All the Sour That’s Fit to Sack

I am a fan of Albanese Gummi Bears. While I don’t generally like gummi bears, finding them too firm and kind of gross, Albanese makes slightly softer bears that are fun to nibble. Plus, when I get their True-to-Flavor bears, they taste natural and good. I love those gummi bears. When I saw a big bag of their sour bears, though, I knew I had to try them for the site. I both generally like the company’s products and enjoy reviewing sour snacks for this website, so it seemed like a win-win.

As such, here is my review of each Albanese flavor of sour gummi bear, in the order they’re listed on the bag:

Cherry

This one was very subtle. Cherry, you expect, would be a fairly strong pop of cherry flavor, but the sour coating absolutely overpowers this. The candy says “starts sour, stays sour”, and that is true, but I would expect more cherry flavor as well and it seems to get lost on this bear. The flavor eventually comes through, near the end, once you’re basically done with chewing the bear, and that’s kind of sad. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either.

Strawberry

This berry flavor was stronger, although I don’t know if I’d say it was better. The strawberry pop comes out much faster than the flavor from the cherry bear, but it is also more distinctly fake flavored. There’s an artificial tang to it, not like the flavor is one hundred percent fake but more like it’s strawberry pie filling that’s been cooked, processed, and then stored in a can. Not from nature, even if the flavor started off naturally. It wasn’t as good as I would like, although in reality it probably would be hard to get a good, natural strawberry flavor in a gummi bear, so I will admit I could be acting overly harsh on this one. At least it tasted strongly of something.

Mango

I think the sour mix really does a disservice to mango flavor. I’ve had their alphonso mango from their True-to-Flavor mix and it’s really good. I love those bears. Here, though, the tang of the sour mix covers up the mango flavor, and what should be one of the exceptional flavors in this bag just tastes like a lesser orange. That’s really sad because slightly sour mango might actually be a good flavor. I won’t know, though, because I didn’t taste that from these bears.

Pineapple

The same problem almost hits this flavor as well as, up front, it’s hard to taste anything other than citrus and sour. Thankfully, as you chew the strong pineapple flavor comes out. It’s nice, and bright, and identifiable, but there is still something missing. Like the mango flavor, the True-to-Flavor queen pineapple bears are delicious, and I would have liked to taste something like that here. Instead it’s more sour than anything else, and while I like sour I find I don’t actually like it in this context, on this bear.

Lemon

This bear caught me off guard, in large part because I wasn’t sure what I was eating. It’s lemon, and while you’d expect that to be super yellow, naturally lemon is only bright yellow on the outside. Inside it’s more of an off-yellow, and that’s what this bear looked like. I wasn’t sure if I was eating another grapefruit, or lime, or maybe even pineapple, until I checked the list and let the flavor settle on my tongue. It’s certainly sharp, and strong, and tastes good paired with the sour mix. But it’s also weird for the brain to try and parse this one. Like, I liked it… but I also didn’t, and I’m not sure I really understood what I ate.

Orange

This was a very citrusy flavor, so you can take that as good or bad. The orange flavor was much stronger here, not tasting nearly as “sour and just sour” as some. At the same time, though, I don’t know that it tasted like a good orange. The flavor was like orange concentrate, with just a little hint of artificialness to it. Like an orange candy, which in fairness this is. But Albanese bears are generally much better than just tasting like normal candy and, honestly, I wasn’t that impressed.

Green Apple

This was another one that absolutely got lost in the sour flavor. I’m honestly not certain it tasted like an apple at all. The only reason I even knew it was apple (and not watered down watermelon) was because it was green and, after I finished chewing it, I got the very faintest taste of apple. Almost not even a taste, really. Just a smell of it lingering on my nose. It smelled great, after the fact, but I’ve never experienced an “after smell” before and… it was just weird.

Watermelon

This one was both the most identifiable of the bears, and also the most patently artificial. It was really not great, but at least it tasted like I expected. Artificial watermelon has a very distinct flavor, quite unlike real watermelon, and while Albanese often prides themselves on their naturally flavored snacks, they do also use artificial flavors as needed, and this one was very clearly going for that fake watermelon candy flavor. If you like that flavor you’ll probably like this, although I’ll warn ya that the sour flavor comes back strong on the end for these bears.

Pick Grapefruit

Now this citrus flavor was actually really good. Like orange, it’s identifiably citrus, with that sharp pop you expect. It’s not as harsh a flavor, though, nor as strongly artificial. It does have a subtle grapefruit tang to it that comes up front and lingers on the tongue. It’s very tasty and pairs well with the sour flavoring that’s all over these bears. I’d call it a good to the last chew kind of flavor, and one of my favorites from the bag.

Lime

I was starting to get deeply confused by the end of the bag because by this point I’d had a lot of hard to identify flavors and I wasn’t sure if something was lemon or apple or what. This being a paler green, with a citrus pop, I think it was lime. Certainly I caught the flavor of lime zest on my tongue and it wasn’t bad. I think a flaw with these is that you expect every bear to taste like the normal candy flavor, especially when they’re bright colors and coated in sour powder, and these bears do not. It was a fine lime, but I wouldn’t call it scrumptious… but then I also don’t know if I’ve ever had a lime candy that I’d call scrumptious. I do know I’ve eaten too many bears now.

Blue Raspberry

This one wasn’t bad. As I’ve noted in previous sour candy reviews, I am a stickler on blue raspberry. It’s a fake flavor, as blue raspberries don’t exist in the wild, and when it got wide acceptance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it had a very specific taste to it that anyone could recognize. These bears do not have that flavor. I’m not actually certain exactly what it tasted like, as it wasn’t really raspberry nor was it the identifiable blue raspberry. It was just… blue. Not a bad blue, though, and I didn’t hate this bear. Like many flavors in this bag, it was kind of odd.

Grape

And finally, we come to grape which… tasted like not much of anything. It reminded me of cherry, where we started this whole review. Largely it tasted sour, with the hint there was some fruit in there, somewhere. But near the end of chewing I finally caught something, and it was kind of like a grape if you rolled your tongue and thought about it. I wasn’t good, but it wasn’t completely unpalatable. Just, like so many other flavors, it was most sour, with a bit of color and not much of anything else.

Final Thoughts

In general I was disappointed with this bag. What I got were sour bears, as advertised, but they all generally tasted the same. If you compare these to Sour Patch Kids, or Sour Punch Straws, or the like they have both the sour pop plus real flavor. These bears have the sour but mostly lacked the flavor. Albanese makes great gummi bears, with really good flavors to them, but I think adding sour to their mix was he wrong call. In this case, the company really should stay in their chosen lane just because they’re so good at it and, in comparison, they’re so not great here.