2026 Q1 Update

2026 Q1 Update

I think towards the end of 2025 I got into some pretty serious burnout and despite the year starting off very strong with a couple of SOTY candidates and some otherwise great sauces, it didn’t seem like this year was going to be resuming the chilehead streak of some years past. Obviously, the unhealthily deranged state of the world and the propensity of one particular individual to pick global fights with former allies and trade partners definitely was not and is not helping anything. That this person is regrettably occupying the highest office in the country in which I live definitely is contributing to the damage to the overall mental state. Things were continuing to get much, much worse, and seemed perpetually on the verge of flying out of control entirely. Perhaps humanity needs a World War within their lifetimes to shock them out of their stupor, but I’d have been just as happy to not be around for that...I suppose others in the past have held a similar sentiment.

On January 15, First We Feast kicked out the sauce list for Season 29 and I updated that page then, as per usual, as well as posting on YouTube. The season seems a pretty widely varied one, which I appreciate, though it only added another 3 sauces to the hit list. I think I probably need to reconsider the idea of getting repeats on the Quarterly Wing Thing FOH video series (link at right), if I’m going to keep current on that, but I also really wanted to get some new sauces in the mix as well, particularly SOTY candidates, so it’s always a challenge, I suppose.

For National Hot Sauce Day on January 22, a very special collab between myself and Dylan over at Heat Hot Sauce, which was a map of various hot sauce companies in the US and Canada, was posted up over there. This is a project I’ve long wanted to see realized and with Dylan and I both being chileheads and statistics geeks, this proved the perfect combination. The initial launch was with nearly 500 companies in that criteria, with us initially leaving out makers with only a single sauce in their lineup and those companies where the sauces were produced out of the country. It expanded pretty considerably and pretty quickly after that. This will be an ongoing thing and I’m truly excited at seeing it develop. 

I also made a post about all of the Runners-Up for my annual SOTY award, which can be found at the SOTY page (link at right). 

It seemed as if my prediction at the end of 2025 was starting to come true. The scheduling for this blog, which was running about a month ahead by the end of last year, was closer to 2 weeks and I really hadn’t filmed much of the non-sauce content for the FOH series...not a lot of sauce content, either, truth be told, as the FOH series was running an entire quarter ahead by the end of 2025. That was somewhat improved, though, to maybe a couple months and changed, instead of a full quarter, but I did have a lot of sauces on deck, still unopened, and was trying to make a concerted effort to clear out some of the open bottles from 2025 in the fridge door. 

One of the directions I’ve wanted to go for a while was to explore more Gindo’s, and more recently, Butterfly Bakery as well, so this year seemed like a really good time to do that. Thus, the first quarter featured a lot more sauces from both of those companies than normal and yes, this will impact the Q2 post section wherein I go over the most represented sauce companies on this blog. 

It became also exceedingly clear that we are again in a spicy food drought, as far as fast food and commercial snack products go and with the havoc I mentioned earlier, a lot of what I do find is also more expensive than I have interest in shelling out, so if it holds, the FOH series will be moving much more heavily into strictly hot sauce review addendums for contents sooner rather than later. As things stand currently, it will be pretty close through Q3 before I run out entirely of non-sauce FOH content, though, of course, stuff might filter in between then and now.

I also discovered some somber news...I still can’t quite wrap my head around it or being to process, but mid-March I found out that one of the icons of my chilehead development, a gentleman named Jimmy Savas, passed in the later part of 2025. He was the man behind the counter at Grove Market & Deli, which, prior to Roger Damptz and BYT, about the only place to find actual scorching stuff in the Salt Lake valley. Even though my visits there were extremely inconsistent, he always seemed to remember me and had time to chat and as time permitted between his many other customers, we’d catch up. I don’t know why he remembered me, but he always seemed to...perhaps with the incessant conversation about hot sauces and spicy foods generally...or maybe all the people I dragged with me through the years if they were up for a massive lunch. In the winter, I’m not so much for cold deli sandwiches and it had been a bit since I’d dropped in, but my brain is struggling to comprehend that the man, this fixture, this beacon, was gone, and with him, the entire soul of the place...and now, of course, I can’t really bring myself to go back. There is no point. He’s gone and it’s far too late for me to talk with him one last time and say goodbye. I suppose it is some measure of solace that I appreciated my visits and he reciprocated the sentiment, though all of that, at least right now, pales somewhat to the degree that I miss my friend. 

In brighter tidings to leave this update off, the blog is closing in on 700 posts, which will probably happen sometime before the next quarterly update, as well as being within striking distance of 250K views. Around 9 months ago, it had hit the 100K mark. I find this both gratifying and perhaps a bit surprising, but I’m absolutely grateful. None of this, of course, would have been possible without the timely intervention of another of my good friends, the absolutely stellar and cherished Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue, who came through with a lift when these pages were strongly in danger of cratering into ashes. Once again, I strongly urge you, if you're within 100 miles of any of the locations, to make the pilgrimage to the hallowed shelves of BYT. The locations are quite convenient to access and you can find the exact addresses by checking out BYT on Facebook or Instagram.