Tirol Chocolate – Cream Soda

I like to think that all kid’s have gone through this phase in their life – access to an unlimited drink fountain, and ready access to ketchup, mustard, salt and pepper. Likely that this perfect scenario takes place at a diner or buffet of some sort. Add in friends and inattentive parental supervision and you have the perfect conditions for the recipe. Is recipe the right word? Perhaps abomination or affront to nature is a more apt description. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, let me enlighten you. Part of the fun in being a kid is experimenting. When you have access to an unlimited soda fountain, the first thing you do is get your favourite drink, and once the sugar from that has set in, you begin to get creative and mix sodas. In all my extensive research and testing as a child, it seemed that most soda combos ended up tasting the same – like some sort of tutti-frutti flavour that is just pure sugar and would remind you of bubble gum flavoured candy. Not particularly tasty, but I couldn’t stop drinking it. With the addition of other similarly aged kids, one would often be goaded into adding other things into the drink, like the aforementioned condiments, usually all at once. As the salt, pepper, mustard and ketchup was mixed into the cup and stirred into a rancid looking monstrosity, someone would inevitably offer up their allowance money to convince someone to drink the gut buster. All this, while the drink begins to curdle a little and the thought of drinking the whole cup for $20 bucks is a real trade off. When you’re that young, $20 bucks is a lot of money. Or at least, it was back in my day.

I bring up this because today’s flavour of Tirol reminds me of all those childhood memories. I’m not saying that cream soda flavoured chocolate is going to taste that bad ( I hope not), but rather that mixing a dairy product of any kind and soda seems like a good way to have a bad time. But being that Tirol is a rather trust worthy company with a pedigree for unique products, I will give it the benefit of the doubt and try this.

Based on the product descriptions I could find, these supposedly have the flavour of cream soda, with pop rocks in the centre to emulate the fizzy feeling. Already not feeling hot about this, but enough stalling. These pieces are the big individually sold pieces, so there’s more of it to love. I guess.

This smells nothing of chocolate, and smells like a piece of ramune hard candy. I guess you could argue it’s cream soda, but I’m beginning to think Tirol’s idea of cream soda is ice cream thrown into a ramune. The piece is white on the bottom, and green on the top. Oddly enough, the inside is red. As far as I can tell, the red is just coloured chocolate, but it does have pop rocks in it.

These taste like a weird combination of ramune and chocolate at first. It’s like took a ramune, threw in some melted ice cream and stirred. It has a weird flavour to it that’s a bit hard to explain – it’s like you tried to add milk powder to a ramune and because the two don’t mix well you can taste both of them distinctly, but they don’t seem to combine at all. It almost reminds me of the flavour version of the oil and water experiment – the water and oil can be stirred and mixed, but it ends up separating into two layers. The pop rocks aren’t really helping the situation either. The after taste is pretty awful if I’m being honest. It’s like I had a stale or really cheap white chocolate, and chugged some soda to try and get rid of the after taste but it’s like the Energizer bunny. It keeps going, and going, and going…

The texture is really not that much better. I’ll give them points for novelty, but that’s about as generous as I’m willing to be. The texture of the chocolate is nothing special, and the only thing of note is the “filling” if I can even call it that. The pop rocks are ample, and there’s no shortage of popping and crackling. I can’t really say whether I enjoy this or not, largely because I don’t feel like it’s adding or taking away from the piece as a whole.

I guess the main message I’m trying to get across here is that I’m just underwhelmed. I’m not sure what else to say about these. The idea is ambitious, but they were really up against the odds. Cream soda is inherently very artificial, so trying to turn that into a piece of chocolate is tough no matter what you do. The whole thing with pop rocks is creative, but the flavour itself is….meh.

If you like creative ideas, have some money to throw away and aren’t afraid of trying random things, then feel free to try these. Otherwise, I would not get these again or recommend them to the average person. Not the worst Tirol I’ve had, but also not the most novel or weirdest so I can’t really give it points for that.