Once again, I encounter a candy which keeps me up all night long.  I never would have guessed how much sleep I would end up losing to CANDY.  I suspect the problem is the gelatin, since that's the ingredient that both Cola Bottles and Conversation Hearts have in common.  

It isn't like I'm eating a big fistful of candy and then going right to bed, either.  In the case of the Gummy Brand Cola Bottles, I ate half the packet at about 8PM.  I went to bed at midnight.  By 2AM I had started tossing and turning, and downing Tums in a futile attempt to suppress the terrible gastric reflux cola and cow hoof gelatin flavored acid burps.

The next day I thought that surely it must have been some kind of mistake.  So I finished off the rest of the packet, and spent the entire afternoon being acutely aware that Cola Bottles do not agree with me.

The things I go through for you people!

Although there are a lot of gummy candy makers out there, Haribo remains the best and most well-known.  Haribo is the German candy manufacturer which brought us the original gummy bears in the 1980s.  

Gummy candies are all pretty much the same flavor: "undifferentiated fruity."  Sure you have your fruit rings sold in specific flavors - peach rings, watermelon rings, and so forth.  And there's usually a sour line, which is "undifferentiated fruity sour."  But for the most part, they're all the same candy in different shapes.

Cola Bottles buck this trend, by being cola flavored.  Actually, they are mostly gelatin flavored, although there is the elusive whiff of cola.  Once I was paying attention, I found that Cola Bottles are not nearly as cola flavored or scented as one might be led to believe.  The flavor is there, certainly, but it's awfully wan.

The texture of Cola Bottles is also a little firmer than that of many gummy candies.  These have a real tooth to them.  They take some chewing.  And given the fact that they are also not very sweet, I really started wondering why I was eating them.  It was a lot like eating some kind of dog toy.  ("Cola Bottles, now by Nylabone!")

I wouldn't have been so disappointed about all this, except that I really liked the cola flavor.  I kept wishing that I was eating something that was actually that flavor, instead of something as dour as unflavored gelatin.

The constant inescapable presence of unflavored gelatin reminded me that in theory, I'm a vegetarian.  (I call myself "vegetarian-ish.")  It is difficult to believe that animals died in order to make Cola Bottles, but it's true.  At best, one can say that the cows died for other reasons, and it was only a matter of efficiency that their hooves are used to make gelatin.  Best case scenario, I was eating a slaughterhouse byproduct.

So to sum up: Cola Bottles aren't very tasty, I suffered from heartburn and gelatin/cola burps for hours afterwards, and they made me sad for ethical reasons.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user rhoadeecha