I Tried the Harry Potter Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans so You Don’t Have To

For something that’s been around a good while, I’ve never once considered cracking into a box of Harry Potter Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Jelly Beans. Made by Jelly Belly as more of a novelty gift or party favor than an enjoyable snack, it's quite the genius idea — it's the type of merch no Potter fan can resist. 

As in the books, there are delicious, normal jelly beans like watermelon and lime as well as gross jelly bean flavors like vomit and earwax — crazy creepy flavors in a 20-flavor magical medley. So what’s the deal with these things? Are they worth buying, even as a joke? Are any of them tolerable? Does the vomit bean actually taste like vomit? Here's what I found out while eating these jelly beans, Harry Potter-style.

Related: Jelly Bean Wars: Who Makes the Best Jelly Beans?

I’ll be honest: My initial plan was to run through every single Harry Potter jelly bean flavor I tasted, but the truth is, I had no idea what half of them were. While the box contains rough diagrams of the candy, the beans within the three-inch-tall boxes are randomly assorted. It's hard to read, and when you have three slightly different shades of red in front of you, it’s difficult to tell the difference between each flavor. 

Here’s a little jelly bean tip: If you’re ever eating jelly beans, and at any point you think to yourself, “I wonder if this bean is flavored like watermelon or dirt,” then you probably shouldn’t eat that jelly bean.  Dirt, earthworm, earwax, grass — most of these were a mystery to me. 

There were, however, a few obvious ones. Here’s my take on the ones I could figure out.

Vomit

I really couldn’t start anywhere else. No, to answer your question, the infamous Bertie Bott vomit bean does not taste like real vomit. However, it’s a nightmare. Absolutely awful. I’m not sure what it actually tastes like since I didn’t keep it in my mouth very long. I’d avoid this guy if I were you.

Soap

This has to be the biggest surprise of the lot. The soap bean reminds me of hand soap more than a bar of soap. Like roses or lavender; nice and floral. Pretty lovely, and nothing like getting your mouth washed out with soap. 

Black Pepper

Another surprisingly tasty bean. There are a lot of licorice-like, root beer-ish flavors here. You could cook some of these down and use them in a tasty barbecue sauce, I bet.

Grass

This one is so very weird. I found it much worse than many of the other Harry Potter jelly bean flavors, which is odd because I like the smell of fresh grass. This tastes more like the mud underneath that grass. And let's be honest — nobody likes mud in their mouth.

Sausage

An absolute shock to the system. It does, in fact, taste like sausage, but not in a good way. Is there a good way for a jelly bean to taste like sausage? Probably not, but if there were, it wouldn’t be this way. This is a lot more like a canned cocktail weenie than a sausage link.

Dirt

Nailed it, Bertie. This sure does taste exactly like dirt. You’ll be surprised to hear I didn’t like it very much. Like mud, soap, and grass, dirt is just another substance that best belongs outside the mouth.

Earthworm

This was highly unpleasant, yet familiar. I’m not sure what it was, but I doubt this is what an earthworm tastes like. Even after eating the dirt jelly bean, the earthworm flavor felt wildly out of place.

I was in the middle of searching for the earwax and rotten egg beans, and then I realized something: This is insane. Bertie Bott is insane. The wizarding world is insane. I’m insane for sitting here and using my phone flashlight to help me identify earwax-flavored candy, parsing out cherry cinnamon from cinnamon dirt. 

Other reviews had similar reactions to mine, though some felt the adventure was worth the trouble.

"My daughter and her friends had lots of fun with these, but a lot of the flavors were disgusting, and some had gotten tricked into eating vomit or dog poop," one Amazon reviewer wrote, while another put it succinctly: "OMG, these are disgusting, but I suppose that's the point, right?"

So, are these things worth paying for? Does the power of Jelly Belly’s jelly beans pull these from the novelty category into the snack category? 

Nope. Not really, in my opinion. Spend money on these if you want to buy a cute gift for the huge Harry Potter fan in your life. Don’t spend money on these if you’re just looking for a sweet treat.

For more great taste tests, please sign up for our free newsletters.