2K22 Q3 Update

2K22 Q3 Update

This one will be a bit briefer than normal, given how much coverage I already did in the 10 Years Anniversary post, which I hope you’ve all read. The only real bit of new stuff is that Season 19 of The Hot Ones is updated and this time, there are way more sauces without onions, which I’m glad to see. Also, I did the entire Hot Ones Shake Shack crossover menu in the FOH video series on the day it came out.

Beyond that, instead of the usual , I think I’ll take this time to plug a bit of the “event” stuff I’m trying to do over on YouTube with the FOH series...”event” is probably the wrong word...let’s call it more themes for the rest of 2022.

Starting point is the kickoff of Q4, October. I’ve tried to really lean into the entire month of October with as many references to spooky stuff as I could pack in. I’m thrilled to pieces we have a fairly well-known pepper (that I also love dearly) nicknamed “Ghost,” which really helps a lot with that. So, all month long, for the most part, I adhere to that motif, along with the continuation of the daily double Sundays for the 10th Anniversary celebration of this blog.

For November, we wrap up the 10 daily double FOH Sunday video posting to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of this blog just in time to kick off the Thanksgiving four-day stretch. For that, we start off with the winter holiday theme, featuring daily Inferno Candy Company seasonal stuff for that whole series of days.

Rounding out the year in December, given that the winter is good for sweets and treats, all of the non-sauce content prior to Christmas is candy...one day someone will make spicy Christmas-themed cookies and I’ll be there...probably. Until then, this is the sugar rush. Post-Christmas, we switch into party mode and kick over into the entry into this segment from Beer Nuts on New Year’s Eve.

Lots of fun FOH stuff planned for 2023, including more themed-videos starting January, which will be announced in the next update. For now, with the blog having a banner year (the goddamn RIGHT way to do a 10th Anniversary celebration, if I do say so myself...and I do), I shall keep this as one of the briefer Q updates and close this for now.

Again, thank you all for swinging by and if there’s anything you want to see, I’d love to hear it.

Hatari Acid Rain Ghost Hot Sauce Review

Hatari Acid Rain Ghost

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjCSR_O0LAI

I've seen this sauce just hanging out on the shelf for years and I kept passing it by, passing it over in favor of other bottles that looked more appealing, for whatever reason, at the time. Possibly it is the odd yellow on brown color scheme, which is certainly unique, with a stylized ghost somewhat reminiscent of Casper looking on in dismay at what appeared to be nuclear bomb mushroom clouds. Whatever the reason, I've seen it around for a long time and only recently got around to picking it up. Upon doing so, I now realize that what I thought were explosion clouds are actually a single cloud hovering over two trees, which seems to be a reference to the African influence of both the founder of the company and of the sauce itself. 

"Acid Rain" is a label that is applied to a number of products, including snacks, salsa, BBQ sauce, dried spices, even a seasoning mix. It also comes in Scorpion, Habanero, and a Reaper + extract variations. I didn't see many of those other ones and it was only after looking into this a bit further that I discovered all of this, but Hatari has seemingly a fairly solid stable of sauces and related goodies. I don't quite understand the naming convention here, of the acid rain, as that doesn't seem hugely endemic to Africa and is pretty far from a positive designation, but I presume them to refer to the proverbial burn of such polluted waterfall.

One of the things I found most intriguing was the list of peppers in it. With this one sauce, you can cover quite a number of them. In this sauce, we have Ghost Peppers, Hatari, Habanero, Piquin, Ring of Fire, Peri-Peri, Tepin, and Jalapeno, many of which also show up in the other sauces. Habanero, Piquin, Tepin, and Jalapeno show up a lot in Mexican cuisine, though Habanero and Jalapeno are getting to be near ubiquitous. Peri-Peri is a more African pepper. Ring Of Fire is a new one for me, but turns out to be a Cayenne offshoot, which one would also expect to be in a blend like this. Finally, we come down to the Hatari pepper, which is purported to be a proprietary pepper, but also evidently a highly secretive one, as I can find no real information on it. 

