Arthur Wayne Montana Rooster Hot Sauce Review

Arthur Wayne Montana Rooster Hot Sauce

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: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq5nUuMH3Q4

Note: I have been reliably informed by the aforementioned Roger that the label for this bottle may be changing, so possibly this is the old label. A number of other labels throughout this blog are possibly similarly changed...my suggestion is to look on the respective web sites of the various sauces and see what the current look is.

Right, now on to the show...as those of you following along in 2020 already know, an Arthur Wayne sauce called Limitless (check TOC for review) is hovering about in my SOTY consideration list. I did find it a bit piquant for daily usage, however, and was really interested in the sauce it was based on, which is this. Had the heat been taken down a few notches, we could be looking at a battle between sauces from the same company, which is pretty rare. The last time it happened, if memory serves, it was back between a couple of CaJohn's entries. 

Sad to say, this will not be the case here. This sauce does not retain any of the smoothness of the other sauce and has almost no heat at all. There are spiky chunks of pepper bits, which is a touch on the annoying side, when I hit them and this is a far looser sauce, much closer to the runniness of a Louisiana-style. It is possible this is just a batch issue with the bottle I got, which can happen with smaller sauce companies, but I'm far from convinced that is what is at play here.

 I also have some related problems with the naming convention here. Sriracha refers to a pretty specific - and well established - style of sauce. Calling this a spin on sriracha is frankly just misnaming the sauce. If you're going to take a sriracha and spike it with fruit, fine, I guess, but it still has to be mainly a sriracha. This one reads more like a vinegary pineapple sauce and indeed, we have the fairly standard combination of pineapple and Habanero here.

Had the approach here been to take a swing at the sweet-hot and just call it sriracha-inspired, fine, but if you set up expectations, particularly for a well-known and beloved sauce, and then get nowhere near it...it is going to raise some questions. The taste here varies a bit, but never too far from vinegar and pineapple. I don't dislike it and it is mild enough you can use a lot of it. Flexibility is fairly strong, going well on nearly everything, other than Mexican food, where I found it somewhat clashy.

Bottom line: Do not consider this a sriracha-style sauce, regardless of the label. Think of it as another sweet-hot, another entry into the halls of Habanero-pineapple, albeit a runny version, and go accordingly.

Breakdown:

Heat level: 1
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 8
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 5