In the world of snacks, beef jerky is a tricky, tricky beast. Assuming you don't want to shell out for the good stuff, commercial beef jerky comes in two forms. Dry, tough, traditional beef jerky, which ranges from completely fucking awful to pretty good, and then processed beef-like substances labeled as beef jerky, but with a consistency somewhere between Slim Jims and dog treats.

My own personal jerky journey was complicated a while back when Oberto, makers of pretty good traditional commercial beef jerky if you don't mind a bit of sinew now and again, introduced a new ad campaign. The tagline was "Eat Like An Alpha", It used the now common advertising strategy of taking their real message, which is "eat our beef jerky and you will be a dominant manly man who bludgeons other men to death with your giant, club-like penis", and wrapping it in a thin layer of irony. You know, for plausible deniability once we realize how offensive it is.

Since I hate, and see right through, that shit, I stopped turning to Oberto for my occasional beef jerky needs. This left me with two options. Target's "Market Pantry" brand traditional beef jerky, which was completely fucking awful, and Jack Links. Jack Links new campaign, unveiled around the same time, also featured assholes. But in this case, the assholes were fucking with BIgfoot and almost died as a result, which is a message I can almost get behind.

Jack Links jerky tends to be more processed, and is often  named after things it's pretending to be, but decidedly is not. Like their vile Beefsteak Nuggets, or Signature Marinade Tender Cuts, which come in the form of mushy rectangular meat prisms. Luckily for me, Sweet And Hot falls in a middle range - not as jaw-wrenchingly tough as usual beef jerky, but fairly recognizable as slices of meat. Plus, they are sweet and hot.

I'm glad they call them "sweet and hot", because beyond Vaguely Beef, that's what the palate registers. Sweet, sort of barbecue saucy sweet, and then hot, like burning. Not superhot, maybe a one point five on the five-pepper Midwestern Spice Scale, but enough burn to remind you you're alive, which is an important factor in a workday snack. The texture is just moist enough to ward off the worst of the need for excessive mastication, but not so moist that you find yourself queasily wondering what the fuck they had to do to it to make it shelf-stable.

There are worse lumps of protein you could shove in your piehole.