2K23 Q1 Update

2023 Q1 Update

This year started off, as Januarys usually do, with me opening a bunch of sauces to make up for all the space I had left in the fridge door after whacking through as many open bottles as possible in December. Unusually, there were quite a few 2s, with one Sauce Of The Year candidate. I also wound up going over the 400 sauces overall mark.

Also January, Season 20 of The Hot Ones show was announced, so I did that update. Four sauces carried over from the previous season, two of which I’d already done videos on. It was one of the better seasons, with seven of the ten sauces not containing onions. It only adds another three sauces to the list for me to get to, though. There is both a blog TOC (and YouTube FOH playlist) for those sauces from that show that I’ve covered.

Also also, in January, I set a new high total for posts in a month, breaking the previous level of August 2022. I’m just not super great at throttling back, apparently. I think I was partially successful in 2022, given how hard I tried to dial things back, but part of that had to also do with breaking a tooth in the spring (I broke another in late fall also, but that one is proving less bothersome).

Still more for January, on the FOH side of things...given that Popeye’s came out with a release of a food item that would fit into the chilehead motif AND my road to the Superbowl promotional tie-in videos, I did an impromptu video playing around a bit with the posting times. Usually, I post everything at 9 am MST, which I’ve been reconsidering for a while. 9 am is a time when folks are at work during the weekdays and my guess is that my audience probably tends to be a bit older, so while it’s nice to have it waiting for them, I don’t know how wise that is to keep it in that time slot, at least during weekdays.

For February, to follow behind that a bit, I changed the weekday stuff (excepting the launch of the new quarterly series) to 3 pm MST, which should cover the entire US fairly well. Again, not sure how much of a difference this will make, if any, but I’m going to run with it for a few months and see. Hot sauce videos, which are normally on weekends, I’ve decided to leave at 9 am, as that fits my schedule for updating this blog with support videos going live, etc. better.

Back again to January (I post up the FOH content for the next month at the start of the current one usually), I had enough sauce videos on deck to cover 4+ months at the usual posting schedule, with another 2 months of archive sauces. So,  for March, I decided to scrap my plans to post archive (meaning from prior to launching the FOH video series) sauces on random Saturdays and roll all the videos together.

From there, the move was to postings all weekend, both Saturdays (except on Mustard Saturday for that month, which will start in April and run through grill season - speaking of which, I have a single mustard to film and grill season 2023 will be fully covered) and Sundays, until I was a lot more caught up, as the inescapable conclusion was that it was just taking too long for support videos to make it up after the written reviews were posted. The only ones that were in a reasonable time frame was the ones I was doing for The Hot Ones list or, to a lesser extent, behind sauces Roger [Damptz, Burn Your Tongue] had provided. I was tinkering with a target time frame for posting support vidoes, but since the blog review posting is so erratic, I’ve decided, for now, on a soft goal of having the support videos up no later than 2 months after the written review, ideally sooner. This change will ONLY be for the sauce videos.

I do have a backlog of finished but not posted non-sauce content, but it should take care of itself by the end of Q3.  Tune back in to see if it does, I guess...It also seems really like that the vast majority, if not all, of the archive sauces I have in mind to do will be done by the end of the year. I was pretty close already in January, but I think there may be one or two stragglers.

Finally, I finished March with the first ever for the blog triple sauce review for the Flashpoint peach hot sauces, as well as a couple of scorching videos, both the Hellfire Fiery Fool, which wrapped Season 6 of The Hot Ones sauces, and one of the hotter, if not the hottest, Wing Things I’ve yet done to end the quarter. Those can both be found on the FOH YouTube page and/or playlists, if you’re interested in checking those out.