Yampa Valley Purple Blaze Hot Sauce Review

Yampa Valley Sauce Company Purple Blaze

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ziPFcAUdWs

Another sort of random, stumble-upon find, of another sauce company both from Colorado and whom I've never heard of before. I have a bit of a partiality to sweet-hots, particularly fruit-based sweet hots, and when they also feature the darker berries, I'm usually intrigued. Even if the sauces aren't particularly wonderful, and there are definitely times when they are not, such as here, if the blueberry is forceful enough, those sauces can often be resurrected into wonderful breakfast concoctions with just a splash or so of a nice, pure maple syrup.

For this one, it's a rather watery sauce overall, but the flavors of blueberry, black pepper, and the Habanero, are fairly prominent. A lot of the time, the peppers will get lost in the mix, but not here. The down side to this, and to fruit-based sauces generally, is that if the fruit is unripe, you can often get a sour quality to the resulting sauce.This is more or less what we have here, as this is one of the sourer sauces I've come across, unpleasantly so. I suspect this is a function of the fruit being sour to begin with, the lack of additional sugar in the sauce to compensate, and the addition of the vinegar. Frankly, this sauce is not one I will consider using by itself, as that aspect is so dominant. It makes me rather strongly wonder if this batch was tasted prior to bottling, as it's hard for me to imagine this end flavor being intentional.

Fortunately, it can be salvaged neatly with the aforementioned maple syrup (or another liquid sweetener, I'd hazard), and then you get those wonderful flavors coming through without the brutal sour aspect, but by itself, it is rather unpalatable. Of course, as always, the rating below is reflective of the sauce by itself out of the bottle, not after I've fixed it. Heat-wise, the Habanero is perhaps there more as a flavoring element, as this is decidedly a not very hot sauce.

Bottom line: The good news here is that this can be fashioned into a pretty solid sauce with the aforementioned additions, but the down side here is that it has to be, as it is borderline inedible otherwise.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 2
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1

Overall: 1