Colourful bowl of jelly beans

History takes many forms, and leads down some fascinating rabbit holes.

I was in the Beaconsfield Pharmacy a few days ago and I bought Val the mandatory bag of black jelly beans. Forget the medicines if you will, but do not, ever, forget the black jelly beans.

When I got them home we talked abut favourite colours in jellybeans – there can’t have been much else happening. I said that I thought the orange ones were the most popular. She was sure the red ones were.

Never one to lose an argument graciously, I went back to the chemist and bought three one-kilo bags of jelly beans (the lady at the chemists’ said she was sure red were the most popular).

Immediately, I ran into statistical issues – I failed statistics quite comprehensively at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education when it was still called that.

I wanted to know the number in a kilogram and that was the first problem, because bags one and three had 256 jellybeans each, while bag two had 262. This could be a bag filled on a Friday just before knock-off, or it could be an opportunity. If you could look closely, or even weigh them, you might be able to consistently gain up to six extra jellybeans in each bag you bought. Over the years that would add up. Say six times a year, over, say, 50 years, you could end up with 1800 jelly beans more or less free, and that is about three kilos.

If you worked on that skill and trained yourself carefully, with a few years of development, you could probably tour the country looking for fetes and school fundraisers where they had the traditional jar of jelly beans where you could guess the number and win – well, a big jar of jellybeans. At this point you might decide for yourself whether that is two words or one.

Our sample packs were three Glucojel one kilogram packets from the Beaconsfield Pharmacy and the three packs yielded 774 jelly beans in nine colours. I’m not sure there were nine different flavours, though, because the dominant taste was of sugar.

The packet let us know that Glucojel jelly beans have been made in Australia since 1941, which led to our wondering about sugar supplies during the Second World War. Perhaps that is where the sugar all went.

It also told us the flavours, some of which had us guessing. You’d need a good palate to pick up the difference between red (raspberry) and pink (strawberry), but the black ones are aniseed flavoured, and couldn’t be much else, really. Green is apple, but the flavour is weak. The yellow ones are apricot-flavoured, the white ones are vanilla (easy to pick) and the orange ones are, of course (I nearly said ‘naturally’ but I’m not sure word applies) orange.

The blue ones are blueberry-flavoured. There is a clue in the colour, yes, but not so much in the taste. The violet ones are said to be blackcurrant-flavoured.

It would be really interesting, and it could be a good dinner-party entertainment to have a blind tasting and see how many people could identify the flavours. I would not expect a high rate of success.

I know you are waiting for the answer to our original question, but, first, a little history. That is what this column is supposed to be about, and it is quite often so.

I turned to my trusty (sometimes) computer and found that surprisingly little is known about the history of jelly beans.

It seems that jelly beans were developed in the USA because there is a record of William Schrafft urging people to buy his jelly beans and send them to the soldiers during the American Civil War. This was in Boston in 1861. Wikipedia tells us that in 1905 jelly beans were being sold in bulk in the USA 10 cents a pound, and that they were used at Easter because of the egg shape, though I’ve never seen an egg exactly that shape.

My chasing entries provided by Wikipedia was hampered by the huge number of advertisements. Amazingly, about half of the first four pages were ads for the Jelly Belly company in the USA, and it was suggested that their founder, Gustav Goelitz, had invented the beans. That can’t be the case if Schraft was selling them from Boston 1861, This was getting harder than counting them,

Jelly Belly is about the biggest jelly bean company in the world and even prints its name on every bean, No, I can’t imagine why anyone would do that. Happily for all of us, in the 1965, while the Vietnam War was ramping up and apartheid was being attacked in Africa, Jelly Belly found a way to flavour the glucose centre! This was big news.

There was even bigger news in 1981 when Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the United States. I don’t know whether he personally ordered them or they were a gift from a grateful nation but three and a half tons of extra jelly beans were shipped to Washington for his inauguration. That is a great many jelly beans. In fact, 3.5 tons of Jelly Beans is approximately 812,837. We could not afford to buy 3.5 tons to check this data, and I suppose counting over 800,000 Jelly Beans would be just a touch tedious, even boring. If you are thinking of doing this remember that these were measured in US tons, not Imperials tons and certainly not in metric tonnes. Let me know your results, and let me know what you did with all those jelly beans when you’d finished.

When the US started sending shuttles up to the space station, Reagan made the grand presidential gesture of sending the first jelly beans into space.

I also found out that there are more than sixty flavours of jelly bean in the USA, even including chocolate and, for the particularly reckless, chilli.

I will now share with you the results of our original research. Though the sample might seem limited, there was still a huge and colourful pile on our table.

The green jelly beans totalled 40 over the three kilos and this looks like a statistical aberration. This is only about 5 per cent when an even distribution would have provided about 46. Perhaps the packs were made up on a Friday and the man who put in the green ones left work early. The black jelly numbered only 67, a fraction over 22 per kilo.

There’s a great bunch of flavour in the 80s over the three kilos, five of the colours had between 82 and 90 beans in the sample. For your elucidation there were 83 pink ones, 84 blue and 84 purple, 88 orange and 90 white jelly beans.

I can hear you holding your breath – which was finally found to be the most popular colour? You’ll have worked out that red and yellow are the remaining contender (I’m drawing this out)

There were 108 red jelly beans in our sample and a colossal 130 yellow beans. There were more than three times the number of yellow beans over the green beans. Go figure.

Now you can rest, knowing all that. Val has cleaned up all the black ones already and the kids next door have eaten all the red and blue ones. There are still many to go.