ISSUE 57, DISCONTINUED PLEASURES, Part 4: Brach's Ice Blue Mints
Brach’s Ice Blue Mints
“They’re like sucking on a fragment of a glacier, only fresher.” That poetic judgment was delivered by Emmett P. Shields, my grandfather, sometime in the mid-1970s. He was then in his eighties, but made sure that the things that afforded him pleasure were always within reach.
It is strange to think that Brach discontinued these once popular year round treats and base its current fortune on Easter Candies of various sorts. The color was a blue intenser than acqua sheating a clear mint-charged hard center. Each was individually wrapped in a rather stiff plastic wrapper. The flavor was pronounced, like an arctic wind rinsing the cavern of your mouth. The mint was sharp enough to make one believe that one was not consuming too much sugar.
Decades after my grandfather passed Brach redesigned the Ice Blue Mint into the more donut shapped and clearer “Mint Cooler.” The flavor was not so bracing and the shape in no way suggest that you just hacked off a corner of the Greenland ice field.
Brach may have jettisoned the symbolism and mothballed the product, but other candy companies saw that the demand remained. Primrose Ice Blue Mint Squares has the look of the rugged original. Alas, a portion of its sweetening drives from corn syrup.