The flavor of this immediately struck me as more or less a powdered pepper spice in a liquid delivery system. Highly skillfully done, as this sauce is quite pleasant, but that's the general tone of it. I find the label order confusion, as it's listing those peppers as the main ingredients, but none of them are an actual liquid. Vinegar, which seems to be mostly the base with this, is dead last on the list, though lemon, lime, and orange juice also show up, before the vinegar, so I suppose it could be some combination. The nebulous generic "spices" are also listed, along with garlic and ginger, though neither of those are especially prominent. The smaller text, which is also done in yellow on brown, is somewhat blurry for the ingredient panel, but I also think this ingredient list is wrong, at least in terms of proportion, and is probably meant to dissuade people trying to suss out their "secret" blend or whatever. 

Making a sauce by liquefying dried ingredients is not a bad idea, if done well (though, to be clear, there are enough seeds and bits in there, not to mention flavor-wise, that I suspect this is a combination of both pods and powders). If executed correctly, you can have a sauce that will happily meld with nearly anything, as this sauce is (although I don't believe I would care for it much on something as specific as Asian foods). I could not find an application where I didn't enjoy it and, whatever the actual percentages of ingredients, I found it quite tasty and enjoyable, and possibly as close to universal as anything I've ever had. Heat-wise, even with the Ghost, it is fairly minimal, right on the border where I would say it's probably better received by chileheads. It also does tend to separate quite a bit and needs fairly regular agitation.

Bottom line: Yet another sauce I find myself kicking myself for not trying sooner. Highly enjoyable across many different food settings and a sauce company whose offerings I will probably find myself digging into deeper.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 8

Left Lane Hazard Lights Hot Sauce Review

Left Lane Pepper Company Hazard Lights

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook or, better yet, head on over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7hNT20kH_k

Left Lane is another relative newcomer, starting up in 2020, shortly after the pandemic hit and lockdown took out one of their favorite restaurants...at least temporarily. They then did the natural(?) thing and made a hot sauce company, with a naming convention heavily road and driving-related theme to the various names. The hazard lights it's named for could be for either the flashers on a car or I suppose a barricade, depending on if you consider the ones on vehicles to be more orange than amber. This one seemed the hottest available that did not also have onions, possibly is also the hottest they offer outright, so this may well wind up being the only one I do from them.

What we have here is kind of an interesting take on a venerable old favorite, the Habanero mango. There are no shortage of those out there, but this one also adds in carrots, which acts a bit as a thickener. This is a fairly dense sauce and seems to contain a lot of other orange items, including orange juice and orange Habaneros. It also deviates a bit as well with the addition of ginger, and the usage of rice vinegar, somewhat a rarity in hot sauces, and with the addition of stevia, another rarity. The latter two ingredients give this a bit of a flavoring I'd put in the relative approximation of apple cider vinegar, to give you an idea how well-received that was with me.

The sauce also has what I would describe as zones. When it's more in the mango-Habanero zone is when I find it to be best, as I can really dig in and latch to that flavor. This definitely has plenty of mango flavor and errs on the sweet side of things, which is what I think sauces of this type should do. I do find the flavor notes I mentioned off-putting enough to limit how much I like to use this sauce a bit, so flexibility takes a hit there compared to some other fruit-based sweet hots. The heat is decidedly mild, which is to be expected, given the Habaneros. 

Bottom line: Another off-shoot of the Habanero-mango branch, albeit one on the thicker side and with some atypical grace notes.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4

Rising Smoke It Hot Sauce Review

Rising Smoke It

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2EoAwl7Pu8

I must admit to some confusion with the naming of this sauce, as "It." Specifically, I can't quite determine if it's in the sense like Coca-Cola formerly used the "Coke is it!" slogan or if they mean as more of a monster, a beast, ala the creature in the infamous Stephen King novel. I suspect it is probably more the former, as the meaning seems for this to be a more ubiquitous sauce. It is both mild in heat and running along the lines of a Cajun style, with heavy Cayenne and garlic notes. I will say I intensely dislike the label. I get what they're going for with the peppers forming the name, but it looks so clumsy, it would school kids learning graphic design would be ashamed.. I know this is more my own personal area of complaint and most people do not have sufficient interest or caring about label design, but when you have a particularly nasty food intolerance, such as I do, you find yourself spending a lot of time with labels. 

