Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Do Better, Jelly Belly

Beer-flavored jelly beans would seem to a match made in heaven, or at least in a pretty cool place. Beer is great. Jelly beans are awesome. Together, magic.

The confectionery wizards at Jelly Belly thought so, too, with some prompting from their customers. Ambrose Lee, the company's head flavor scientist (Don't think too hard about that title. Too late? My bad.) told Fast Company, ""We go to over 500 events a year; at literally every one, someone asks us for a beer jelly bean. With the craft beer scene exploding, the timing finally seemed right."

And so Jelly Belly set out to create a beer-flavored bean, experimenting with beer styles, flavor compounds, and ingredients to develop a perfect match.

Their perfect match, as it turns out, is perfectly disappointing.

Presented with hundreds, if not thousands of styles of beer from which to choose (chocolatey stouts, grapefruity California IPAs, caramel-redolent porters, smoky, bacon-tinged rauchbiers, etc.), Jelly Belly completely whiffed.

Hefeweizen. They developed a hefeweizen-flavored jelly bean. A flavor so disgusting it needs an orange or a lemon to make it barely tolerable.

I think I'd rather eat one of Bertie Bott's earthworm-flavored beans.

They look beautiful, though.

12 comments:

zman said...

TR will buy as many of these beans as they can make.

zman said...

When I was a goat Hoopie told me "If I could make gum that tastes like Heineken I'd be a millionaire." We weren't sober though.

Squeaky said...

In other news, the OED recognized a bunch of new words this year: Beatboxer, bestie, chugging, death spiral, do-over, exfoliator, sciency, and whackadoodle. Some decent ones in that list.

There were four additional words that I will use more often (but get killed by my wife for saying in front of her): cunty, cuntish, cunted and cunting.

rob said...

bruce pearl is auburn's new hoops coach. in other news, auburn just got a hoops program.

Mark said...

Finished up TJ & Jessica's Florida visit with a huge meal at my in-laws restaurant last night (Yay for free food!). A great weekend full of lots of food, laughs and booze. Love having those two visit.

Mark said...

Auburn hired Bruce Pearl as its new basketball coach. In related news, Auburn's going to be good at basketball very soon.

Mark said...

Damn you, Rob.

Dave said...

hate hefeweizen. very disappoiting.

Dave said...

also very disappointing is my spelling of the word disappointing.

TR said...

Whoa. So it's de-TRI-tus, not de-tri-TUS?

zman said...

Very much so.

TR said...

Well that is the most upsetting news I've heard since I found out banal didn't rhyme with anal.