Starbucks has been in and out of the chocolate business a few times, the most recent large effort was in conjunction with Hershey’s and lasted less than two years.

These little bars called Starbucks Dark Chocolate with Via Ready Brew are found only at Starbucks cafes (not even on their website) and feature the Starbucks Via Ready Brew instant coffee as a flavor base. The packaging is simple and effective, it’s a tough paper and foil combination. The package says that this little chocolate bar is 100% natural roasted instant and microground coffee blended into rich, dark chocolate.

It’s rather small, at 1.2 ounces, but for such an intense thing, it’s an appropriate size. (And with a calorie count of 160 according to myfitnesspal, it’s not on the Starbucks website or the wrapper.)

The bar shape and size is clever and incredibly portable, like a narrow and thick companion for your iPhone. The bar is in four little sections, the top is molded with some very nice typography.

The color of the bar is exceptionally dark, much darker and blacker than I usually see in just chocolate bars.

Starbuck’s has done an awful lot right with this little bar. The texture is very smooth but still intense. It’s about the coffee for the most part, but the elements of the chocolate are also in a strong supporting role.

The coffee flavors are concentrated. It’s a little acidic, smoky and woodsy. The coffee notes are less intense, but don’t fight. The texture is smooth though the bar has a bit of a dry finish. The powdered coffee isn’t chalky or gritty at all, which is a great bonus over chocolate covered coffee beans.

There’s no indication what the caffeine content was on this bar, and as I’m sensitive to the stuff, I made sure to eat only half of this for breakfast this morning.

It’s a really strong bar, smooth for something with whole coffee beans in it, flavorful and nicely portioned. The price of $1.75 seems steep at first, but as a coffee replacement that you can pull out at any time, it’s a great deal. If you’re traveling, especially driving, and need to have something at the ready, this is a great option.

I’ve never actually tried the Via Ready Brew was a drink. I do, however, buy it for use in baking. I make an incredibly intense triple salty chocolate (cocoa, melted chocolate & chocolate chips) espresso cookies with Via Ready Brew. It makes the recipe ingredients insanely expensive (between the two bags of good Guittard chocolate chips and Via it’s about $11 for a batch, and that doesn’t include the standard ingredients). So if you have the money, I do think it’s much better than espresso powder or ordinary Folger’s crystals for baking.

Starbucks posted a bit about the ethical sourcing of the chocolate on their blog in two parts: part one & part two. One of the posts indicates a relationship with Tcho, but another blog reports that the chocolate bars are made by Santander.

Related Candies

1. Sarotti Scho-Ka-Kola
2. Starbucks Assorted Gum Drops
3. Ginger Chews: Hot Coffee
4. Javaz - Milk & Dark Chocolate Covered Coffee Beans
5. Coffee Nips
6. Starbucks Chocolate
7. Caffe Acapella - Coffee Confections
8. Pocket Coffee
9. No Time & Black Black

Here’s a small selection of what I’d call Christmas chocolate bars. I’ve got to eat them up before the holidays - it may be too late for you to get them by Christmas, but there are some special ones that are worth picking up at the after-Christmas sales.

Hershey’s introduced their Golden Almond Bar in 1977. It’s a thick bar and clocks in at 2.8 ounces. The bar design and packaging has changed little over the past thirty five years. It’s still wrapped in gold foil with a gold sleeve. Bars are sold either singly or in gold gift boxes of five bars (see a 1984 ad here). They’re not that easy to find, I usually see them at the official Hershey’s stores at Chocolate World or the Times Square shop.

The bar is simple, it’s just milk chocolate with lots of whole roasted almonds in it. It differs from the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate with Almonds bar as it’s supposed to be better quality chocolate. The ingredients do not differ from the Hershey’s standard milk chocolate which includes PGPR but is at least made in the United States and not Mexico as the other supposedly upscale Pot of Gold line is.

The bar is wonderful looking, it’s thick and has a great snap. It’s about 1.7 inches wide, 4.75 inches long and a beefy half inch high. There are some almonds in there though not as many as I feel are promised but they look like they’re fresh and of good quality. The chocolate looks a little darker than the standard Hershey’s but smells like I’d expect. It’s sweet with a slight yogurty tang to it.

