Pex Peppers Painapple Hot Sauce
I bought this one last year and then promptly forgot about it until a bit ago, when I was casting about trying to get a line on how many Reaper sauces I had yet to do. As mentioned in my End Of Year piece for 2020, I had intended on getting to a lot more Reaper stuff this year, after largely giving the pepper a pass nearly entirely prior. I think this was part of a large collection of Pex Peppers sauces I had gotten while on sale and looking at the flavor profile, which is ostensibly pineapple and Carolina Reaper, I had somehow gotten it into my head that it was actually apple (like green apple) and Carolina Reaper, which did not seem to me to lend itself well to a bunch of stuff, unless I happened to be grilling.
The sauce kind of reminds me a bit of both the Lemon Yellowjacket and the Wildberry Whoop Ass in that those superhots, Fatalii and 7 Pot Primo, respectively, begin to become assertive, fast in the former, a bit delayed in the latter, things get that old familiar superhot bitter tinge. This one jumps right to that, however, and I suspect it's because pineapple is not an especially dominant flavor. It is also shunted towards the rear of the ingredient panel, so instead, it reads more as a generalize sweet, which is mostly what we have here: a very aggressively bitter superhot that has a non-descript bit of sweetness to it.
What's also interesting is the sauce goes nearly right away to a full-on furnace, but then does not go any further. Unlike the other two sauces, it does not continue to build and the drop-off is nearly as fast as heat dosage. This is a pretty neat trick and I'm not sure how the peppers were managed to be tempered in this way. A lot of what I've described as the "cloying" nature of the Carolina Reapers is gone entirely here, in favor of more of a straightforward superhot bitterness, that could really be almost anything other than Scorpions, which always have that bit of floral note to them. I would put this probably below the Wildberry Whoop Ass in terms of heat overall, though initial heat, it's right there with the others.
On the less happy side, I really wanted this to retain a lot more pineapple flavoring. I love pineapple in my sauces and lament what could have been here. Going for a nice gloppy pineapple that also carries the kind of flavor that you don't want to stop eating would have been a neat trick. Instead, here we kind of have the inverse, where the sauce isn't bad enough not to use entirely, but I can't say it's very high on my list of sauces that I want to reach for, either. I'm sure I can doctor this into more my suiting, but that's not really the sauce being out there like that, then. That's me tinkering and having to modify.
Bottom line: Pex Pepper has some interesting sauces, to be sure, but this is more of a thud, presenting an interesting aspect to the Carolina Reapers, but missing wildly on the fruit side of things.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 5
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 4
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