Best Hot Sauce 2023 + Recap

Best Hot Sauce 2023  + Recap

I guess the biggest news here in our little chilehead space was on October 16, 2023, when Smokin’ Ed Currie became once again responsible for a World Record in hottest pepper, this time with Pepper X dethroning the mighty Reaper and by a pretty solid margin to boot. I’ve said for quite some time I thought we were about due for another World’s Hottest title holder and this news wasn’t overly surprising. I have found the various products where I’ve run into Pepper X to be overall pretty positive and I’m looking forward to it being used in more future sauces for sure. Also, this makes Smokin’ Ed Currie a back to back winner of the hottest pepper crown, which is, in itself, no small achievement. Once again (I also posted to the YT Community section on the day this was announced), a hearty congratulations to Smokin’ Ed!

I don’t really get into personalities too much on this blog or in the FOH video series, but I’ve seen a few videos commenting on Ed himself and how he’s apparently some kind of “polarizing” figure. While I’ve watched a number of his videos and found much to agree with, as well as some things to strongly disagree with, my direct interactions with him have been brief, mainly running into him at one of the Fiery Fests, wherein he was quite cordial and graceful. It has long been a sort of back-burner pipe dream of mine to make a pilgrimage to Fort Mill, specifically because of his headquarters there, but I am far from an important enough figure for that to just happen. To be frank, even if I was, circumstances currently are not exactly what I’d call permitting, but a boy can dream and maybe one day... For what it’s worth, my impression of Ed is that he’s a genuinely good person, generous, the kind anyone would be inordinately fortunate to call friend.

As to the bagging of Guinness because it’s now a marketing company...I don’t know that it ever changed. They always wanted to sell sensationalist type books and would sometimes appear on tv shows (I think they had their own for a while), back when what they were doing was fairly rare and more or less specific to them. They devised the system tracking and testing, which, in the case of the more “prestigious,” for lack of a better term, awards, involves a quite extended paper trail, which takes a certain amount of infrastructure, and promoted what is often largely meaningless data, an endless stream of points of curiousity. That, of course, was all pre-internet and now the world has largely moved beyond.

Like most other business forced to adapt to changing times, they are pivoting to keep the brand intact as long as they can, as, truth be told, their days are probably numbered. They are not an official governmental entity or anything, just what they always were...a private company collecting and warehousing points of human interest. If their branding is still to remain meaningful, it has to have some accompanying price tag to it or there is no value. My son, for instance, who would have loved the books as I did when I was younger, largely has no idea what Guinness is (aside from a beer his father sometimes drinks and yes, the two companies have ties) or any respective worth attached to the name, as he has never lived in a time when access to information, even information about goofy subjects, maybe even especially information about goofy subjects, wasn’t immediately available at his fingertips. That Guinness Records has been able to sustain themselves at any level, particularly one where the records they keep still have value to people, is nothing short of a marvel.

There is nothing preventing any other grower who feels their pod is hotter than Pepper X to pony up for the lab tests and go through the same steps and methodology Ed did in order for Pepper X to dethrone the mighty Carolina Reaper. Sure, it’s thousands of dollars to do that, but there’s nothing stopping them from doing it. I think there may be a larger discussion (which I won’t be attempting here) about perceived “heat” vs. HLPC readings, with the Scoville scale itself being a more famous version of the highly subjective former of those two “tests” and the HLPC being the actual analytical one. With tolerance being highly variable, it would be interesting to test various chileheads to see how close they could estimate SHU to actual testing.  

