C3 Colorado Red
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOkAVL49-zk&t=6s
I hope you forgive my abbreviation of the company name but there is a reason that 3M no longer uses the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing name and hasn't for years. If you look at the title for this post, "Colorado" appears twice, which is one time too many, possibly two. The sauce itself is named Colorado Red, which strikes me as odd considering it's more of a sunflower yellow color, slightly pushing orange, with red flecks in it, which is not itself red. I suppose Colorado Red could be the name of a color, like Candy Apple Red, except I can't think of any colors, like Plum Crazy Purple, for example, that are not the actual hue of the color they're describing. Perhaps (probably) I'm overthinking this, but that's part of the fun. The logo, however, is great. I like it quite a lot and the label looks good, with a wonderful sauce level gap between the ends. I don't like the copy on the bottle or the arrangement of the nutritional info text too much, but there are a lot of positives here.
One of those positives, at least somewhat, is the flavor. Here, we have a very nice blend of the red bells and red Fresnos, two of the best-tasting peppers out there, rounded out with a flash of garlic, and some nice heat courtesy of the Ghost powder. The flavor is dampened somewhat by the oil in this, which is both vegetable and soybean, the choices of which I find confusing. I get you want oil for richness and smoothness, which is all to the good, but olive oil does a nice job of this, without tending towards the overpowering. This one isn't quite all the way there to that level, truth be told, but it's knocking at the back door pretty hard and I don't quite understand using both of them. One of the issues with sauces that use oil is the dynamics change pretty drastically when cold, which is definitely the case here.
As far as usage, I really like this on pizza, which was the impetus for me picking it up. It's nowhere near my favorite sauce for that application, as oil also makes it a bit of a challenge in terms of stickiness, but I think it works there well (I'm tempted to try to use this hot sauce as an actual pizza sauce, as I did with the Boar's Head (reviewed elsewhere here). It does nicely with other tomato-based sauce foods, such as spaghetti, say. I think this would also be probably pretty solid on lasagna and it can be a challenge to find sauces that handle that well. I don't love it on strips and it's already too rich to add to cream-based foods, like mac & cheese or alfredo. Heat-wise, this is probably better served for chileheads, but, if used judiciously, could definitely be a nice gateway sauce for normies.
Bottom line: Overall somewhat pepper forward and nice-tasting sauce, that hovers very close to the border of being overpowered by the oils. If you like creamier and smooth hot sauces, definitely well worth a go.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 2
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5
Overall: 4
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