Brach’s Classic Jelly Bird Eggs

Live from Amtrak’s Empire Builder line, somewhere in North Dakota, it’s the next jelly bean review from A Boy and His Beans!

As a friend told me when he brought some of these beans to me for review, Brach’s Classic Jelly Bird Eggs are the kind of jelly beans that remind you of Easter lunch at grandma’s house. There’s a certain “old world” quality to them.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Let’s find out.

Size and shape

Brach’s “bird eggs” are a bit large for my liking, but the average size is pretty consistent.

They’re almost as large as the Russell Stover beans, volume-wise, but their shape quality is not even close to those. Whereas the Russell Stovers had a near-perfect bean shape, the Brach’s beans are most commonly a sort of rounded trapezoidal shape.

1 out of 5 beans

Chewability

Chewing a Brach’s Jelly Bird Egg is a good experience. The shell gives with the right amount of force, and the insides remind me of a fluffy pillow. It could be juuust a bit chewier, so I’ll dock one bean from this subscore.

4 out of 5 beans

Texture

The shell gets unacceptably gritty when breaking up. That grittiness overpowers the insides so much that I can’t get a read on the texture of the insides at all. Not good.

1 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

I’ll get right to the point: These jelly beans do not taste good. The flavors are not labeled, so I took my best guess at them, but the fruit flavors barely resemble actual fruit.

The cherry and grape flavors are notably offensive, as they both have a distinct cough syrup taste to them.

One bright spot is the inclusion of licorice. Finally, 10 reviews in, the first bag of jelly beans that include that classic flavor! Two beans earned just for that.

2 out of 10 beans

The one-of-each test

Perhaps the ultimate test of a bag of jelly beans is how enjoyable it is to take one of each flavor and eat them all at the same time.¹

This section ought to be pretty predictable, given the previous scores.

Seven beans that are too large + bad texture + terrible flavors =

0 out of 10 beans

Conclusion

Ouch.

Brach’s Classic Jelly Bird Eggs may have a decent nostalgia factor, but they don’t hold up in 2016, taking the last place crown from Swedish Fish Jelly Beans by two beans.

To add insult to injury, they come in a full 1 lb. bag, several ounces more than the previous largest bag. That’s a lot of beans I’m going to be leaving in the trash can of this train car.