The texture is smooth and fudgy, with a sticky melt and a light caramel and woodsy chocolate flavor. It’s not complex and it’s not extraordinary. But if you like Hershey’s chocolate and enjoy the decadence of a thicker piece, this is a good bar to choose. I liked the nostalgia of an actual foil wrapped bar, which is so rare these days. If there’s someone on your list that loves Hershey’s, this is a little bit more elegant way to give them what they desire.

Size: 2.8 ounces
Price: about $2.00
Rating: 5 out of 10

I’ll have more about my German adventures, including a tour of the Niederegger Factory in Lubeck in the coming weeks.

I found this seasonal bar called Niederegger Marzipan Weihnachtsschokolade at the Niederegger cafe at Marktplatz in Lubeck. The front of the package says Saftiges gewurz marzipan mit vollmilch-schokolade. So it’s a spiced marzipan in milk chocolate. The image shows almonds, cinnamon sticks and star anise. The ingredients don’t specifically list anise, just “spices” though cinnamon is a separate item.

Inside the paper wrapper there’s a stiff card (advertising the company and their website) and the foil wrapped bar.

The packaging did a great job of protecting the bar. It was glossy and unscuffed.

The milk chocolate is very light in color (33% cocoa solids and 14% milk solids). The bar smells like milky chai, a little spicy and very sweet. The marzipan is moist and a bit like eating Snickerdoodle cookie dough. The chocolate is smooth, but doesn’t contribute much in the way of cocoa to this, it just nicely encases the marzipan. The texture of the marzipan is a little more rustic than the French style fondant type that’s used for creating figures and shapes. Niederegger is meant for eating and enjoying.

The ratios on the 100 gram bars from Niederegger favor the chocolate more than the enrobed little classic loaves. (I’ll get into that more in my master post.) If you’re looking for a starter marzipan that’s more about the texture and celebrates almonds as the source ingredient, Niederegger really can’t be beat. It’s not too sweet and doesn’t have any fake amaretto flavors to it.

I would prefer a version of this with dark chocolate, but I can’t argue with the traditional recipe they have. It’s a great balance of subtle spice, sweetness, milk and almonds.

Size: 3.5 ounces
Price: 1.95 Euro (about $2.50)
Rating: 8 out of 10

I’m no stranger to the Ghirardelli Peppermint Bark. They’ve been making it for years and it comes in a clever little square that’s perfect for some afternoon tea or coffee.

I found this set of bars at Target last month on sale for $2 each. They’re heralded as limited edition and come in milk chocolate and dark chocolate.

I’m not actually a fan of barks. I like my inclusions fully immersed in the chocolate. So the bar version of Peppermint Bark is perfect for my strange fondness for things being hidden in the chocolate.

Unlike most Peppermint Barks, which combine white chocolate with crushed peppermint candies (like candy canes or starlight mints), the Ghiradelli version uses minty, artificially colored corn flakes. I haven’t the foggiest why they did it that way, but honestly, they created something unique enough to be a new genre.

The milk and dark vary a little bit in their coloring. The milk version is sweet and has a lot of dairy notes to it from both the milk chocolate base and the white chocolate top (made with real cocoa butter). The mint is clean and bright, the little cereal bits are crunchy and a little salty and keep it all from being too cloying.

The dark version has two kinds of bits, the red bits and some little dark brown bits, which I think are little chocolate cookie pieces. The dark chocolate has a little smoky note to it which overshadowed the minty layer a bit, which I enjoyed. There’s a definite difference between the Ghirardelli Peppermint Bark and the Dove Peppermint Bark, which can also be found for comparable prices at similar stores. Personally, I prefer the Dove version, because it’s a bit butterier. This one is about the crunch, a grown up sort of crunch.

Size: 3 ounces
Price: $2.00 (on sale at Target)
Rating: 7 out of 10

The last item I have is not quite a full review. The Hachez Weihnachts Knusper Bar (Christmas Crunchy Bar) is a darling looking bar. The soft white paper wrapper has a classically illustrated scene of a child ice skating on a pond.

