Sour Skittles, ranked, with feeling

I want to be clear that I have thought about this more than is reasonable and I am not going to apologise for the conclusions.

1. Green

It is not close. Green is the only one where the sour and the flavour are doing the same job — the acid is the lime, rather than sitting on top of it like a coat. Everything else is a sweet with sour applied. Green is sour with a shape.

If you hand me a bag and there are four greens in it I will eat the four greens and hand it back, and I think that is a reasonable thing to do in public.

2. Red

The workhorse. Strawberry is doing nothing especially clever, but it holds up under the sour coating better than any other red candy I can think of, and it is the one you can eat six of in a row. Consistent. Unfussy. Second place is not an insult.

3. Blue

Blue raspberry is not a fruit and that is the entire appeal. It tastes like a decision made in a laboratory in 1987 and I respect the commitment. Volatile — the coating hits hard and then there is a slightly hollow moment underneath. Great third, bad first.

4. Orange

Fine. Genuinely fine. Orange is what you eat while you are looking for a green. It has never offended me and it has never once been the reason I opened the bag.

5. Yellow

Here is where I lose people. Lemon should be the best one — it is the most sour fruit in the box, it has every structural advantage — and it is flat. It tastes like the idea of lemon described to someone over the phone. It is the one left at the bottom of the bag and we all know why.

Yellow's defenders are, in my experience, people who have not recently eaten a green one.

On the coating

The crystals are the product. The candy underneath is a delivery mechanism. Anyone who tells you they let a sour Skittle dissolve slowly is describing a regular Skittle and should be treated with suspicion.

I keep a bag in my pack on every hike. Not for the sugar — for the third hour, when everything has started tasting like water and dust and you need something to happen in your mouth. Two greens at the top of a climb has salvaged more days than any energy gel I have ever bought.