Tricky Treats -- Sour And Hot Candies Separate The Suckers From The Wimps

FORGET TRICK OR TREAT.

What's hot these days - for Halloween giveaways, playground competitions and a surprising number of adults - is candy that is both trick and treat.

The middles of these hard candies and bubble gum are innocent enough: ordinary, sweet, fruity confections. The outsides, however, are another story, a sadistic coating that's hyper-sour or almost painfully hot.

Now, you may think you like sour or hot candy. Like lemon drops or SweetTarts. Or Red Hots or Hot Tamales.

Think again.

Have you tried Eye Poppers? Mega WarHeads? Cry Babies, Mouth Blasters or Face Slammers?

The trick in these treats comes from offering some to the unsuspecting and watching their reactions: Eyes widen. Eyebrows shoot up. Sharp breath in. Tongue out. Faces that make Mr. Yuk look like Luke Perry.

Of course, kids love 'em.

This family of sweets became so popular so fast that earlier this year, stores couldn't keep them in stock. This inspired preteen entrepreneurs. They'd buy the 5- and 10-cent stuff by the jar and sell them on the playground for a quarter apiece.

One company got up to 100 fan letters a day. Kids have formed clubs, where the initiation is to eat one and not make a face. Adults who like to suck lemons have discovered them. So have smokers, some of whom claim the extreme candies helped them quit the weed.

Even if it's just another fad, it's the biggest fad Carol Parrott has witnessed in 24 years with the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Co., makers of Extra Sour Cry Baby Bubble Gum and Cry Baby Tears candy. "I have never seen letters like this on any of our other products," says Parrott. "At first, we had a hard time just keeping up with the demand."

Many of the candies are imported. The Foreign Candy Co. started bringing The Original Mega WarHeads from Taiwan last February. Sold $5 million worth by May. A nickel at a time, mind you.

"We do lots of in-company testing," says Shawna Moret, associate marketing director, at their offices in Hull, Iowa. "Everybody's a guinea pig.

"It seems you're either a hot fan or a sour fan, but not both," says Moret, a sour. "What may be slightly hot to someone may be way too hot for someone else. But we have people asking, `Can you make it hotter?'

"We don't think we can get through the testing."

COULD I? PUTTING ASIDE questions about the merit of any sugar in the diet at all, I tried to enlist co-workers to help with taste tests. They'd pop them in, wait five seconds, and spit them out.

But, in the spirit of Woodward, Bernstein and George Plimpton, somebody had to chew it.

So, using chocolate as a palate cleanser and a stopwatch to measure the effects, I sampled a variety, taking notes along with way.

First, the sour candy:

Hi Sour: Only about 10-second sour, yielding to an awful green-apple flavor. Made in Malaysia.

Too Tooo Sour Lemon: 20 seconds. Rather pleasant, really like lemon. Then sweet. Two in a package. Made in Korea.

Cry Baby Tears: Like slightly more sour SweetTarts, tear-shaped, come in a box. No coating, just a bit sour all the way through.

Sour FX lemon candy. Wrapping has a caution: "The first 40 seconds are intense. Stay with it!" Dangerous-looking white coating. First bitter, then tart. But not so bad. By 20 seconds, it's just a lemon drop. Also in cherry, orange and grape. Made in Japan.

Sour XS intense lemon candy. Strong sour, 20 seconds. Has more sour powder once you get to the middle.

Two-Tooo Sour Apple: Sour! Yuck. 28 seconds. Then pretty much that same old green-apple flavor.

The Original Mega WarHeads, Sour Apple: White-ish coating. Wow! Real, real sour. Almost gagging. Sour lasts 40 seconds. Impressive. Then very mild, rather sweet.

Now, on to the hot candy:

Atomic Fire Ball: The old red jaw-breaker. Cinnamon-type hot. Took out of my mouth once (ostensibly to look at it). Keeps some hotness throughout.

Everlasting Hot Gobstopper. Billed as "jawbreakers that get hotter and hotter." Takes 10 to 20 seconds to get to hot. But cinnamon hot cools off after two minutes. Then very mild.

Hot Grape WarHeads: Cayenne hot. Clear the throat. Swallow. Cough. Like ordering two stars too many in a Thai restaurant. Starts to back off around 40 seconds, but the hot lasts a full 60 seconds. Counting the leftover hot, three minutes or more. Also in cherry, which isn't as hot.

THE SOUR BUBBLE GUM tends to be more sour than the candy, but you can always chew to release the inner sweetness. For testing integrity, however, I didn't chew until the sour was gone.

Face Slammers: In unmarked wrapper. Whoa! At first, so sour I can't chew. But sour goes away after 10 seconds. Gum tasty but thin and rather wimpy for bubbles.

Eye Poppers: Eeeew. Face scrunches, head tilts to one side. Darn sour for 20 seconds. On repeat trials, couldn't manage without making a face. Good flavor afterward. Decent bubble gum. Made in Canada.

Mouth Blaster: Not as sour as the others, but the sour lasts much longer, 50 seconds with one, 1 minute 40 with another. Gum flavor a bit chemical. Good bubbles. Made in Mexico.

Cry Baby: At first sour, then backs off a little, then stays sour fairly evenly. Ouch. Head in hand. My eyes actually are watering. Subsides after 90 seconds. Gum taste OK; bubbles pop early but with good sound.

(A warning: The bumps on my tongue started to rise after eating five in a row. The seventh and eighth were my undoing. Told my boss I might have to file for workman's comp. It took two days for the tongue to recover. And that's not to mention the sugar highs and headaches.)

BY THE WAY, A FUNNY THING happened during the course of testing. Those co-workers who at first could hardly look at the candies came back after a few weeks to try another. Then, sheepishly, another. And, more boldly, another: "I'm starting to like these!"

Some say these candies appeal to the joker in all of us. Others suggest they connect with the bitterness of today's youth. One adult fan tried to explain the candies in terms of yin and yang.

Perhaps there's some correlation between the candies' short-lived intensity and the attention spans of the video-game generation.

Or maybe the confections are popular just because they're different.

Anyhow, in the miscellany category, Sour Licorice gets good marks for the red ones, but the pink-lemonade ones were unimpressive. Sour Patch Kids are like gummy bears but softer, with slightly sour sugary coating. Good for beginners.

The winner in the missed-opportunity division is Ouch! bubble gum, which could be fashionably hot or sour, but instead is just pleasant gum wrapped like Band-Aids.

And easily the most gross, start to finish, was Striped Bubble Gum: green and pink, squeezed out of a toothpaste-like tube, smelled awful, gritty with sugar, yielded disgusting green watermelon-flavored gum that, admittedly, blows good bubbles.

In other words, a guaranteed hit.

Molly Martin is assistant editor of Pacific. Jimi Lott is a Seattle Times photographer.