Feine Vollmilch-Chocolade mit Zimt, Mandeln und Nussen

My German was getting pretty good, even though I’d only been listening to German podcasts for a week and was only there for a day. The front of the package said Fine milk chocolate with cinnamon, almonds and nuts. The little image also showed all of the above -cinnamon sticks, milk chocolate blocks, almonds and a hazelnut in its shell.

So I was very excited when I got it home and put at the top of my list to photograph and review before Christmas. I took it out of the wrapper, snapped it in half ... it looked and smelled so good:

The bar was glossy and showed no ill effects from the long journey (about 750 more miles on a bus at that point then the 5,700 mile plane ride).

I broke off a little piece of it to try after the photo, I was greeted by wonderfully smooth and milky chocolate and amazingly fresh, crunchy and crushed nuts and a hint of cinnamon. I could taste the hazelnuts and something else ... it wasn’t pecans, it was walnuts. What I didn’t realize was that while Nussen might be a generic word for nuts, it usually meant walnuts. (Walnusse is the more specific word.) So technically, I didn’t eat any of the bar. I had to spit it out and rinse out my mouth (I still ended up itchy and with a sore throat all evening - my allergy has not developed beyond this irritation stage). But I’m going to go out on a limb after eating many of the other Hachez products in the past week (which I’ll have reviews for) and say that this really is a good bar.

Size: 3.5 ounces
Price: 2.20 Euro ($2.89 purchased at Hachez factory store)
Rating: 8 out of 10

Do you have a favorite winter flavor combination? Anything regional or something from long ago that they don’t make any longer?

Related Candies

1. Lindt Holiday Almonds
2. Choceur Nougat Bites & Marzipan Bites
3. Dove Peppermint Bark
4. Al Nassma Camel Milk Chocolate
5. Hershey’s Special Dark with Almonds
6. Niederegger Ginger Marzipan
7. Dove Caramels & Chocolate Covered Almonds

I saw the Organic Moo Chocolate bars from Organic Children’s Chocolate, LLC at Whole Foods. It’s a line of chocolate just for kids with fun cereal inclusions like crisped rice, corn flakes, granola and graham crackers.

It’s great to see some organic candy products that are formulated just for kids, because most of them seem to be just for adults, with mature palates. The packaging here is easy to read and appeals to youngsters with cartoon cows and simple formulations. It’s really about time someone came up with an organic version of the Nestle Crunch bar.

But the big question becomes, why organic chocolate? Is it better than traditionally grown chocolate? Well, yes and no. Traditionally grown cocoa is fraught with pests, so most of the cacao grown is treated with a variety of inorganic pesticides. Because of the way the cacao beans are situation with a hard pod, and the fact that most treatments are on the canopy of the tree (not in the soil) means that very is absorbed or becomes a residue in finished chocolate. (For example spot tests in the UK have found very low levels of Lindane at less than .02 mg per kilogram in about 45% of chocolate tested.)

Chocolate is a very small part of our diet (about 12 pounds per person per year in the US), so that’s a very small, very slowly ingested amount. But children are smaller and more susceptible to toxins, so it’s understandable that many parents want to limit their exposure. There’s also the fact that the farm workers who apply the stuff are exposed to it at much higher levels and are for more likely to suffer from side effects than we would be. So you have a choice now, organic chocolate is available. But how does it taste?

The Organic Moo Milk Chocolate with Rice Crisps bar is made with all organic ingredients, including organic crisped brown rice. Even the packaging is made from recycled paper.

The bars are big, 2.1 ounces for this one, and a lot of crisped rice there when I flipped it over.

The bar smells milky and sweet, but has a toasted sugar and malty cereal scent to it ... along with a kind of musty odor, a bit like hot cocoa but also slightly reminiscent of wet paper.

The texture is quite smooth, much smoother than Hershey’s or Nestle. The milk flavors are strong and a little earthier, but that could be the malt of the crisped rice. It’s sweet, much sweeter than other organic chocolates, as this is a chocolate for kids so it’s a little less intense. The flavor reminds me of the Thompson’s Organic I’ve had before. When I contacted Moo Chocolate to ask about the source of their organic chocolate, they wouldn’t say except that it is Swiss.

The crisped rice are crunchy, but also not quite airy and light, as I think many of us might be accustomed to with Rice Krispies. It’s quite satisfying to eat just half the bar (a little over one ounce). The sections (whimsically alternating between a cow and the Moo logo) are easy to break off and small hand friendly.

