Merf's Angry Elk Hot Sauce Review

Merf's Angry Elk

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=r9zIhhTQY1I

Every once in a while, a sauce comes along that takes a bit for me to grasp onto and for this one, I'm nearly at the end of the bottle and I still don't know that I quite have a handle on it. This is another of the newer sauces to the Merf's lineup, as I understand it, and it is a very unique entry. Here, we have both beer and monkfruit, combining with some fire-roasted red peppers, some guajillo, a whole lot of garlic, and some chipotle in there for good measure, all combining to make one of the more intriguing, but also somewhat puzzling sauces I've come across.

It is thick, quite thick, and it tends to clump. The texture and the color is somewhat reminiscent of a mole' but the somewhat garlic-forward nature of this, in conjunction with those other things, creates an effect that is sort of like cold pockets of garlic, which is...curious. When this sauce is warmed up a bit, hopefully by whatever food it's put on, things improve, but this renders this not so great for things like a dipping sauce for chicken strips, say. The first thing I tried it on was pizza, as I was bandying about for a good pizza sauce and opened three or four others at the same time (yes, reviews for those will be forthcoming). I found it rather a delight on pizza, but to be honest, somewhat of a disappointment on nearly everything else I tried it on. On burgers and tacos, it was solid, but might not be my first choice and I don't think it worked particularly well where it had a blander base, such as on the aforementioned chicken. 

The fire-roasted peppers and the guajillo/chipotle combination should make this more of a Mexican-style sauce, but the conjunction with the larger chunks of garlic, which should also work well in that setting, at least as a flavor, sort of plays against it. The Angry Elk lager beer and monkfruit may be coming into play here, but this is definitely more of a cumulative effect sauce and trying to parse individual elements, aside from the stronger tastes, comparatively, of the garlic and fire-roasted elements, is a bit pointless. It is a quite well-blended sauce in terms of the elements melding together to a cohesive whole, albeit one with a fairly narrow application range. Given the peppers, the heat here is pretty nominal.  

Bottom line: A very interesting low-heat creation that wound up with me using up most of the bottle trying to chase down where it worked best, which was pizza and other complex type foods, such as hamburgers.

Breakdown:

       Heat level: 1
       Flavor: 7
       Flexibility: 3
       Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4