Finally, this brings us to the point about persons being disappointed that Ed is not letting Pepper X go into the wild, as what happened with the Carolina Reaper, I - hugely speculating here - am guessing this may be because of either an exclusivity contract (and accompanying NDA) with First We Feast and/or Heatonist, two companies he and his peppers have been strongly associated with, an association which has undoubtedly made him piles of money. Or, it’s possibly because he didn’t like what happened with the Reaper when that got released, either with a lot of people making money off a pepper it took him a long time to cultivate without him also benefitting, maybe up to taking a Reaper plant and using it to make their own strain competing with the Reaper. I think he alluded to another reason on one of the streams that I didn’t quite catch which is maybe related. Regardless, I get people are disappointed and it’s totally valid they dislike Ed’s choice, but I don’t see this as any kind of rationalization to attack or so much as question the character of the man or his integrity. For my part, I’m certainly well content to just enjoy the sauces utilizing the Pepper X.

It was not all rainbows and kittens for 2023, though. I think the chile surge, the huge spicy wave that was bringing us tons of hot goodies over the last couple years, is ebbing. There is still stuff coming out in that vein, but a lot of it is difficult to impossible to actually locate. Case in point, the Sour Patch Ghost candies. I didn’t find out about them, at all, until 10/22, when Brand Eating, one of my main sources for upcoming stuff, posted a little blurb, but here’s the fun part. The candies were only available to get via the Sour Patch website. Fine, all well and good, kind of silly to wall the product that way, but maybe it’s a limited run or whatever. So, I go there and it’s 7 - 10 days to process the orders, not to get the candy, but merely to process the order. I would have loved to have done those on camera for the FOH video series, but that means 14 - 21 days to get it, which would have put it well after Halloween. I’m just a microYouTube channel, merrily making content I think is fun, but definitely no money from it, and so the candy was definitely out of reach for yours truly, given I’d have to pay for expedited shipping, etc. to make the operative time frame. Banza also did the same fucking thing with their crossover bullshit pizza with Tabasco, which I find utterly hilarious considering the Tabasco sauces used on this are both sitting on grocery store shelves, as well as probably everything else on the pizza.

I get it; it takes time to R & D stuff, to put it into production at all, but if you’re intentionally knee-capping it on release, what’s the point? Take, for example, the Hot Ones tie-in stuff. Their most recent foray was into Hot Pockets. The tamer two (I did FOH content for both) went to retail and you have to use a specific delivery service for the actual interesting one that paired with The Last Dab Apollo. Again, small channel, I only work at home some days, so trying to get delivered whatever that one is/was is right out of the question. But, here’s the kicker. They’re making that product for me, me and other chileheads on that level, and putting them out of our grasp on release seems foolish, incredibly, massively stupid. They are not going to drive sales to a delivery service. Indeed not. They are just going to be added to list of crap I wouldn’t mind doing someday, but not to the extent I’m willing to spend a bunch of time and money chasing down.

There are other guilty parties, such as Jack In The Box, who came out with their Monster Tacos, including a spicy version, which would have been great, again, for October and Halloween, but it never hit any stores near me...at all. Ordeals like that are part and parcel of what is not often spoken about, except by me, when being a chilehead. It is, I suppose, on one level further fodder for a series I continue to kick around in my head for potential FOH video essays about the overall chilehead experience.

Anyway, let us now get to the blog. For this year, overall posting was down from last year, but by the end of Q3, 2023 was the #2 spot of all the years. I knew I would probably not make 95 posts, as I did last year...at least I was thinking not to do that...right before January 2023 beat the previous highest posting month, which itself was in 2022. I thought that 95 number was a bit much, but figured posts would be somewhere in the 60 - 75 vicinity. As it turned out, I wound up with 84 for this year, including this one. I think right around 70 somewhere is a pretty good amount, but this blog has always just kind of been “take it as it comes” and that will not be changing, so who knows where 2024 will wind up. 84 is not, I don’t think, too unreasonable. 2023 was also, by far, the biggest year in terms of views, thanks to an influx of what seemed to be overseas visitors. Welcome all!

I also did my first ever triple review, as well as a few doubles, and even some Mini-Reviews, so the amount of coverage for sauces was still pretty high, even if the overall post count was down. Also, we will roll past 500 total posts for the blog in 2024 sometime, probably January. Shortly after that, the blog will hit 500 sauces, cumulative, across both lists. You can see the specific breakdown further along in this post.