Ok, so what do we have here? As noted earlier, this is a not particularly hot Cajun style sauce, so the main flavors are Cayenne with heavy notes of garlic. The garlic is indeed quite prominent, possibly due to both garlic, bits of which are visible in the sauce, and the addition of garlic powder, which can get dangerous pretty quickly. Concentrated forms like that tend to really amp up those notes and this is perhaps a bit beyond my preference, which is another reason why I make the distinction between Cajun and Louisiana-style and usually opt for the latter. What separates this from other Cajun style sauces is the use of the roasted red bell pepper mash, which adds a nice bit of sweetness from those peppers and a robust flavoring you can only get by fire-roasting things. This is the second sauce I've had from this company which has had no real smoke aspect to speak of, but fire-roasting obviously involves fire and fire tends to involve smoke at some point, so it does fit the motif there, I suppose.

Heat-wise, again, we have the addition of a concentrate towards the end, in Cayenne powder, which serves a bit to amp things up, I suspect. Cayenne powder is not what I would consider an especially flavorful element and is almost always a part of things to add heat without much impact on flavor, a utility that makes it a fairly ubiquitous staple in many spice cabinets. I kind of wish I could have tasted this sauce without the garlic powder, as I suspect the fresh and lively flavors that are there, thanks mainly to the addition of the roasted red peppers, would have really come more to the fore.

Bottom line: Very solid sauce, nice, smooth and a bit rangier in flavor profile than most Cajun sauces, clearly intended to appeal to a broad spectrum. It's a bit garlic-heavy for me, but not enough to stop me finishing it.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4

Angry Goat Yellow Flamingo Hot Sauce Review

Angry Goat Yellow Flamingo

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QfstLwIZvc

This is another fascinating creation from Angry Goat and also marks the first time I've had a sauce with banana in it. Usually, I steer fairly clear from those sauces, as I am not a banana fan, particularly. Here though, it is pretty far from the focus, despite the naming convention of a more mythical creature on the front, which I presume is intended to reference the yellow fruit contained in the ingredients. Instead, we have  a very curious entry that straddles the line between actual hot sauce and dessert sauce, while fitting entirely into neither. 

The sauce starts off with mangos, the flavor of which gets lost nearly immediately. It does make a good base for the orange Habs and carrots that also make their way into the proceedings. Of those flavors, the Habs are the more dominant one, but they are tempered considerably by the apple juice and cinnamon, which meld with the carrots and bananas to give the effect of a carrot cake or banana bread aspect. Cinnamon, despite being dead last on the ingredient list, shows up fairly prominently in the flavor profile, but, again, in the context of those confections I just mentioned. You could also make a case for perhaps a cinnamon apple coffee cake or zucchini bread or somesuch.

However, the taste of hot sauce, of vinegar and peppers and salt, still rears up fairly prominently when actually used on things like apple pie or the suggested ice cream. Hot sauce and ice cream are rarely a good mix and in this case, the application diminished that considerably. So, I tried the other tact and went towards more hot sauce applications. I did quite a bit of testing on this and found it solid on things like chicken strips, but a bit on the funkier side for stuff like pizza and beer battered (also suggested by the label) fish, for instance. It is by no means a bad sauce and is quite intricate and flavorful, but the things it reminded me of, maybe a holiday fruit cake aspect as well, in addition to those other more bready type delectables I mentioned earlier, was where I found it worked best. 

Heat-wise, it is fairly moderate, with the peppers being the Habanero and Jalapeno. It is definitely not intended on being a scorcher. I'm not clear on where they meant it, other than another wildly inventive sauce, which it surely is. At times, you can pick out apple, banana, and a bit of carrot flavoring, all dusted with cinnamon and tinged with Habanero, creeping in there, which makes it a rather nice winter holiday season sauce, I think...

