All The Pleasure Has Gone :( (Barratt Sherbet Fountain)

Member Name: cmh4135

Product:	Barratt Sherbet Fountain
Date:	28/09/09 (69 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: More hygenic?

Disadvantages: Not environmentally friendly, taste has changed, all the pleasure has gone

One of my favourite childhood pleasures involved a stick of liquorice and a tube of sherbet. As they were known then, Bassett's Sherbet Fountains, were the thing of dreams. There was a deep satisfaction in managing to get ANY sherbet sucked up the liquorice tube (it always seemed to get too wet and congealed halfway up) and the pleasure one could have trying to get every last bit of sherbet from the paper tube without choking was immense. Alas those days are over in more than one respect.

Now rebranded (slightly) as Barrett's Liquorice Fountains all of the pleasure has gone.

Rather than the sherbet being housed in a paper tube it's now in a hard plastic tube with a lid. Whilst this is arguably far more hygienic (although probably a lot less environmentally friendly) than the open-topped paper alternative have you EVER heard of someone being poisoned by a sherbet fountain in a paper wrapper?! Part of the pleasure of eating the fountain was the fact that the top of the cardboard tube invariably went soggy before you'd finished and, as a result, the sherbet stuck at the top, the cardboard lending an interesting flavour to the whole. Now that pleasure is gone.

The next change that is quite definitely for the worse is that the liquorice stick is now no longer a tube. It's a solid stick through which nothing can be sucked. This means that the "fountain" part of a sherbet fountain just doesn't exist at all. It's turned the whole into a rather tame "sherbet dip dab" - another great product from the past - the liquorice stick just doesn't enable you to scoop sherbet like the tart strawberry lolly from the dip dab though. The pleasure is gone.

The liquorice stick itself sits somewhere between an Aussie-style soft eating liquorice and a traditional English stick. It's tougher than the liquorice that one would find in a liquorice Catherine wheel but has the same, mild flavour. It's a confectioner's liquorice.

The sherbet is, in my opinion, not a patch on the original sherbet. It's (along with the liquorice) had all the artificial nasties taken out of it and now only contains natural colours and flavours (it's also now halal). It is, however, more prone to cloying (and lumping in the tube) and lacks some of the fizz that the original had. It's rather like eating slightly tart icing sugar. In the old packaging you used to be able to squash the sides of the tube to break up any lumps in the sherbet - that's not possible with the plastic.

I guess that one could argue that you can now reseal the packaging, but, when was that ever necessary?! If you can't get rid of one of these in one sitting then... well... you know!

There was something very appealing about the dynamite shaped original. The new packaged product just doesn't give the same bang for your buck!


Shame.

Summary: A repackaged product that just doesn't work