Overall, it’s a great combination of textures, but the kind of goaty flavor of the chocolate is not to my liking, so I’d probably skip this entire brand line. However, kids are often less discriminating and the packaging here doesn’t make this feel like it’s “special”, just that it’s fun and tasty.

The Organic Moo Chocolate Milk Chocolate with Corn Flakes is also made with the same milk chocolate, though the bar weighs a little more at 2.7 ounces (I guess corn flakes are denser than crisped rice).

The ingredients are all organic, except for the sea salt. The package has a pleasing yellow color coding, which actually helped me make the natural assumption for corn.

This bar was not as amusing to look at as the Rice Crisps. The mold is generic, and only breaks into fourths instead of eighths. The breaks were messy, as the corn flakes were big and would keep the cleavage irregular. I didn’t get as much of the musty taste in this bar as the Rice Crisps one, but it tasted much sweeter.

The corn flakes are thick and a little rustic. I didn’t find them as light and crispy as the commercial brands though I’d probably love them in actual milk. I wanted to like this bar, because of my deep devotion to the Ritter Sport Knusperflakes (milk chocolate and corn flake bar), but the textures, chocolate flavor notes and ratios just weren’t there. Plus it cost more than twice as much.

I did a little research about organic chocolate versus traditionally grown for this post. It’s hard to find independent information on the subject, as most publishers of information freely available are biased one way or the other (usually in favor of selling their own product). This article was well researched with plenty of citations, if you want to read more on the subject. As far as my opinion, it would be good to reduce pesticide use through sustainable methods that both preserve the ecology of the plantations, are safe for the workers and the final consumers. For the latter folks though, chocolate is such a small part of our diets, there are far better places to spend your money to reduce pesticide residue exposures. I would advise prioritizing the “dirty dozen” and working from there.

If you’re a parent looking for something a little more wholesome for your kid, the Moo Chocolate brand is well rounded and a good bet. Of course with all things organic you’re going to pay more. Ultimately, I’d like to see Fair Trade go with that and maybe some diversity of package sizes (little one ounce bars are more appropriate for kids). A great stocking stuffer, they’re available at Whole Foods and other stores that sell natural products.

They’re Kosher and contain milk and soy. Also made in a facility that processes wheat, peanuts and tree nuts.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate Covered Potato Chips
2. Crisp Angell Organic Candy Bar
3. Dark Angell Organic Candy Bar
4. Sunspire Coconut Bars
5. Theobroma Chocolate y Maiz
6. Sweet Earth Chocolate Cups
7. Crispy Cat
8. Ritter Sport Assortment

Chimes has always made eye-catching packages. They make a great set of tins for the Indonesian-style ginger chews. But even the bag version is gorgeous. I picked up the Chimes Orange Ginger Chews at the local Korean-run Japanese market in Little Tokyo (but I’ve also seen these at Cost Plus World Market).

For a sugar candy, they’re a little expensive, $2.99 for only five ounces. But they’re well packaged to keep the product fresh and the pieces are small so you get a lot of them.

The package says that it’s made with Pure Java Ginger. I have no idea what the reputation of ginger from Java is, the only ginger that I’ve actually noticed I eat a lot of is Australian ginger. (But Wikipedia cites that India grows the most.)

The initial flavor, after the dusting of sweet powdered sugar goes away is orange zest and a bit of orange juice. The chew is stiff at first, but gets pretty sticky as it softens up in the mouth. The dissolve is smooth and then it gets quite warm from the ginger. I didn’t get much of the rooty and earthy flavors, because the orange was so strong. But there was a very strong heat from the ginger.

The pieces are small, but pack enough punch for the size. My biggest frustration was with the little sealed wrappers on the pieces. They were devilishly hard to open, and then inside there was a bit of powdered sugar with varied and could be messy. Luckily folks are used to seeing me dusted with confectioners sugar and have never accused me of having a coke habit.

It’s a nice hot weather treat, you can really abuse them since they don’t melt and won’t leak out of the sealed wrappers. Ginger is great for upset tummies as well, and the flavor is fresh and invigorating so good for keeping you up without caffeine. I’m still most fond of the traditional just ginger version, but if you’re looking for something that’s not quite so gingery, this is a good starter option.

