General Update Q2 2K17

I know this has been a long time coming and I’m probably late to this particular party, but I’m wondering if all the super hot sauce craze has been kind of a fad that is starting to taper. A lot of this is because of what is going on with perhaps the most prolific and well-known of the hot sauce bloggers and the guy who inadvertently got me interested in doing this via inspiration, Scott Roberts. His output has been declining for some time and it seemed he had lot the spirit to continue promoting the agenda of heat and while I probably am only now just catching up, admittedly, apparently he has gone all churchy. I have always said a price can’t be put on happiness and if this is what is making him happy, more power to him and go have fun, but that is a major voice being removed from the spicy side of things. 

I will not ever replace Scott Roberts and am not sure anyone realistically can. I think he definitely hit his stride at the right time, when there was some crazy groundswell momentum and his approach was smart to the point of brilliance, particularly with his chart. I thought he had a great premise with trying to crown king of kings of all the hot sauces and tried to help as I could, but alas, it didn’t quite shake out. All of that stuff (minus the tournament, which lives on now only in memory) will remain, from my understanding, but updates will be even more sporadic, at best, again, from what I’m gathering. Rather than say it’s a shame, I celebrate the other times and triumphs and wish him nothing but the best. 

I have refrained from any escalation into snack foods or BBQ sauces or spicy dry rubs or candies or any of that, partly because so many of them violate one of my 2 main rules (no onions, no extracts) and also because I set this up to be a hot sauce blog. Because there is no trying to outdo myself, there is no pressure to chase after hot sauce gatherings (though I would like to hit at least one someday) or create video channels or anything else that takes the fun and joy out of what has been a very pleasurable experience thus far. I also do want to note that there is still much popularization of "hot" stuff in fast food chain menus and on grocery store shelves, but it is of a much more pedestrian and "tame" variety. I think there is definitely a public interest in spice, just to a fairly limited extent.

As to TSAAF, with a flurry of activity towards the end of May and another larger shopping trip in June, which was ultimately disappointing in that I only found 1 new sauce, but also useful in that I was able to obtain several pictures to catch up on my backlog a bit, a project I’ve been long meaning to resume, I’ve finally got a little bit of action on this blog. I also have a hopefully more fulfilling trip on the near horizon, which I’m hoping gets me into both some new sauces and more pictures, but I’m running pretty close to being caught up on the more easily obtainable ones. 

I’m eyeing another job shift in the near future as well, which I’m hopeful will lend me more time to potentially partake of some spicy goodness. My tolerance has definitely waned a bit more than I would like and I’ve had that on the back burner to get back into it again. I’m a bit tired of mining grocery shelves and look forward to finding some new and exciting stuff. I don’t know that I will get to the level where I need to bomb internet sites again, as there are two very solid brick-and-mortars that I dearly love in reasonable enough proximity to skip that, but that was certainly an enjoyable experience. 

Waxing on more philosophically, we, all of us who are alive, have to deal with lifestyle shifts. My wine blog, for instance, will be almost certainly running its course once I finish the backlog of stuff I have written but not posted because my wife has decided to stop fighting her body, which has long had a low tolerance for beer and that has lately been further extended into wine as well. My interest in sitting around slugging down a bottle of wine solo is fairly low, so developing the blog further seems unlikely at best. It has its own strange and slightly twisting tale, which will be appearing in those pages at some future point. 

When I joined Yelp, I posted an obscene number of reviews in the less than 4 years I’ve been on there…that has tapered off lately and it is not anything I spend a ton of time thinking about now, but I’ve got a backlog there of about 20 pages of reviews, as of this writing, still to post up. Part of this is because of time and partly because one can get tired of anything, including chasing the new and exotic. With as many sauces tried and reviewed, when you hit on some great ones, you want those around, but there is only so much sauce one can reasonably eat and only so much money one can reasonably spend on those. Every sauce I’ve tried and loved and bought again pushes newer stuff that much further back, so unless and until this somehow winds up being a paying gig (I’m not looking for this, as has been pretty well documented during the course of this blog) and someone wants to make it a point to finance my time and sauce habit, there necessarily will be sacrifices to be made.

Which brings us full circle. Even if someone does want that, does the current climate make that a smart investment? Is the hot sauce clamor still on or has it be commercialized and homogenized to the point where there is no room for smaller sauces and companies to get traction? Are people still looking around for a community or is it more to see who has the most absurd and stupidest YouTube video? I have yet to see any food-related show be exclusively devoted to hot challenges, which kind of tells me the thought behind that potential demographic, but I’m also surprised, because that seems like a really good idea. Still, most of the food challenge shows are with “normal” stuff, just often in gross quantities, so the viewers in the audience can at least relate. Most people are still pretty scared of heat…

Anyway, no idea what exactly lies on the road ahead, but I’m still eyeing 200…and finishing – to the extent possible – that picture project…I think a few of the titles I don’t have are from now-defunct sauce makers or the makers are still around, but the sauces are not. Several are challenging because the sauces were so bad, I would never consider buying them again. 

As of now, there are 130 full sauce reviews and depending on if you count the 20 mini-reviews, I don’t, particularly, 150 is probably a much more sane and realistic goal for the year…of those 130 full reviews, 77 have photos, which I think is pretty good, considering…I didn’t start photos at all until I hit 100 reviews in October of 2015 and largely forgot about it for a bit, so almost 60%, particularly when there are a few novelty sauces kicking around in there that I will be hard-pressed to ever get pics of is a number I’m pretty happy with.

As I leave off here, in another couple of months, this blog will be turning 5 years old, something that still strikes me as incredible…thank you to everyone who’s stopped by or told a friend.