Maui Pepper Co. Mango Meltdown X-Treme Heat Hot Sauce Review

Maui Pepper Co. Mango Meltdown X-Treme Heat

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: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tA11m-kZ0U

My expectations going into this were that I would find basically a similar sauce as the regular Mango Meltdown (reviewed elsewhere here), along with almost certainly a hotter, perhaps much hotter, heat punch. Perhaps it would be more pepper forward, but the idea would be that it would be like that other sauce, only hotter.

I suppose, in a very general sense, you could say that's kinda sorta the case, but there are more differences than I had anticipated. Along with the goofy stylized spelling of the emphatic in the name, we have a heat scale on the label going all the way up to the top and very, very tiny text for the ingredient list. Hmmmm. The sauce itself is a nice light orange shade, with little flecks of what looks like pepper bits in it, so there is a differentiation in color. Consistency is close enough that I would call it identical.

Flavor-wise, this is sort of the same, although this one has both a before and after taste of something chemical. It's like if you have bottled water in one of those plastic bottles and you let it sit in your car during a hot summer day and go for a drink and discover that the plastic has leached out a bit and flavored the water, it's basically along those lines. Once the sauce asserts itself more, it doesn't seem remarkably different from the original sauce, other than that rather distracting taste modifier. 

Ok, but then how much hotter is it, I hear you ask. Not really is my answer. It may be slightly hotter, but on the level of slightly only. The original I think I gave a 2 for heat and I would put this one at between a 2.5 - 3 at its highest point, but it does take some doing to get to that point. It is something one has to build towards and, like the other sauce, it's not particularly challenging out of the gate. Even at its hottest point, I don't see this as really much of a challenge to anyone, other than the aforementioned off-flavor notes.

Bottom line: More like the original Mango Meltdown than not, with a very slight heat increase and a much more noticeable weird artificial note to the flavor. The original is definitely better.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4