Related Candies

1. Ginger People Spicy Apple Ginger Chews
2. Divine 70% Ginger & Orange Dark Chocolate
3. Niederegger Ginger Marzipan
4. Darrell Lea Licorice & Ginger
5. VerMints
6. Ginger Bears
7. Chimes Ginger Chews

The Ginger People are wild about ginger and make all sorts of ginger products including a nice array of ginger chews.

The package for the Spicy Apple Ginger Chews features The Ginger People‘s mascot, an anthropomorphic gingerman sitting on a pile of apples, eating a ginger chew. Kind of weird looking as well as creepy when you think of him being cannibalistic.

Soft and spicy apple-ginger candy. Natural, stimulating and delicious.

The candy comes in a small stand up pouch. It has a zipper seal, so it can be closed up. Reclosing is hardly necessary to keep it fresh though, as each piece is maddeningly sealed in un-tearable plastic that says “tear here” with an arrow at one end.

The pieces are about an inch and a half long, rather flat and kind of sticky. There’s a powdered starch coating on the outside to keep it from sticking too much.

The chew is smooth, the ingredients have no dairy in them, so I can’t call it a caramel. It’s made of cane sugar, ginger, tapioca starch, apple flavor, cinnamon oil and allspice oil.

The flavor is first, and foremost ginger. The woodsy and earthy flavors come out loud and clear then create a warming sensation that last for quite a while, some pieces were hotter than others and created a little soft burn. The apple flavor was vague but present only by comparison to their classic Ginger Chews. The cinnamon and allspice did add a bit more dimension to it, like a spiced cider drink.

They’re messy and difficult to get out of their wrappers, but they’re also simple, vegan and refreshing.

I like them for traveling, as I sometimes get motion sickness. Folks who are prone to upset tummies (especially for morning sickness) may find them both a fun candy and soothing. They’re a little expensive for a sugar candy at $2 for 3 ounces but the pieces are small and there are a lot in the package.

Gluten free and vegan but they’re processed in a facility that also handles peanuts.

Related Candies

1. Divine 70% Ginger & Orange Dark Chocolate
2. Bissinger’s Lemon Ginger Yuzu Gummi Pandas
3. Ginger Chews: Hot Coffee
4. Niederegger Ginger Marzipan
5. Green & Black’s Ginger Chocolate
6. Ginger Bears
7. Ginger Delight

A couple of years ago Trader Joe’s started carrying something called Chocolate Crisps. They’re thin pieces of chocolate, slightly bent with a few little bits of crisped rice in them.

As with many of Trader Joe’s products, they’re actually a much larger product line. I started seeing a nearly identical product in stores like Cost Plus World Market and Target called Belgian Chocolate Thins. In this case they’re made by a company called Royal Chocolates who actually patented their machine process for making these little thins. It’s underUS Patent 6,303,171. The process is kind of simple, according to the patent, deposit a little disk of chocolate on a flexible surface, then before it cools completely bend the sides up. (I’d hazard that Pringles are made in a similar fashion - but are fried while in their little forms.)

The package describes them as Luscious, milk chocolate filled with crispy rice puffs. Simply irresistible!

They come in a tray, which is sealed in cellophane. The tray holds three stacks of approximately 12 pieces. Each little flick is two inches long and an inch and a half across, so a bit smaller than a Pringles potato snack.

The package exhorts buyers to enjoy them all year round and suggests serving them with ice cream, coffee or decorating cupcakes. I think it’s safe to say that simply eating them is also a good year-round option. But I can imagine that they melt much quicker in the summer heat than more solid bars.

The milk chocolate is rather dark, much darker than UK and American style dairy milk chocolate. The smell as much like sweetened cereal as they do like chocolate. They break easily and melt pretty well too. The first thing I got was a caramelly sweetness. The cocoa notes do come out and are quite woodsy. The rice crisps are crunchy, but not overly present as a texture as they disappear quickly. It does give a little malty flavor to it though.