Bottom line: Very novel sauce that doesn't have enough of an anchor for most people, I'd suspect, which might make it more of a novelty sauce, but still a fairly fascinating fruit-based sweet hot.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5

TSAAF At 10 Years

10 Years Of TSAAF

Let’s start with an announcement. In celebration of the decade anniversary of this blog, for the next 10 Sundays, starting today, it will be double hot sauce FOH video postings

It’s pretty crazy to me to think that 10 years have gone by since I launched this blog. It definitely doesn’t seem that long. The first posting, and what I’m calling the official launch date was 09/11/12. 09/11, of course, is an infamous calendar date in the US since 2001. In hindsight, I probably should have moved the date, but I guess it is a measure of our success at returning to normalcy in the wake of that tragedy that it did not occur to me until well after the blog was up and running.

I originally meant this mainly, like the now defunct Happy Sippin’ Companion blog, to be a list to remind me of which sauces I liked and which I didn’t, especially so I didn’t re-buy sauces I didn’t like, and along the way also serve as a reference for anyone else who might be interested. The entire thing was fueled by getting a Ghost Pepper burger at Red Robin and wanting and needing an outlet to commentate on spicy things, or stabs at spicy things, which prompted me to poke around online and find there was a community of other writers, Scott Roberts being foremost. A few others, but not a ton, were doing something similar, but not exactly what I wanted. So, I did like many others before and after me; I set about to create something that catered more to me directly and specifically.

The first 1/4-ish year was a lot of fun. I was still trying to feel my way into the thing and really get a handle on what I wanted it to be. Again, in retrospect, I should have more properly dedicated myself to take a photo of each sauce, but I didn’t meant the blog to be entirely for public consumption...at first. I DID have clarity that I wanted it to be for hot sauces only, which it has remained throughout the entirety of its history.

That first year, partial though it was, saw a flurry of activity. I was actively going out and seeking new sauce avenues, beyond the only one I knew of at the time, which was Grove Market. Big Lots, for quite a while, did a great job of serving me up the two things I craved most then, namely variety and low prices. Over the years, this has changed a lot, from online to elsewhere, with it mostly resolving now to Burn Your Tongue first, then Pirate O’s more infrequently, then, if I can’t find what I’m after at either of those, I move it things online.

I didn’t have in mind any kind of posting regularity, just whenever I had a new sauce and had something to say about it, but there wound up being enough other stuff that I eventually added the quarterly updates. Things stayed pretty solid through 2015, aside from a brief dip in 2014, where I had cleaned out everything I could find locally and was struggling for a new source. Then, I hit the period of 2016 - 2018, where things really conspired against me. I was depressed thanks to a certain election, traveling a lot for work, and my then-wife going through yet another diet change and me perhaps being a bit burnt out got things to the point where this blog was flailing in a big way.

2018 was the lowest total of all, including the partial year, at 15 posts total, and 2019 looked like it was going to come in even lower. During 2019, I was feeling a lot like there was probably not much point in continuing on, as my motivation was at an all-time low and it just didn’t feel worth it. This is not an inexpensive hobby and with the prices of hot sauces on the rise, even though I enjoyed being a chilehead greatly, I was starting to think the blog had run its course. I was close to cashing it in then, putting it on hiatus as I did with the HSC, but then Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue stepped in with a timely intervention.

Ever in support of the local chilehead scene, he offered some comped sauces for review. The blog has never been a great draw, so I initially declined, as I didn’t think it was a fair exchange. After thinking a bit longer, and doing a bit of research, I coalesced around a concept I’d been considering for a while, namely adding videos. I had a structure in mind, which is almost always the first part of any project for me, and so I gratefully accepted his gracious offer, to launch the FOH series, which meant a video AND a written review on those sauces. It is not an understatement to say that Roger probably saved this blog.