For the FOH video series, I also had the biggest year to date, after coming close repeatedly in months prior,  finally breaking 1,000 views for a month (December 2023), then 2,000, then 3,000, then 4,000, then 5,000, then 6,000, landing at over 7,000. Also breaking was view count for a single video of 1K, 2K, 3K, then 4K, 5K, and still rising as I post this, which was the Hot Ones x Hot Pockets Spicy Garlic Chicken Bacon Review. Given that this video was posted in December 2023, that was definitely the biggest driver of that surge.  

Speaking of breaking stuff, I once again managed to break a tooth in the spring of this year, different one this time from last year, for the 2nd year in a row, which caused me no shortage of agony, particularly with the high SHU sauces, which is kind of interesting. Capsaicin in open wounds is evidently not particularly useful...it started to get really bothersome in late May/early June, hence the slowdown for the blog during that time. I also had a number of other struggles, which I won’t relay here, but which contributed somewhat to a sense of burnout, although, as I’ve alluded, I started to feel like things were getting a bit out of control (at least on the FOH side) and I wanted to dial things down to get a better handle on content.

I have a pretty substantial catalog of both blog posts and videos, so there’s quite a lot to read and watch. YouTube, I think, at least for the part I’m in, tends to be very topical and having so much content filmed in advance was cutting down on a flexibility I wanted. Even though the channel is far from a top one in terms of viewership, that sort of internal frustration and stress definitely cut a lot of the fun from it and as this is something I really want to keep doing, I needed to find a happier medium. Also, again, as noted in Q3, for another year, I got to very few of the video ideas I had in mind from earlier years. I did not really manage to reach the desired FOH posting within 8 weeks after posting a written blog review, with sauces other than Hot Ones show entries...so that is going to be at the fore for 2024. Once again, I’m rather flush with videos in the can, so for the early part of 2024, we will be going back to regularly posting hot sauce videos on Saturdays as well as Sundays, at least for the early part of Q1 2024. Stay tuned to the YouTube Community section to keep tabs on posting schedule changes, if interested.

The initial idea with the FOH series was mainly to add video accompaniment to the written hot sauce reviews here, with non-sauce content just on the side, an idea which it nearly immediately skewed away from. This is partially because I greatly underestimated how many non-sauce spicy things were available, as well as the commercial resurgence of spicy food offerings. As I’ve noted before, YouTube viewer interest seems entirely dependent on the product, the subject of the video as it were. The fact is that non-sauce content draws far, far better than sauces generally. Of the top 10 FOH videos, only 1 is for a sauce, which speaks pretty well to viewer interest across 4+ years and 600+ videos.  The blog (and by nature, the FOH support videos) have always been more a labor of love than anything, so getting back to that sense of things seems to be the good move here and hopefully the new influx of viewers follows.

I do want to mention that in addition to the FOH videos, there is a fair number of posts on the YT Community tab for my page, many of them pictures of various things I’ve made with the different products in the FOH video series or just random posts, where I can engage with things in a more timely fashion than quarterly blog updates. I invite you all to check into those, if you’re interested and want to see more content. While FOH video posting is regularly scheduled, the blog posts, aside from the quarterly updates, is restricted entirely to sauce talk when I get around to writing reviews and the YT Community posts I use to try to cover any ground I may have missed...and post pics.

For 2024, I was planning to produce less non-sauce video content. For months, I had the sentence written here that I was going to actually do that, but I generally work on this post at random times throughout the year (yes, I know it is still meandering quite a lot - I have limits to how much editing I can do and still keep the general, informal, off-the-cuff tone that the vast majority of the other posts also have) and by the start of December 2023, it was pretty clear that if I let that wording stand, I’d be a liar. I have enough right now to keep the regular schedule of posting non-sauce FOH content on Wednesdays (not counting special event stuff) well through Q3, probably longer, and a bunch of other cool things I’ve found that I haven’t also done yet, and maybe after all that will have to revisit things.

