Hold on tight and get ready to contort your face while wiping tears from your eyes. Warheads Extreme Sour candies are everything they claim to be. They are even sold with a warning label on the package, discouraging consumers from eating multiple Warheads at once. But if you tell kids not to do something, what is the first thing they will do? Exactly. We have our friends from The International Candy Company in Taiwan to thank for the discovery of this candy. Invented in 1975, it was first imported to the U.S. in the ‘90s and was electric in sales. In 2004, Impact Confections bought the Warheads brand, and they are now produced stateside in New Mexico. Over the years, many copycat sour candies were created, but Warheads holds the greatest fan base by far.

Black cherry, watermelon, lemon, sour apple and blue raspberry are the Extreme Sour flavors, and packages are sold with assorted flavors so you can try each on several times. True candy sissies should not eat these—it just wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience. But if you are of the braver sort, pop in these candies for a jolt of extreme sour flavor that will make you look like none other than Wally Warhead (seen on the front of the packages). You may not sprout a mushroom cloud from the top of your head, but like him, you will most certainly curl your lips in pain for the duration of the sourness. Technically, the extreme sour taste lasts only as long as it takes the outer coating to dissolve (about 5 seconds), allowing you to access the real fruity flavor part of the candy. But it seems to me that the sour flavor used to last so much longer, which leads me to wonder if the company had too many parental complaints and changed the recipe. Anyhow, black cherry is my preferred extreme sour candy, but it’s really difficult to read the flavor right off the bat. Lemon also has a jolt to it, a natural choice for sour candy flavor. Just don’t slip it to an unsuspecting friend under the guise of a much milder candy, like a lemonhead. You might just see that mushroom cloud erupt…