Gilliam’s Candy was started by a man named Cleve Gilliam. It was originally called “The Candy Kitchen” at his flagship location in Paducah, Kentucky. Cleve made his candy well, and it expanded and expanded until in 1944 he retired and sold the business. It kept going and expanding and was eventually bought by Quality Candy Company in 2003, which made them the largest manufacturer of stick candy west of the Rocky Mountains. Which I’m glad someone still uses such phrases, though I’m curious how they figured that. Also I got this east of the Rockies, so that means there’s a bigger, yet at this moment unknown, maker of stick candies who’s rivalry no doubt is the stuff of legend in the stick candy world. Also they probably make their own root beer flavor, but anyways, back to Gilliam. I personally like stick candy, it reminds of candy canes but isn’t near as annoying because the crook isn’t always breaking off.
A pleasant generic root beer flavor, much like a root beer barrel. There is a distinct wintergreen flavor in this, which, not uncommon in root beer, does distinguish this a bit from other root beer hard candies I’ve had and leaves your breath feeling minty. It also has a strong flavor for a hard candy, so I recommend you should lick it slowly rather than bite off chunks and suck on them. Maybe that’s general knowledge, but I’m kind of new to this hard candy world.
All in all, it does justice to the beverage from which it gets its namesake, and really, that’s all that one can ask for with this sort of thing. So I can honestly say I’d get it again, if I were looking for a root beer candy stick.
So my first root beer product review in my new format. Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading these as much as much standard root beer reviews, or at least they’ll be like, three keg blog posts, “drinkable” as it were, enough to get you through to the good times of proper reviews. If you think of any way to improve these, do let me know in the comments. Anyways, what to pick for my very first? I picked this Theo Root Beer Barrel 55% Dark Chocolate bar because one of my coworkers was kind enough to anonymously leave it on my desk. How very kind of them. I did eventually find out who it was after a few wrong guesses, and I am going to publicly say, thank you Brian, you’re the best! So Theo is an organic fair trade chocolate company coming out of my old stomping grounds of Seattle. They have a bunch of different specialty flavors including this root beer barrel one. I’ve had root beer barrels before (I’ll write about them soon enough) but never mixed with chocolate. So how is this?