Ben's Sugar Shack is a maple syrup shack in New Hampshire, my home state. The make, well, syrup, and like any good shack they offer tours, yadda yadda. I haven't visited in person myself, as I have plenty of family members who make syrup, and have thus never needed to purchase it, and I've certainly have done my share of sugar shack visits over the years at my family/friend's places, so no need for that either. So why have I heard of Ben's?
"Ben's Sugar Shack offers a wide range of award-winning, 100% Pure, New England maple products."
Because, in addition to the base syrup, they make a range of maple treats and snacks, such as maple salt water taffy, hard candies, caramels, and brittle, maple cotton candy, maple leaf cookies, maple flavored pancake mix and maple flavored coffee, maple beef jerky, maple bbq sauce, maple cranberry sauce, the list goes on and on. But I of course honed in on one particular set of items in their lineup: popcorn. They make both a caramel and a kettle maple popcorn, I went for the later.
I wasn't impressed.
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| Maple Kettle Corn. $6.59. |
Bo-ring. That's the one word I'd use to describe this popcorn. There is nothing *wrong* with it, but there is just nothing particularly good about it either.
The pieces are standard small sized, not the larger puffier style some gourmet brands use. It wasn't perfectly popped, there were some half-pops and some entirely unpopped kernels, and bits of hulls. It tasted fresh, but wasn't all that crispy. Mediocre base.
And then the coating. As they say, "lightly coated", which is accurate. It wasn't particularly sweet. It wasn't particularly salty. The maple flavor wasn't particularly pronounced, but it clearly was a slightly deeper sweetness than just pure cane sugar. Fairly muted, boring flavor.
And it lacked the slightly caramelized or charred nature of true cast iron kettle corn.
As I said, bo-ring. No reason to get this again. Half-hearted **+.
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