In my latest chapter of the nut butter diaries, I will be reviewing Barney Butter, an American almond spread.
I came across this brand whilst doing some online research, which I tend to do quite often, and was lured into buying it for a handful of reasons. Firstly, the brand name evokes luxury as it reminds me of Barneys New York, the American chain of high-end department stores. Secondly, some of the best almonds in the world hail from California, which is where Barney Butter’s nuts are sourced and where it’s produced. “California Made. California Good.” is the tagline emblazoned on their packaging. Thirdly, the flavours in the range sounded interesting: cocoa-coconut and vanilla-espresso, anyone?
For trialling purposes, I purchased three on-the-go snack packs from iherb.com. Due to limited UK availability and price sensitivity, since these butters are imported, I needed to limit my initial taste test efforts to these flavours: bare smooth, cocoa-coconut and vanilla-espresso.
Bare Smooth
The Bare Smooth butter does what it says on the tin - or ‘squeezable snack pack’, to be precise. It is devoid of sugar and salt but chock full of blanched, roasted almonds. Most of Barney’s other flavours contain a small percentage of cane sugar. Despite Barney Bare being devoid of nasties, it is also regrettably devoid of flavour. The taste is quite generic and innocuous but hardly leaves a lasting or memorable imprint. In contrast to many other almond butters, the taste of almonds just doesn’t come through. The texture is also more rubbery than smooth. To be honest, the best thing this has going for it is its macro-friendliness.
Cocoa-Coconut
Despite the lure of this tempting trio - cocoa, coconuts and almonds, yum! - this hardly tantalised my taste buds. Beyond the faint hint of coconut (and it was faint), it was fairly bland. This stands in marked contrast from other coconut & nut spreads from the likes of Meridian and Pip & Nut (which I have yet to write about but is on the list), which provide an explosion of coconut in your mouth. At least there was a trace of coconut flavouring – the cocoa was non-existent.
From a consistency standpoint, this was akin to the Bare Smooth version. However, this one contains a small percentage of cane sugar, making it a slightly sweeter proposition.
Vanilla-Espresso
This sounded the most interesting and I guess since the bar has been set so low it was probably the best of the lot. The taste is a minor improvement over the others, in that there are hints of vanilla and espresso. Small flecks of coffee are blended in, making for a slightly more interesting consistency and flavour. It unfortunately doesn’t escape from the rubbery and synthetic texture plaguing the range as whole. Despite some positives, I still wouldn’t go so far to say the Vanilla-Espresso is great - but it is the best of the bunch.
So – you guessed it - I’m not going to give this range a ‘thumbs up’. I was quite disappointed that despite having access to some of the best almonds in the world, Barney’s made something as flavourless as this, and with such a disturbing rubbery texture. I guess the only real positive I can attribute to this range is its macro-friendliness, which is in line with most of the other almond butters out there. Across all 17g snack sized sachets that I sampled, the macros were generally as follows: 100 Kcals: 3g protein, 4g carbs and 9g fat.
I personally would give this range a miss as there are better almond butters out that are both more readily available and possess stronger almond taste profiles. Given the steep competition in the nut butter game, there is no shortage of better tasting almond butters out there. Keep your eyes peeled and taste buds primed!