Apteekkarin Salmiakkipastilli

When you've tried as many kinds of salmiac as I have, you start to notice patterns. I mean, they're all bad, but they all fit into their own category of bad.There's the hard-candy-that-calls-itself-hot-but-really-isn't kind, the sticks-to-your-teeth-so-the-awful-never-goes-away kind, the saltlick-licked-by-a-deer kind, and so on.

So, when I saw the Apteekkarin Salmiakkipastilli, I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into from my Apteekkarin Pehmeä Salmiakkipastilli review and thought it'd be a great candy to share with my friends.

I was expecting basically the same thing, just without the "Pehmeä". Of course, I'm not sure what "Pehmeä " means, but I figured it's either "menthol" or "yellow packaging". This is what I found inside.

The candies looked like your typical hard candy, but they had a slightly rubbery texture. Not squishy rubber, more like the rubber on running tracks - or even asphalt on a hot day.

"They look like rabbit terds," one of my friends added before taking a whiff of one, "doesn't have much of a smell, though."

The taste wasn't very intense - in fact, it was fairly subtle. At least, until getting past the outer coating. The middle had quite the kick, but not nearly as strong as some of the Tyrkisk Peber I've tried. It was tolerable, but not something anyone would want to keep eating any longer than they had to. And as such, this earns the almost edible rating.

Apteekkarin Pehmeä Salmiakkipastilli

A font can say a lot of things about your brand. If you choose Comic Sans, you’re basically saying I don’t even take myself seriously. Papyrus, on the other hand, tells people that you’re doing the old-age/new-age thing, and that you might be Asian, Egyptian, or even African.

On the same note, Apteekkarin’s choice of a Blackletter/Gothic font (along with an illustration of the grand inquisitor himself) says one thing very loudly: the contents of this package were originally designed as a medieval torture device.

Despite this scary looking design and bright red warning ("VAIN APTEEKISTA", which translates to "DO NOT EAT"), I opened up the package.

Never sure of whether I'll find sugar or salt, I popped one of the jelly-textured drops in my mouth and prepared for the worst. Surprisingly, I didn't gag or even immediately spit these out. The mild licorice taste slowly transitioned to a menthol flavor, and after a chewing for about a minute, a subtle salty flavor cropped up. It wasn't too bad at all.

I had another, and then another... and next thing I knew, the bag was empty! That's an extremely rare occurrence here on Salmiyuck and, as such, earns this Salmiakkipastilli the halfway-decent rating. Keep in mind that I'm fairly tolerable of menthol flavors, so you may find these much worse than I did.