Overall, a good little treat. It’s very easy to manage portions, because each piece is so light but takes a while to consume. They suggest a full stack of 12 pieces (1.5 ounces) but I found that about 8 or 9 was plenty and stretched out the package for four portions. I feel like it’s priced rather expensive, but a Belgian chocolate bar that actually weighs less often costs more. There’s a lot of packaging, but it’s well engineered since every single piece was whole and nothing was melted or bloomed.

They come in a variety of flavors: Caramel, Almond, Hazelnut, Dark and Mint. They’re not the first company to make this sort of thing. For a few years Hershey’s made a version called Swoops, which were pricey and didn’t catch on. Fast Company recently did a brief profile on the product line.

Belgian Chocolate Thins contain gluten, dairy and soy plus may contain traces of other tree nuts. (There’s no statement about peanuts, but they are made in Belgium where peanuts are less common.)

Related Candies

1. Nestle Skinny Cow Heavenly Crisp
2. Nestle Crunch - Even More Scrumptious
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Crisps
4. Ferrara Belgian Milk Chocolate
5. Q.Bel Wafer Rolls
6. Ritter Schokowurfel
7. Villars Swiss Milk Chocolate
8. Reese’s Swoops (Chocolate Chips)

When I was a kid and candy was hard to come by, there was always the old standby of cough drops. I grew to love Hall’s Honey Lemon Eucalyptus drops as if they were decadent candy. Of course they are, there’s little that’s nutritional or therapeutic about them. But sometimes it’s a small pleasure that lifts the spirits when you have a cold.

My favorite cough drops as a kid were Pine Bros, which were about as old school as they come. They weren’t like the standard hard candy lozenges, instead these were a glycerine pastille, similar to Grether’s or Dr. Doolittle’s. The ingredient they all share is glycerine, which is viscous and has soothing properties as it can coat irritated membranes.

Pine Bros Throat Drops and I were born in the same city, about a hundred years apart. Once I moved to the West Coast from Pennsylvania, I couldn’t find Pine Bros any longer. Part of it was that Pine Bros, which was made by Life Savers between 1930 and then Life Savers was bought out by Leaf (I believe they were manufactured outside of the US for a while and the formula changed) then when Leaf divested in 1998 a company called IVC picked up the Pine Bros name. By 2005 they were gone.

The word softish is perfect for these. They truly aren’t hard or soft, but have a great squishy quality. The pieces are nicely formed and comfortable for the mouth. The pieces are about three quarters of an inch long and have a little indentation in the bottom, which I believe is caused by the piece shrinking a bit due to evaporation as it cures in its mold.

The flavor is mild, a combination of a jammy wild cherry flavor and a little hint of honey (though there’s not actually any in there). The flavor is rather similar to blackcurrant with its deep wine notes. It’s more floral than many other cherry candies and because they’re colored naturally (with elderberry juice) there’s no weird aftertaste.

Most cough drops are hard candies, but these are soft, pliable yet tacky and stiff and pretty much impossible to chew up. They’re not quite bouncy like a gummi (which contains gelatin, which is a protein) but still have some of that firmness. The other great thing is because they’re so smooth, there’s little danger of sharp voids like some cough drops can have - so no little cuts or scrapes inside the mouth.

I picked up the Value Size not because of its value but because it was the only format available. It holds 32 drops for $3.49 (2.38 ounces) while a little tin of Grether’s of a similar quantity would be about $10.

If you always wished that Grether’s came in Wild Cherry and at a fraction of the price, Pine Bros may be the solution for you.

My favorite Pine Bros flavors were Licorice and Honey. So I was excited that even though the Licorice wasn’t in production yet, the classic Pine Bros Natural Honey Throat Drops were back.

The package is new and sharp, but still has a classic feel to it. The color coding is similar to the boxes I remember as a kid. Cherry came in a deep red box, Menthol was in Blue and Honey was in a deep amber. The new packaging is a bit brighter, with more of a mustard yellow.

The ingredients are listed as a medicinal product, not a candy. My Pine Bros Throat Drops were also taxed, so were not considered food so do not have any nutritional/caloric information.

Active Ingredients: Glycerin 65 mg. Inactive Ingredients: Gum Acacia, Sugar, Honey with other natural flavors, Corn Syrup, Water, Sunflower Oil, Canauba Wax.