Maybe this will finally be the year I screw around with challenges, other than the ones I’ve already done. I originally had the parenthetical “probably not” following the preceding sentence in one of the earlier drafts of this post you’re reading now, but I actually found a few I’m at least moderately interested in doing, and have 3 or 4 of them at hand now, 2 of which I have shot vidoeos for already (stay tuned for which they are), so I guess the answer for challenges is yes, but to a somewhat limited extent. I definitely need to ramp up tolerance before tackling the remaining ones, though. I imagine I’ll probably create a Challenges playlist at some point, which I’ve been kicking around for some time.

Back to the dialing back thing for a second, doing so would also enable me to return to at least one of the things I had in mind from a couple years back, but new stuff always excites me and I can’t seem to help myself.  I hope that sense of fun translates to the videos. It seems like it does when I go through and edit them and that is something I really want to get across to the viewers, that this whole food explorer adventurism is really, truly, a blast. I do have one significant change I’ve made (that no one seems to have yet noticed, which is what I wanted) that I’m continuing to fine tune and another, larger one I hope to make, at some point next year, and the more my main laptop acts like a craptop, the closer that gets. Everything I have in the can basically needs to be posted (or at least that’s the operating idea) prior (maybe) to bringing that online, so I will need to accommodate that as well.

The reaction videos, while a bit time intensive, are also kind of fun, so I’ll probably do a few more of those in 2024, but unless they perform better, that might be the last year for those. I do have some other fun stuff, such as maybe doing more shorts, on the back burner for 2024, and am looking forward to at least attempting some of those long-backburnered ideas.

Though it’s been far from the priority, I’m also closing in on finishing the hot sauce archives project, in which I go back and revisit via FOH videos certain sauces from the blog from back before the FOH content existed. I don’t really have anything specific in mind for that and am not doing any particular planning for it, so I think it’s going to be more or a less a thing that creeps up and I find I no longer have any sauces not covered that I want to do kind of deal.

Let’s turn now to The Hot Ones sauce coverage project. There are 22 sauces total, current through Season 22, of sauces I have left to get, with a few entries not in stock. I didn’t buy the Last Dab Reaper when it was kicking around before Black Friday and it deleted it from my cart, so I guess that’s gone again. Also, cannot find the Dingo Widowmaker anywhere, so I’m guessing that one is done as well. If both remain unavailable when I re-update the Hot Ones list in Q2 of 2024, I will just eliminate them from my remaining list entirely.

There may also be others by then, which will rather tidily speed things getting current up to whatever the running season is. I’m not there now, though, so once again, here is the priority order for the remaining sauces, updated to reflect what’s left:

    1) Sauces I’m interested in, that I have not done a written full review on, that I can get via one of the Burn Your Tongue locations.
    2) Sauces I’m interested in, that I have not done a written full review on, that I can get reasonably easily online (probably during a Black Friday sale). 
    3) Torchbearer Zombie Apocalypse (maybe I’ll luck out and find a mini-bottle of this somewhere. On the other hand, maybe I’m being unduly harsh. While I don’t remember the sauce fondly, at all, it has been quite a while since I had it...)
    4) Sauces I have done a written mini-review on. This honestly is somewhat unlikely to happen and I keep debating whether or not to delete it from this priority list entirely. I suppose if there is enough of a clamor, I might...maybe. However, if there is not more of a clamor by the update to this in Q2 2024, I’m going to also delete this from consideration then. I dislike the idea of moving from a mini-review into a full one, but I am at least toying with the idea of getting all of them from the earlier seasons that I’ve only done a mini-review on and then doing a Wing Thing video of just those (I think there are 9 total), but then I’d have to re-buy the Hot Ones Classic and The Last Dab Apollo and I’m not so keen on doing that, either. Stay tuned, I guess.

