After 2 years and change, I'm strongly considering the first major change to this
blog. It will not be videos or audio blogs or anything along those lines, though I may
wind up adding pictures of the sauce labels/bottles at some point, for
recognition. This would include retroactively, if I have enough time and can
find the actual bottles. My overall stance on the other elements (expanded more
in some of the earlier posts of this blog) has not changed and I frankly don’t
have the available time to spend on that, even if it did. Fact is, I have not quite decided exactly what it will be, though I wouldn't be surprised it if does turn out to be pictures of at least the sauce labels. More on that as it develops in 2015...
When we last left off, I was working my way down through
several open bottles of sauce in the fridge (aside from pitching the awful
Scorned Woman) in order to make room. After having done that and going through
almost all my remaining shelf stock, as well as ordering more stuff through a
couple Black Friday sales, I now have new stock to play with as well as another
shift that is lately enabling me to use more sauce, albeit mostly on fish. Many
of these new sauces seem to be of the “blast furnace” variety, so this new wave
should be interesting, as most seem destined to be “back of the fridge” sauces.
I do have enough on tap to exceed 100
sauces reviewed, though I’m not sure I’ll be getting to all of them next year.
Then again, if I don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying. One of them I had when
I made the recap post last year, though that is admittedly rare, although, the
trend of posting having fallen way off from years prior will likely continue to
hold in 2015 as well.
My current standby sauces have changed little. They are
currently:
*Emeritus Everyday sauce: Trappey's Red Devil
*Everyday sauce: Blair’s Pure Death Sauce
*Grilling sauce: CaJohn's Bourbon-Infused Chipotle Habanero(BICH)
Mexican-style sauce:
Arizona Pepper’s Chipotle Habanero Pepper Sauce
*Emeritus Asian-style sauce: Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
Louisiana-style
sauce: Trappey's Red Devil
Sweet-hot sauce:
CaJohn's Happy Beaver
*= Not looking for a
replacement
Last year, my sauce of the year was given away in the Standby
list, where the mighty Blair’s Pure Death did the unthinkable, something I
never thought would happen, didn’t even think was possible and certainly never
foresaw and usurped Red Devil as my Everyday sauce and basically retired it.
This year, things are not so clear-cut. “9” seems to be the magic number
overall rating as both the winner of 2012, CaJohn’s Happy Beaver and last
year’s winner, Blair’s Pure Death, came in at “9” as well. Those other two sauces
had some strong contenders along the way and this year, the winner, Born To Hula’s Ghost Of Ancho, was the only sauce to register that high. There were a
few at 7, but nothing seriously challenged or presented much competition to
this one, which clocked in right out of the gate in January and held off
everything else all year. Despite having
a much smaller pool against it, Born To Hula’s Ghost Of Ancho is every bit as
deserving and rightfully takes its place up against those other worthies.
The others are as follows:
2012 Sauce Of The Year: CaJohn’s Happy Beaver
2013 Sauce Of The Year: Blair’s Pure Death
2014 Sauce Of The Year: Born To Hula’s Ghost Of Ancho
Now, I could open up all the years to the running and have
the only qualification be that they have not won in years past (otherwise Pure
Death is my sauce of the year forever), but as mentioned, by leaving it open to
strictly the year in which a particular sauce is reviewed, it keeps things
fresher and current. All of these winners were at least available in the year
they were rated, in case anyone wants to go get a bottle for themselves and for
all of these winners (I think they are all still available), interested readers
definitely should. I may recant on this and if I have a year with particularly
low-rated sauces, I might go back through all of the other “9”s and do a
run-off, but so far, there hasn’t been need.
Let’s get to some metrics. This is post 106, which makes 23
for 2014, compared to 21 for the last quarter of 2012 and 61 for 2013. The
total of hot sauces reviewed this year is 17, bringing the grand total of hot
sauce reviews to 78. That number is right around 74% of the total posts. I’m
not going to do a cumulative average rating or anything like that as I largely
don’t think it matters in light of the fact that several of the sauces appear
to be off the market, which seems to be somewhat of a trend for hot sauce
makers; make and bottle a batch and then go off on to something else. It’s nice
for the exclusivity, I guess, but can’t be too wonderful for sales, unless they
just intend to bring it back if something takes off.