I was a little confused by the “Gum Acacia” item until I looked it up on Wikipedia. It’s Gum Arabic with a fancy new name in an attempt to hide from an urban legend.

The pieces are beautiful little amber drops. They actually remind me of true amber. They sound like it when dropped and feel lighter than they look they should. But they’re a little weird. They’re not like I remember them.

The package smelled quite a bit when I opened it. Not just like honey but like roses, like a jam made from rose petals, so it’s a very sweet, syrupy rose scent. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s not the toasty and more cotton candy notes I was prepared for.

The texture is smooth, the melt is wonderful and they truly are soothing for a throat a bit raw from the drying and dusty Santa Ana winds. But the flavor, which I was hoping would be mild and sort of fleeting is rather stubborn. It tastes, well, old. Like old flowers, old tea ... not fresh. I actually found myself reaching for the Wild Cherry ones.

There are two other flavors that Pine Bros is hoping to bring back: Licorice and Honey Lemon. So here’s to hoping that it’s actually Honey Lemon that I love so much and that my favorite will be restored. But I also have high hopes for Licorice.

They are made in the USA in a facility that also processes peanuts and tree nuts. They’re not listed Kosher but the non-honey versions should be considered vegan (unless the glycerine was from an animal source, which is pretty rare because it’s so much more expensive).

I’m not planning on reviewing cough drops on a regular basis, but now’s a good time to ask: what cough drop do you eat like candy? (My other favorite is Thayer’s Slippery Elm, which also has a dreamy smoothness with the flavor of maple sugar considering it starts out looking like a small tablet of rabbit food.)

Related Candies

1. 12 European Licorices
2. Perfetti Van Melle Golia
3. Honees Honey Filled Drops
4. Gimbal’s Honey Lovers
5. Eat with your Eyes: Pine Brothers Cough Drops
6. Boules de Miel (balls of honey)
7. Puntini Jujubes - Frutti Tropicali
8. Jujyfruits & Jujubes
9. Pastiglie Leone

When I was in Amsterdam, instead of seeing Altoids by the check out stand at the grocery, I saw Potter’s Original. The funny thing was, there was already one in my purse. Several months before my trip to Europe, I picked up a little tin to tuck into my bag.

It’s a cute little tin, light and narrow, it’s like a longer box of wooden matches. It has a pleasant rattling sound from the little candies inside. It was pretty cheap for licorice, too. They sell for less than 1 Euro, so about a buck and even in the United States I only paid $1.50. Of course there’s not much in there weight wise, it’s only .44 ounces.

In Holland folks call them simply Pottertjes. The flavor is a combination of licorice and menthol.

The tin has a clever dispensing set up under the lid. The second lid has a tiny hole that allows only one or two pieces to come out at a time. Each piece is about the size of a French lentil, though a bit square and pillowy.

I was fully expecting these to be strong and possibly salted. I was spared the latter, though they are quite potent not only in the licorice department but also have some sort of yin yang thing going on with some warming and some cooling.

The ingredients list a base of licorice and sugar then an addition of both menthol and capsathine. Capsathine is one of the constituents of hot peppers.

The flavors start bold and smoky, there’s a lot of molasses and woodsy licorice notes. Then the menthol gets things pepped up with a bit of nasal clearing ... then towards the end there’s a little burn, like a cayenne but without those green notes.

The texture is odd. Sometimes I thought I was chewing on a piece of paper, other times it was like slightly grainy gummi bear. They’re very small, but one does quite a bit. I’ve had the tin for nearly a year and do partake every once in a while. The overall flavors are on the medicinal side but much more interesting than the standard honey lemon variety.

Potter’s also makes a mild version, which I’ve bought but can’t bring myself to open until I finish (or get close to finishing) this one. They also make glycerine drops, similar to Pine Bros and Grether’s Pastilles. Hopefully when I have a layover in Amsterdam I can try to find some.

Related Candies

1. Villosa Sallos Licorice
2. 12 European Licorices
3. Eat with your Eyes: Old Timers Licorice
4. Panda Soft Herb Licorice and Licorice Cremes
5. Leaf Schoolchalk, Allsorts & Pipes
6. The Apothecary’s Garden: Herbs (and some Bees)
7. No Time & Black Black