Because of that, in 2019, at the very brink of TSAAF, the FOH video series was born. I meant that series to both be in support of the blog, as well as to branch out a bit on its own and finally cover all the spicy food that I didn’t on the blog, apart from asides on the quarterly update, and it has been an absolute joy to do those, as well as injecting new life into the blog (as of the end of August, the highest year in terms of posting).

One of my favorite things here has been playing around with numbers (as I do in every year end recap), so let’s take a look at some of those (all numbers from this point current to this posting) for the life of the blog:

Postings by year:

2012 - 21 (12 sauce reviews)
2013 - 52 (47 sauce reviews)
2014 - 23 (17 sauce reviews)
2015 - 32 (26 sauce reviews)
2016 - 19 (15 sauce reviews)
2017 - 23 (18 sauce reviews)
2018 - 15 (12 sauce reviews)
2019 - 20 (17 sauce reviews)
2020 - 50 (45 sauce reviews)
2021 - 60 (56 sauce reviews)
2022 - 66 (61 sauce reviews)

This is the 381st posting for the blog. There are 326 sauces with full reviews, 38 mini-reviews, for 364 total, with 55% of the full reviews having FOH support videos (180 up on YouTube, link to playlist at right) posted.

Though it has changed somewhat since inception, as far as my own internal criteria vis-a-vis the scaling, here is the breakdown by final rating (percentages are rounded):

0 - 21 (6%)
1 - 22 (7%)
2 - 28 (8.5%)
3 - 39 (12%)
4 - 43 (13%)
4.5 - Average rating across all sauces (only full sauce reviews have ratings)
5 - 50 (15%)
6 - 53 (16%)
7 - 35 (11%)
8 - 28 (8.5%)
9 - 7 (2%)
10 - N/A

As we can see, overall, this more or less follows a very similar bell curve pattern, slightly skewed a bit in the middle, with 6 as the median point, a slight change to the last time I commented on this (quite some time ago now). There is no sauce with a perfect 10 rating, as the system in place was one I devised for that to be exceedingly difficult.

The overall highest rated year so far has been 2014 and the lowest 2021. Of course, 2022 is still incomplete, so that may change sometime after this post. The most represented sauce company, far and away, is CaJohn’s with 15, even with me doing zero of those sauces so far in 2022 (depending on if you’re counting the Alice Cooper sauce, which I am not here). Next closest is Silk City with 8 and Hellfire at 7, though those totals will also probably change before the end of the year.

Here is how the full list of years shook out, as far as final ratings:

2012 - 5.25
2013 - 4.29
2014 - 5.29
2015 - 4.31
2016 - 4.27
2017 - 4.58
2018 - 4.58
2019 - 4.75
2020 - 4.51
2021 - 4.09
2022 - 4.57

I’m also debating adding a new TOC based on overall rating for the sauces, so you can search by what is the highest or lowest rated. That undertaking is not a small amount of work, though, so it is staying a debate until I can assess demand for it. Honestly, views for the blog are, and have ever been, a bit streaky. So, if this is something you would like to see, please leave me a comment here, to this very post, and let me know to the affirmative.

As I mentioned in some of the FOH videos, I think we’re in the midst of another chilehead surge, which started in 2021, partially fueled by the continued roaring success of The Hot Ones show, which has really breathed a lot of new life into the industry. The breakdown of where I’m at on those sauces will be in the year end recap, but I’ve done quite a few of them and it definitely has made being a chilehead a lot more exciting. I’m still pretty pumped to be doing this, still having fun, and greatly enjoying branching out a bit more with the FOH series. I hope to keep doing this another 10 years...or even longer. Thanks again to Roger Damptz especially, but also to everyone else who’s ever stopped by and checked it out. I do appreciate it.

