastes the most like it's actual fruit, it still is closer to the taste of an old-school orange slice candy.

Strawberry is next. Like Watermelon, it is sweet and delicate. Unlike Watermelon, however, it tastes nothing like the fruit it shares a name with. Instead, it is cut from the same cloth that many strawberry candies are, borrowing notes from strawberry and raspberry to fabricate a pink hybrid only possible in candy.

Which brings us to Black Raspberry. The heavy hitter of the pack, as one would expect a raspberry flavor to be. While it is nominally the sourest of the bunch, that is a low bar that means little overall. Itself a hybrid of blackberry and raspberry notes, the deep purple gummy is unafraid to pattern itself after a food that doesn't exist in nature.

By tempering the acid levels, curating the flavor combinations, and developing around a tonal center, this print ensures that every bite is a rad one, whether you eat them one at a time or by the handful. I haven't spoken about the form factor yet, but it's a solid gummy, and this print is a worthy successor to the LiFESAVERS name.

i give it 86 radicals out of 100, and 3 hype out of 5, making it "yeah, hype"

Twix

What came first: a chicken or a chicken egg? What is the sound of one hand clapping? What color is the wind? 

Which is better: Left Twix or Right Twix?

Language and knowledge are useful tools, but one unfortunate condition of our reverence for their efficacy is their ability to make palaces and prisons out of what amounts to empty paradox. Knowledge is fractal in many ways, building a gradient of difference out of simple dichotomy and self-reference; just as everything's identity is wholly bound up in its own opposite, these opposites are key in establishing self-reference.

Such is the case with Twix. While Left Twix and Right Twix seem eternally at odds, their complicated identities are inevitably and inextricably linked. Honestly, they are more alike than they are different. Both are a flaky, neutral cookie bar serving as a boat for a layer of dense, sweet caramel. Encasing each is a thin layer of milk chocolate. Truly, the only difference is perspective.

But there is the rub; all of language is a construct, and all knowledge is illusory. All of reality hinges on a delicate cross-modal sensory process that is, at best, creative, and at worst, deceptive, so in many cases, the only difference is perspective. Why should Twix be any different? Like the best zen koans, Twix invites us to a space beyond language and beyond knowledge, where true understanding lives.

i give it 84 radicals out of 100, and 3 hype out of 5, making it "yeah, hype"

Reese's Outrageous!

 

Some things are too good to be true. Sometimes genies are spiteful, the devil is in the details, and a monkey's paw comes with a catch.

Reese's is a strange company. They have what could be boiled down into two basic market strategies. The first is obvious: sell Reese's peanut butter cups.  Different prints, different counts, different sizes, and different flavors. By flooding the market, the brand exposure pays for the extra shelf space and allows a hypothetical company like Reese's to fund a second type of market strategy: throwing stuff at the wall.

What works? Reese's peanut butter. Throw a candy shell around it and you have a Reese's Pieces piece.  Form a bar with those pieces, bind it with that peanut butter, ribbon it with caramel, then coat that in chocolate. This idea, no matter how outrageous it sounds, is an actual candy bar. It's incredible.

The end result of Reese's relentless experimentation (and the ultimate evolution of Reese's bizarre tinkering with the NutRageous line), this candy was born out of a period of time where Reese's was just throwing Reese's Pieces in everything. They replaced the peanuts in a NutRageous with Reese's Pieces, reformulated the ingredient ratio for at least a third time, and released history's greatest candy bar.

A lot of it speaks for itself. The peanut butter is obviously doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.  While it acts as a binder alongside the caramel in the bar, this is decidedly a bar of Reese's Pieces, and more peanut butter is just on the other side of that candy shell. But right there is the true magic of this candy bar; entirely ignoring the conventional wisdom that has held candy bars back for decades, this candy bar has candy shell inside the bar. Because of the merely philosophical difference between the peanut butter inside the piece and the peanut butter binding the piece, the candy shell gets a chance to shine as a valid candy bar ingredient.

But what about the monkey's paw? Yes, it is too good to be true. It could use more caramel. The candy is a little bit one-note, even if that one note rocks. Too much of a good thing, though? Hardly. This might not be a perfect candy bar, but few things are perfect when they aim for greatness. And at the end of the day, isn't greatness great?

i give it 90 radicals out of 100, and 4 hype out of 5, making it "super hype"

Looks just like the photo.

Halloween

hey, it's just 365 days until the greatest holiday of the year, so it's about time to start thinking about what candies to buy and distribute!

now I know it seems counterintuitive to select candies meticulously to then give them away callously, but tradition is tradition, and if you host trick-or-treat visitors, it's something to keep in mind.

before I start, a couple rules of thumb. go for value. value packs, variety packs, fun size. the myth that anyone wants full-size Snickers bars on Halloween is an insidious lie spread by Big Candy. on this night, above all others, Fun Size is king. furthermore, the candy is not only a commodity, it is often a currency. make sure there aren't duds in the mix. you're better off giving no candy than bad candy. if you don't want to think about it much, order a bulk bag of Reese's Minis off the internet and call it a day. so, without further ado...

5) Airheads - Unhealthy and surreal; the perfect candy to start this list and encapsulate what Halloween candy represents. a little expensive relatively, but they are substantial, and there are value packs that include Airheads alongside classics like Gushers and Fruit-By-The-Foot, so there are options. Most houses will be giving chocolate, so it isn't necessary to complement it with some kind of chocolate yourself. Airheads will be remembered.

4) M&M's - Not much needs to be said here. Candy shell that doesn't melt. Small but substantial packages. Instant vareity to account for some tastes and allergies. Classic choice.

3) Hershey's Miniatures - Similar idea to M&M's, with the individual varieties. For chocolate purists, it's a safe choice; though there are clearly better chocolates, few are as palatable to the Halloween canvas.

2) Snickers - People love Snickers. I'm not sure if it's just brand awareness or if the singular formulation of their peanut nougat really sets them apart from other candy bars, but ignoring any of my own biases, Snickers is an undeniably good candy. It really doesn't taste like anything else, but keep in mind that because of the aforementioned brand awareness, a lot of people go for the Snickers as well. My advice is to pair it with Milky Way, but your mileage may vary.

1) Reese's - Everyone had to know this was the top spot. It's Reese's. Cups, pumpkins minis, pieces. You can't make a wrong choice. Similar idea to Snickers with the brand awareness, but there is no such thing as Reese's fatigue.

Happy Halloween everyone!