ahh life savers. i guess maybe they could be considered a boring candy, but i enjoy them. they are like the classic hard candy! COME ON PEOPLE! classic. now, i enjoy whatever kind of lifesavers you throw at me, but i have a special place in my heart for butter rum.
when i was a kid, we would go on many a family road trip. usually it ended in upstate new york, but our winding and ever-changing route would take us through many other states, often stopping in different cities along the way. there’s not much to do in the back seat of a van for hours on end, so we would look forward to each and every stop we made, including the gas station stops. we would each get our own drinks and candies, but my dad would almost always pick up a roll of life savers. he would usually get one of each the five flavor pack, and the butter rum pack (and sometimes the tropical too). as we made our way up the interstate, he would reach the pack back to us, and ask if any of us wanted a ‘smoke’. and the roll would get smaller and smaller until it was all gone.
i associate the butter rum with this more than the five flavor packs because i would have regular lifesaver whenever, but i would never go out of my way to get butter rum. butter rum is NOT a fun flavor. it’s… well it seems adult to me. and just one flavor per pack?! what a waste! but i picked these up last week, remembering how they actually were a pretty good candy. and eating them now they are every bit as good as they were all those years ago that i last had them.
the butter rum flavor is a warm, sweet buttery melty-type flavor. it’s similar to a caramel in the way it’s sweet, but the butter is the prominent taste here. there is just a light hint of a rum taste to it, and that really goes a long way. typically, i hate candy flavored like liquor. in fact, anything flavored like liquor is pretty gross to me usually. but it’s such a tiny flavor in these life savers that it just serves as a special, unique bite.
these candies are delightful, and even if my nostalgia glasses make them seem ten times better than they actually are, they’re still a really solid treat.