Ben's Cereal Bracket - Round 1!
Welcome back to the blog, baby boiz. It’s been a minute, but not much has changed. On one hand we’re focusing much more on the podcast these days, on the other hand I ate three oreos off my chest while writing this. Regardless, we’re ranking cereals today!
Our good friend Ben listened to our last cereal bracket featuring 16 cereals (Episode 62 of Here’s A Podcast Are You Happy Now?) and decided he wanted to rank/write up a bracket of 48 cereals. Were some cereals left out? Yes (looking at you Cracklin Oat Bran). Did one entry of this list make me want to drive to Ben’s apartment and cough on him? Also yes. Regardless, Ben put many hours into this bracket and the rankings, it’s 99% awesome, and we appreciate him for it. That being said, if you subscribe to this blog and the our podcast’s instagram account I will dm you his phone number and address.
Rather than do a deep dive into the 16 first round matchups, I decided to only dive into the upsets. Don’t be mad, we have a ton of cereal content coming in the next three days. If you are mad, take it up with Ben.
9 Kix vs 8 Cheerios
Winner Kix- this is the battle of two flavorless cereals. Cheerios is atrocious, only consumable with spoonful of sugar, or salt, or anything. Getting to the bottom of any cereal box is a double edged sword, because regardless of flavor you’re getting the cereal in its smallest particle matter. For some cereals this is great, like cinnamon toast crunch. This makes sense, it’s a clear #1 seed and everybody loves cinnamon sugar. Other cereals, like Raisin Bran, it’s not so good. It’s as close to eating dust as we’ll ever get- second to only the dredges of a Cheerios box, which is actually eating dust. i choose Kix because it’s got a fraction more flavor than eating the ashes of my dead dog, sorry I meant Cheerios. It’s less, less-flavorful than performing cunnilingus on a sandcastle. There, that rolls off the tongue better. Kix, can’t wait to see how far they go!
10 Grape Nuts vs. 7 Grape Nut O’s
Winner: Grape Nuts. This is an upset I believe will have people calling for my job. Joke’s on you guys, I don’t have a job, or any leads on a job, or the capacity to feel love, but I digress. One thing I do have is an appreciation for grape nuts’ ability to fill a niche. They’re not called grape nuts because they’re a delicious, tasty treat. It’s a blue collar cereal. They’re too crunchy, they hurt your teeth, it is impossible to open the bag without spilling them everywhere, and if you let them soak too long they turn into concrete (second best home-remedy for a gunshot wound is packing the affected area with soggy ‘nuts). Regardless of its faults, grape nuts in its sweet spot hits subtle flavor notes that are unique in the cereal family. That, maximum efficiency on cereal per spoonful, and an impressive window from fresh pour-to-too-soggy put them far above the far inferior attempt to turn the brand mainstream, Grape Nut O’s.
9 Oatmeal vs. 8 Granola
What a dumb matchup. Jesus, Ben, we’re doing cold cereals. You couldn’t think of two other cold cereals? You could have fully leaned into the bit and done two hot cereals, Oatmeal and Grits! But instead here we are with Oatmeal and Granola, one hot cereal, one cold cereal, and not a single clue on what we’re doing here. The variation in preparation already throws this matchup out the window. Are we doing plain oatmeal with nothing on it? Are we doing a certain brand of granola? Are we putting the granola on greek yogurt or just throwing some milk on it? Now I’m heated. Thanks for the bracket, Ben. No thanks for the unsuccessful Coup D’Etat.
That being said, Oatmeal in a landslide.
10 Corn Pops vs. 7 Corn Flakes
Winner: Corn Pops. I’ve never had corn pops but anything is better than corn flakes. Corn flakes is just raisin bran with no raisins. I legitimately imagine Corn Flakes as the cereal that people eat when they live in a place that doesn’t sell any other cereal. If we lived through the apocalypse and I had a box of corn flakes, I’d eat the box, or the corn flakes, as I guess I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Corn Pops wins because the fact that it’s been processed into a pop gives it exponentially more flavor potential than any form of Corn Flakes.
