Review - Wonka SOUR! Nerds

I had high hopes for these. Willy Wonka has shown that they know how to do sour well. Though the SOUR! proclamation does make me hesitate a bit. Rarely do sours live up to the all-caps, exclamation point kind of hype. I do admit I have a soft spot for Nerds and the idea of tasty sours in tiny little balls of...whatever they are, is appealing.

Now I have to admit a bias. I think citrus flavoured sours are a bit of a cop-out. Lemon and lime are naturally sour. It doesn't take any candy alchemy to make those pucker-able. A non-sour lemon or lime is harder to pull off. Green apple gets a bit more slack, but not by much.

Like other Nerds boxes, these come in two flavours. We have Lightning Lemon and Amped Apple. These are XTREME candies for XTREME kids, judging by the gnarly skateboarding nerds on the box. Cowabunga, dude.

Now, Nerds are meant to be enjoyed in a big handful, so I'm not going to do this one at a time. I took a big handful of the 'Amped Apple' annnd...
...not bad. It actually did make me pucker. I have to fight very hard to taste anything even remotely apple-ish, though. Tastes far more like lime if you ask me. What flavour there is isn't especially good. A second handful reveals a bit more apple flavour, but all I really taste is kind of an indistinct tartness. It's not as disappointing as it could have been, but it's not all that good either.

On to 'Lightning Lemon.' If they made apple sour, surely they can manage lemon. Um. Apparently not. Though they don't have the horrible 'dishwater lemon' flavour of Jelly Belly Sours lemon, it's not all that sour either. In fact, after the initial sweet-ish artificial lemon taste, these taste exactly the same as the 'Amped Apple.'

Okay, for completeness' sake, (and because that's what you do with Nerds) I mixed them both.
Again, a pretty good sour level, but the flavour is very disappointing. Although these are billed as two very distinct flavour, the sour sugar on both is identical.


THE SOUR LINE

Although SOUR! Nerds are actually sour, it's not a very tasty pucker. The two 'flavours' are indistinct and blend together. Unless you're feeling nostalgic and want a sour hit to boot, I'd give these a pass.