Zia Chile Traders Whiskey River Frontier Hot Sauce Review

Zia Chile Traders Whiskey River Frontier

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook and Instagram. 

This may be the most referential sauce I’ve ever come across. We will start with a lot of the non sauce elements first, so you can skip this paragraph and the next if you aren’t interested in this part. The first of these is the name itself. “Whiskey River” has been used as a song title, referring, presumably to drowning one’s sorrows in a particular alcohol, as the namesake of a bourbon marketed by the singer who recorded and popularized that song, as a location within a fictional literature series, as a cultural phrase wherein the river eventually leads to Bourbon Falls, as a condiment selection at the Red Robin restaurant chains, as the name itself of a regional restaurant chain owned by a former NASCAR driver, and here and there by various other bars and saloons. Meanwhile, the idea of a “Frontier” sauce is largely meaningless and refers more to theme, as in visual appearances, such as on this label, or the various foods associated with a given area, loosely referenced to what we would consider the “Wild, Wild West.” 

From there, we move to the packaging. I already touched on the label, and I suspect the word “Frontier” was added both to refer to the New Mexican heritage of the peppers in this sauce, and John Hard’s current home, as well as an attempt to differentiate it enough to avoid litigation by others already using the name “Whiskey River.” As to that packaging, it is in a flask and a certain other sauce, from John Hard when he was the saucier at CaJohn’s, rather famously formerly came in a flask and also prominently featured bourbon as one of the ingredients. That sauce being, of course, the Bourbon-Infused Chipotle Habanero, reviewed elsewhere here.

Ok, now, as to this sauce, we definitely have a different lineup of peppers, being varieties of Hatch chiles, as well as Jalapenos. Definitely this drives the heat level down somewhat, but this sauce is clearly aiming to be more of a flavor showcase. It is thick and a tad sludgy, unlike the other sauce, and I think this is less an updating or re-imagining of that other sauce than a hot sauce on the way to being a barbeque sauce. I found the bourbon flavor to be a bit more prominent here, as well as the sauce being sweeter, but also working better as a “straight out the bottle” hot sauce than the other, which I used almost exclusively as a grill sauce. To be sure, this one is much better used as a grill sauce, where it can flash off some of that very forward bourbon and get a nice Maillard effect going, but I don’t mind this as an actual condiment, either. I particularly like that there is a lot more black pepper in the mix here. If I do have a major gripe, it is probably that I wish there was a lot more smokiness here. That was perhaps not what he was going for, but I felt the absence of that to be fairly prominent. 

As far as usage, I think this one is more broad. This will work just fine on grilled meats, pretty much meats in general. How much you like it will depend greatly on how much you can tolerate the bourbon coming to the fore in your sauces, but as long as it has something to counter that and the fairly forceful sweetness of this sauce, it could work on a pretty wide variety of applications. For me, I will stick to using it as a grill sauce, I think, as bourbon when carmelizing with sugars, imparts a pretty wonderful effect and this definitely is a sauce that benefits from both heat and whatever smokiness you can add to it. 

Bottom line: This one is a lot more accessible as a straightforward condiment, both in terms of flavor and in minimal heat. Think of it as bridging the gap between a hot sauce and bbq sauce and you’ve about got it. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 8
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 6