That aside, more blog numbers:
Total posts (including this post): 106
Total views (as of this writing): 5172
Total single sauce reviews: 76
Total double sauce reviews: 1
Total sauces reviewed: 78
Total unopened sauces waiting on shelf for review: 15
Total opened sauces waiting for review: 0
Total open bottles in fridge: 11
Door sauces: 7
Back of fridge sauces: 4
Highest viewed review (separate from the overall blog
generally): 242 - Valentina's Extra Hot
Highest viewed article, any type: 242 -
Valentina's Extra Hot
Most posts, month, 2014: 6 - December
Most sauces reviewed, month, 2014: 4 - December
Most posts, month, overall: 10 - June 2013
Most sauces reviewed, month, overall: 8 - June 2013
Along the way, I’ve also had a number of “hot” food items at
restaurants and much less so, but also “hot” snacks in 2014, of varying quality
in both heat and taste, mostly nothing I’d care to repeat. That is generally
reported to my Yelp account, but occasionally it will make it into these type
of posts, if notable. Speaking of Yelp, here are some updated metrics there,
current as of this posting:
My review count is now 540 reviews and 72 updates, which is
a total of 612 reviews, all in. Further, I was "First To Review" 57 times or slightly over 10.5% of the time.
I also have 309 "Friends" (feel free to add me, if you
wish), 9 "Fans", submitted 1 Event, which was one I'm
enormously gratified to have been able to take part in (Inland/Outland from Svavar
Jónatansson) and created 11 Lists. Rounding this out was 541 "Useful" votes, 147 "Cool" votes, 172 "Funny" votes and 42 Compliments. My distribution
of ratings falls in the order of: 29 or ~5.5% at 5 stars, 173 or ~32% at 4 stars, 241 or ~44.5% at 3 stars, 83 or ~15.5%
at 2 stars and 14 or 2.5% for 1 star, which, again, is well in line
with expected results as the pool grows larger.
It takes quite a bit for a place to get 5
stars, in that it has to either be the best of its kind, live way up to or
beyond my expectations, blow my socks off, be near perfect or be something that
I literally cannot think of a way to do better. Most of my 5s are not
restaurants, in fact, as of now, there are only 8 of that 29 count for the 5
star reviews that are for restaurants. Likewise, if I give something a 1
rating, it generally means I think the place should be closed. Those are also
exceedingly rare and perhaps somewhat harder to get than the 5s. Most of the places I’m trying to find are
either places that will be comfy and reliable “regulars”, places I can take
someone to impress them (work-related, for the most part) or useful in some
other way. A lot of it, in practice, winds up with me just canvassing
geographical areas around places I’m at normally, i.e. where I live, where I
work, where I travel on a somewhat frequent basis for work, my PO box, etc.
This is useful, though, after a fashion, as information is always good to have
in hand. Given that this frequently results in costing me a lot more than I’m
reimbursed, sometimes the trade-off is less in my favor, though.
I also keep 5 separate lists of future places
to visit (much as I do with hot sauces and wines, actually, though those two are
only single lists, respectively), so those Yelp totals will only continue to
increase. Of course, I have no idea how well the actual reviews there draw and
I’m not sure Yelp will either divulge that information or ever plans on
publishing it. For further discussion of Yelp, please refer back to my Q3 2K14
post in September 2014.
As to my wine blog, that sits at 20 posts, with all but 3 of
them reviews. That one still continues to draw very slowly, hovering right
around 3.5% of this one. This, of course, is a spin-off of my wife’s very
quickly started and ended website from spring of 2014, but it also is intended
to be one fairly specific thing and I think the inherent audience for that is a
much narrower band than even this.
As always, I welcome your companionship in future times…in
any or all of these arenas.
