Tampa Bay Food Monster

i’m a pretty big fan of sour patch kids. i’ve been eating these things for as long as i can remember. they are, as far as i’m concerned, the base line by which to judge sour candy. that’s not to say that i find them to be the most sour of sour candies, just that they are my favorite. now, i am something of a purist when it comes to a lot of things, so when i hear that a candy i like has come out with a variation on the traditional form, i am usually pretty skeptical. but actually, i’ve had a few different types of sour patch candy that i’ve quite enjoyed (the sour patch peach, and sour patch watermelon). so i feel that whatever new things they come out with are generally worth a try.

when i saw the “sour patch extremes”, i was a bit turned off by the name (X-TREME marketing is always a negative, even if it’s just in name alone), but i thought why not give them a try. it wasn’t really easy to tell what i was getting into judging by the art on the bag, but i figured that it was probably just an extra sour version of the originals, in different double flavors.

as you can see, they are fairly similar to the regular sour patch kids, with the same sour sugar coating, but in different shapes, and multi-colored. these shapes are supposed to be x-treme headz^TM of some sort. they come in three varieties: watermelon grape, orange blue raspberry, and sour apple strawberry. one of my chief concerns was that they would have a more gummy chew to them than the waxy chew the original sour patch kids have, and that was mostly unfounded. they are made from largely the same ingredients as the originals, and have a similar chew, though (as a result of their flatness?) they do have a little more give. but it’s not so much that i don’t know i’m eating a sour patch product.

the flavors are pretty good. biting them in half, you can taste that each colored side has a distinct flavor of its own, which is nice to know. the orange blue raspberry features a similar orange flavor to the original sour patch kid orange, and the blue raspberry flavor is about what you’d expect from a blue candy. the sour apply strawberry is pretty overwhelmingly apple in flavor, which is good if you like sour apple. and the grape watermelon (my favorite) has a similar watermelon flavor to the sour patch watermelons, with a nice light grapey flavor present as well. the latter works best as a combination of both flavors.

sadly, i didn’t find these to be any more sour than regular sour patch kids, which was my only real hope in buying them. the flavors aren’t interesting enough on their own to warrant the purchase, and having to eat them in their predetermined combinations is kind of annoying. overall, nice to try, but i’ll stick to the old school sour patch dudes. they taste like childhood.