Scoville Brothers Reggae Hot Sauce Review

Scoville Brothers Reggae

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cynSFFdzy0c

I didn't notice that this was actually named Reggae, due to some horrendous label design. I actually thought it was just Scoville Brothers and they made one sauce only when I picked it up. This is also not related to the YouTube resident chilehead madman Johnny Scoville, at least not that I've been able to discern. My interest in this was primarily due to the Scotch Bonnet peppers, which is one of those that I've always found to be one of the better-flavored out there and certainly in my favorites list. I suppose I could find it incongruous, given my conflicted relationship with Habaneros and how closely they're related, but Scotch Bonnet have always stood apart for me and it's another pepper I don't see used in sauces as often as I'd like. Here, it is paired with mango, which, as has been noted elsewhere on this blog, can be a dangerous ingredient. However, when done right, such as on the Private Selection Mango Scotch Bonnet (reviewed elsewhere here), the results can be almost magical.

Right off the bat, it's pretty clear that they're going for a complete different tact than some of the other entries. This is not at all a thicker, slower-moving sauce, quite the contrary. It is instead a rather watery sauce, on par with something more akin to a Louisiana-style, which is an approach I found intriguing. Fruit-based sweet hots have a lot of potential uses, but one of the reasons I suspect they're so thick is to hold to food in a way to accommodate usage. When you go watery, one of the inevitable repercussions of that choice is that it dials down flexibility. The more inconvenient a sauce is to use, the less well it works with a wider range and also the less likely it is to be used. Take pizza, for instance. Fruit-based sweet hots, particularly tropical fruit-oriented ones, play very well on pizzas...at least those with red sauces. If you have a watery sauce, though, what happens is it will tend to not hold to the surface and run off and then sog the crust. While sogging the crust, to a degree, is ok for things like breaded meats (fish, chicken, etc.), it is much less ok with pizza. 

Another deviation of sorts is that the sweetness of the mango. Here, they're trying to straddle the line between a more sour mango flavor, yet still have enough sweetness in there for that to resonate. It's a bit stunning that someone would attempt this at all, let alone pull it off as well as it's done here. To be clear, it still tends notably towards the sour side of that equation, particularly with the astringent vinegar hit, but the flavor of mango also shines through well. It's a pretty neat trick and makes me suspect they may be skilled sauce makers (as it turns out, they do other sauces also). The flavor profile is angling, more or less, towards a fruity Caribbean (those sauces are often similar to Cajun, which itself is a take-off of Louisiana-style, hence the watery nature) vibe, so a lot of those associated spices show up as well here, though they are not listed out specifically.

Heat-wise, because it's a Scotch Bonnet as the heat driver, it's moderate at best. There is a solid degree of build to it, but the real star here is the interplay between the wonderful flavor of the Scotch Bonnet pepper, which they've captured exceedingly well, and the mangos, which do a nifty balancing act of being sweet enough to bring the mango flavor in that setting, while also retaining enough sourness to keep it from being an actual sweet sauce. It's honestly quite fascinating and this is a company I'll be looking for more from in future.

Bottom line: A very well-done Caribbean sauce that manages several flavor zones deftly, yet still makes the interplay of the mighty Scotch Bonnet and mango the star. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 9
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7

Da Kine Hawaiian Hot Sauce Review

Da Kine Hawaiian

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emGlnCC9diY

Oh boy do I have some problems with this one. I almost don't know where to start, but the positioning of this sauce is something that needs to be addressed. While I will stop short of accusing this company of appropriation of native Hawaii islanders, I will note that of the persons of that lineage I know directly, all of them would be offended at the idea that you can simply list pineapple as an ingredient to make something "Hawaiian." Hawaiian restaurants are one of the largest boom segments in the restaurant industry and it's not surprising that companies would want to jump on with that, as they did with the macadamia nut craze of a while ago (this company also offers products with macademia nuts). The company itself seems to be trying to capitalize on the "all things vaguely Hawaiian" motif and we see product names like Da Rub. 

That brings us to the company name, which is islander pidgin for "that one" or "the one," clearly here meant to denote a specific level of quality above all others.  If this sauce is a representation of that put into practice, they're missing pretty wildly. The phrase itself is highly contextual, however, depending on both speaker and usage, so it could also mean something else entirely. I don't usually spend a lot of time on price points of the various sauces, but this one is some serious wolf tickets. We'll circle back to that, but because they're in World Market and catering to shoppers who generally don't know better, it's smart marketing, but a bit on the dubious side.