9 Cap’n Crunch Berries vs. 8 Cap’n Crunch
Winner: Crunch Berries. This is the first tough matchup we’ve had, and ironically will be the shortest answer. Cap’n Crunch is a classic and deserves its place as on of the greats, however they’ve been pushed out by the younger, hotter, more progressive Cap’n Crunch Berries. The berries bring a deeper flavor profile, leave a slightly less disgusting milk, and cut your mouth less.
Crunch Berries with the win.
11 Multigrain Cheerios vs. 6 Apple Cinnamon Cheerios
Winner: Multigrain Cheerios. This one won’t win me any popularity contests but I’m a firm believer that Multigrain Cheerios are hugely underrated. They may not be the powerhouse that Honey Nut Cheerios is, but they’re far above any of the other try hards like Frosted Cheerios, Yogurt Cheerios, or the aforementioned Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. If you want an apple Cereal, then you get Apple Jacks. They did it. Not sure who wants it, but they can get it from Apple Jacks. There’s no need to add another subpar cereal to the Cheerios monopoly. Multigrain Cheerios though? Easy presentation, the word multigrain makes parents psyched to buy it, and the subtle sweetness keeps the kids coming back for seconds. This was a classic underpromise, over deliver cereal. Multigrain Cheerios with the dub.
10 Golden Grahams vs. 2 French Toast Crunch
Winner: Golden Grahams. If there’s one that breaks my heart, it’s the matchup between Golden Grahams and French Toast Crunch. On one hand, Golden Grahams offers a delicious crunch, and the fact that it brings a seriously unique flavor to the table can’t be overlooked. French Toast Crunch, while a relatively recent guest to my cereal bowl brings me back to the better days of Waffle Crisp, before I’d ever eaten pickled asian plums, and before I knew what it was like to disappoint a woman. This one kept me up at night.
At the end of the day, I had to go Golden Grahams. I was chose to overlook Golden Graham’s biggest flaw, it’s very short window for consumption from fresh pour-to-too-soggy, in favor of its many strengths, including great cereal to spoonful ratio, and it’s deep flavor profile that doesn’t have much competition. We bid farewell to French Toast Crunch, a powerhouse that drew a tough first round.
Don’t like it? Shoot me, a part of me died making this choice anyway.
9 Raisin Bran vs 8 Raisin Bran Crunch
Winner: Raisin Bran. This brings us to another choice that could have been deeply influenced by my childhood. We had Raisin Bran at my mom’s vs. Raisin Bran Crunch at my dad’s. Maybe it’s the wya they were stored. Maybe it’s the way the pantries were designed, or the brand of milk that was purchased. Maybe it was the way my dad yelled at me. I don’t know!
To me, Raisin Bran is just an all around solid cereal. It doesn’t do anything crazy. It takes three very simple things, sugary raisins, disgusting corn flakes, and milk and combines them in an amazing way. maybe that’s what makes Raisin Bran so great, it’s the perfect example of being more than a sum of its parts. Each one of those ingredients would die on its own. Raisins would be overshadowed in almost every other cereal! Corn flakes are objectively bad! Milk is just white water! Alone, these ingredients perish alone. That’s not meant as an insult, many charismatic, young people who at one point had a lot going for them and maybe wrote and starred in a hilarious musical their senior year of college but failed to turn it into anything more than that will perish alone. But together, together they make something great.
Raisin Bran Crunch just does a little too much. The crunch changes the texture of the cereal, and they switch up the flakes. This in turn skews the flavor profile of the entire cereal and now even though we’ve got these little granola pieces the raisins are no longer a nice treat, they’re suddenly way too raisin-y. What a waste. Who saw it coming? Boom, Raisin Bran wins.
That brings us to the end of our first round. Thank you for tuning in! Tune in tomorrow as I recap the next round, where we see our #1 seeds enter the fray and likely ruin every argument I’ve strung together over the past two hours. Can’t wait.
