WarHeads Sour Jelly Beans

Sour jelly beans are an interesting subgenre. There are quite a few kinds of sour jelly beans out there, yet this is just the third batch reviewed on this site – following last spring’s back-to-back Sour Patch Jelly Beans and Trolli Extreme Sour Egg Bites Fruitz reviews.

I’ve been looking forward to getting back to sour beans for a while. Will the WarHeads Sour Jelly Beans satiate that desire, or leave me disappointed and wanting more?

Size and shape

This is one of the weakest showings in this category that I’ve come across.

Both size and shape have an huge amount of variance. The beans are too small overall. The largest ones are just right, but the average size is on the small side, and the smallest ones are comically tiny.

I’d maybe give half a bean, if I could, for attempting a dimple, but the general shape tends to be a flattish trapezoidal prism. The roundest ones are acceptable, but most are too angular or even concave in the wrong place.

Not off to a good start, WarHeads.

0 out of 5 beans

Chewability

Lack of quality control is becoming a theme in this review. When you get a good bean, it chews very well. Unfortunately, every third or fourth bean is extremely hard to chew. Not just requiring a bit more effort, but really requiring an excessive amount of effort.

Those bad beans spoil the bunch.

2 out of 5 beans

Texture

WarHeads Sour Jelly Beans have the distinction of being the first jelly beans reviewed on this site that have a sanded outer shell. Sour Patch Jelly Beans had what I described as a “matte” finish, but the shells of the WarHeads beans is definitely rougher.

This isn’t a huge deal, but I think it warrants docking a bean in this category for going against tradition without a discernable benefit. (Compare with Nerds Bumpy Jelly Beans, where the bumpy shell texture is actually a feature.)

A bigger issue is that the shell is thin and almost flaky. It melts away almost instantly when chewing most of the beans, and it’s really brittle when chewing one of the stale, hard-to-chew beans.

The somewhat mealy insides are nothing to write home about, either.

1 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

The flavors are hit and miss as far as representing their real-life flavors. Lemon and orange are good, cherry and apple are okay, and blue raspberry and watermelon are terrible.

Additionally, the flavor seems to all be contained in the sour coating, and once that dissolves, the insides have just a bland generic sugar taste.

Most disappointingly, they’re just not that sour. The WarHeads brand has a reputation to live up to for being some of the most sour candy on the planet, and these beans do not deliver when eating one or two at a time.

3 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

As you might expect, many of the problems highlighted above are exacerbated by the one-of-each test. Hard beans make it even harder to chew six beans than it already is, and though the greater quantity of sour flavor hits you in the face up front, once it’s gone, you’re left with a long time to chew a bunch of beans that are only tasting like plain sugar.

2 out of 10 beans

Conclusion

How are you, WarHeads?

Brach’s Classic Jelly Bird Eggs now have some company at the bottom of the barrel. I’ve got several different (non “bird egg”) varieties of Brach’s coming up in the near future, though. I’m curious to see if Brach’s will be able to redeem its brand.

This is it for WarHeads, though. Pretty disappointing for a longtime fan of WarHeads Extreme Sour Hard Candy.