Pepper Palace Kentucky Charred Chipotle Bourbon Hot Sauce Review

Pepper Palace Kentucky Charred Chipotle Bourbon Hot Sauce

The label indicates this one is made, hand crafted, no less, by Pepper Palace itself, in Tennessee. I will note that does not improve things much from some of the other offerings I've tried from them. In fact, if someone read me this list of ingredients and told me they were going to make a hot sauce out of it, I'd have told them to bin it right there and just start over.  This was never going to taste good, so no real surprise it doesn't...

So, why did I buy it, then? The scuttlebutt out there has been that Pepper Palace has been reverse-engineering the hot sauces of various other companies and putting them out there as theirs. So, I thought, given how many sauces I've now done and how ace my palate is, I would be in a good position to find out were this the case. This one, coming in a flask and called itself Kentucky Charred seemed to me to be taking aim more or less directly at something like the much-vaunted BICH (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) from CaJohn's. 

Now, I didn't look too closely at the label at the time, and I like to think that if I did, I would have skipped this, but they are two totally different sauces. In addition to the CaJohn's actually tasting great and working well on the grill, which are major differences already, they pour different, have difference viscosity and share very few ingredients. With Chipotle as the main pepper, it was also never going to be hot and there is no heat to speak of here. Instead, what we have is a sour, foot-vinegary mess that doesn't work on food, either at room temp, on the grill, or if the sauce is chilled. This is, in short, just a poorly-conceived and possibly executed worse sauce. This will not be appearing on the FOH video series as there's no way I want to either go through eating it again or wrecking other food with it.

Bottom line: I don't know where you'd use this...I could doctor it, to try to make it work, but there is not really enough there for me to work with and that's me "fixing" a sauce, not the sauce itself standing on its own. It's been a while since I've done this, but this one gets my rare AVOID recommendation.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: -80
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 0