As to the sauce itself, this is, more or less, a Louisiana-style sauce, or, perhaps more accurately, given the glut of the other ingredients, a Cajun style sauce. However, flavor-wise, none of that reads except for the first three ingredients, which are that of typical Louisiana-style sauces, namely Cayenne, vinegar, water. Frankly, back to the slogan, this company has a lot of nerve calling this a "unique, Hawaiian-style" anything, let alone a hot sauce. I don't know what would be unique about a Lousiana-style Cayenne pepper, a form which is one of the longer running in the hot sauce world generally, let alone Hawaiian, and it's exactly that kind of exaggeration, which is then also reflected in the price point, that I find both highly disingenuous and offensive, not to mention unnecessary. 

Look, the sauce is fine. It tastes, more or less, generally, like most of the other Cayenne Louisiana-style sauces out there. This one is a bit more astringent and harsher on the vinegar side, closer to something like Crystal, but it's consistent with the majority of the other ones out there, only at around 3X the cost or more. The garlic (which appears twice), the pineapple juice, the sugar, the "red chili," whatever that's supposed to be...none of that really shows up in the flavor. This is not notably sweeter than any of the other Louisiana-style Cayenne sauces, and as I mentioned, not as smooth as some of the others. Heat-wise, this is probably among the lower of this form, which is fine, as Louisiana-styles in general are not really meant to pack much of a charge.

Bottom line: Your basic, run of the mill, pedestrian, slightly harsh Louisiana-style Cayenne sauce.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1

Overall: 3

Angry Goat Sacrifice Hot Sauce Review

Angry Goat Sacrifice

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2yuUsiC80s

Here we have another dynamo from what is my pick for the most innovative and inventive sauce company, in terms of the flavors.I don't really understand the "sacrifice" naming nor the mask on the front, which seems a strong reference to some sort of vaguely tribal thing, but the expectation with such a thing is that the sauce will be burning, which this is not. It does have a nice punch, given the Ghosties in there, but it's not anything near a full-on blaze or anything. Angry Goat tends to focus more on flavor first, which is another aspect I admire, even if here and there those flavors are not always ones I necessarily love.

With this one, again, the experimentalism is going full tilt. This, while fun, does make it a bit of a challenge to figure out where to place this sauce. It does have a fairly strong taste, but the coverage is rather all over the map, ranging from fire-roasted Habanero and Poblanos, smoked Habanero powder and New Mexican red chiles, along with lime, which seems a nod towards Mexican-style, but then it adds in apple juice and maple syrup, which is kind of a wild left turn. From there, we also have both ginger and soy sauce, just to really muddle things up and add a bit more confusion. I've burned through easily half the bottle trying to pin down exactly where this sauce is trying to take me and I still am not entirely sure. 

It's wonderful with chicken strips, but on actual Mexican and Asian food, it leaves a bit to be desired, tending to not only not mesh super-well with the existent flavors, but then threatening to overpower them entirely. It definitely needs a strongly flavored food, not necessarily a distinctly-tasting one, in order to be in the best setting, I think. As far as to that flavor, it does strike me as more leaning towards Mexican-style flavors, albeit a bit on the sweeter side (which is, again, not really a facet of Mexican-style sauces) but is very definitely its own thing.The fire-roasted and smoked flavor of the aforementioned ingredients shines through well, and that chef's kiss of sweetness is nicely executed, giving the sauce a feel of being very well-done. I don't know if this is a hit, exactly, as the meandering around a bit, while certainly creative, is almost too off the wall for its own good, but it is definitely one of the funner sauces I've come across to play around with and test out various combinations to find out.

Bottom line: A wild ride of a tasty sauce, though a bit hard to pin down. Definitely better if you're more into that kind of experimental thing.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 7
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 6