Review: Balance Bar Bare Sweet & Salty Peanut Butter Bar

I can't tell you how happy I am to right this review.  Why am I happy?  Well, this is the last review out of the gigantic box of sample bars that Balance Bar sent me to try out.  There have been some good ones and bad ones in the reviews, but it certainly has been an interesting journey.  I thought I'd never run out of these, but I finally reached the end point and that leads me to this review of the Balance Bar Bare Sweet & Salty Peanut Butter Bar.  This one has all the standard measurements of a Balance Bar in that it comes in at 1.76 ounces with 200 calories.  The only difference is that it has fifteen grams of protein instead of fourteen grams and as I've been able to discern from all these reviews, the one gram difference is because of the peanut butter.  Other than that, it's all the same.

Being that this is a bar from the Bare product line, that means that the bar is not coated in whatever flavoring and what is normally on the inside is "bare" to the world.  That inside consists of the typical rice crisp/oat/granola mix and in the case of this bar, that mix also includes tiny bits of ground up peanuts and also slightly larger peanut chunks.  None of them are overly large, but there are a whole bunch of them.  The bar then has a base of peanut butter that is in kind of an "icing" form and that's about it.  This is a pretty simple bar.  The bar also smells strongly of a peanut butter and if I could pinpoint a smell as salty, I would say that this bar has that smell.

Biting into it, it definitely tasted strongly of hearty peanut butter and I'd certainly hope so since that was the whole point of this bar.  Outside of the peanut butter, you get absolutely no other taste and that gets kind of bland and boring.  The peanut butter taste is very hearty and not either sweet or salty, thereby kind of defeating the purpose of the name in some way.  For lack of a better way to describe it, it just "is".  The numerous peanut bits add a nice crunch and the peanut butter "icing" adds a bit of creaminess, but there's not a whole lot else going on there either.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I'll give this a BUY IT rating solely because it is a good bar if you need a peanut butter fix because that's all that this bar is.  If you don't need a peanut butter fix or don't like peanut butter, then you definitely don't need this bar.  If you do need that fix, this one is right up your alley.

BUY IT!!