The seasons with sauces outstanding are:

Season 5 - 1 remaining
Season 9 - 1 remaining
Season 10 - 1 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 11 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 12 - 3 remaining (2 at hand)
Season 13 - 1 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 18 - 1 remaining
Season 19 - 3 remaining (2 at hand)
Season 20 - 4 remaining (2 at hand)
Season 21 - 4 remaining (2 at hand)
Season 22 - 7 remaining (2 at hand)

These are the sauces remaining, by slot position on the show:

#1 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
#2 - 1 remaining (1 at hand)
#3 - 2 remaining (2 at hand)
#4 - fully covered
#5 - 2 remaining
#6 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
#7 - 6 remaining (3 at hand)
#8 - fully covered
#9 - 4 remaining
#10 - 3 remaining (1 at hand)

We will get into the SOTY discussion more, but first, as we usually do, some stats for the blog. I’m changing the format a bit this year, because Google seems to not want to update and keep live-time stats the way they used to formerly and I'm doing this post a bit earlier than I have in years past:

Total posts (including this post): 494
Total views (as of this writing): ~61.6K
Total sauces full reviewed: 434
Total full review sauces with FOH video content: 307
Average rating, all full review sauces: 4.62
Total mini-sauce reviews: 51
Total sauces reviewed, combined: 485
Highest viewed individual blog review: ~1.8K - Private Selection Mango Scotch Bonnet

A couple notes here...the full review sauces with FOH content is a lot closer than the numbers here suggest, as I’m using the videos that are actually live, as in can be clicked to and watched. There are quite a few posted and scheduled, but not yet live, that bring that number up a bit...I might call the archive project, which I mentioned briefly earlier in this post, over once I get the numbers within 100 or so of each other. There are quite a few, like Wicked Cactus, long gone now, that it will be quite impossible for me to have in a video.

This brings us to the SOTY deliberations for this year. Since an overall score of 10 is, by design, virtually impossible for any sauce to achieve, a 9 is usually as high as these go. Even that is pretty rarified air and much more common, though still rare, is an overall rating of 8. The list of 8s in 2023 was pretty considerable. We had the Canal Street Louisiana Crude, the surprising Retsuko Rage, Puckerbutt’s Chipotle Express, easily the hottest entry to date, and the out-of-nowhere surprise of Prescribed Burn’s High Pulp sauce..

While I enjoyed all of them immensely, since it was posted in February, the Retsuko Rage consistently was an absolute blast out of the gate and then rather handily sustained its momentum. It was initially the runaway leader for SOTY and never really in any danger of slipping from the top spot. Not only was I thrilled that the sauce lived up to the coolness of its namesake in a licensed vanity sauce, not only did it feature my favorite superhot, the venerable Ghostie, which offset the stupid apple cider vinegar in it, not only was it consistently delicious each and every time I used it, but I got 8 ounces for $3, making this easily the greatest value of any sauce I’ve had, ever. I still have the bottle, staring at me from across the room in its display in my office as I type this, which also marks the first hot sauce bottle I’ve ever kept.

Truly, it was a spectacular sauce and I found myself repeatedly marveling that it was better than I remembered when I enjoyed it over the 6 months or so it took me to finish it. I seriously wish I knew who the actual sauce maker was, as, with all SOTY winners, I would like to revisit it (and also see if they could make it sans apple cider vinegar, to more perfect an already highly impressive entry). Our 13th winner of the Sauce Of The Year, for 2023, goes to Retsuko Rage.

One of my habits with things I really enjoy is hold off on the ending, slow-walk consuming whatever it is, trying to extend the savor and my delight and this applies to books or tv shows or video games or here, with the 2023 SOTY, very limited run hot sauces. I suspect it has some psychological underpinnings, but obviously there were a number of other sauces I wanted to get to in the meantime as well, but that delay I just mentioned was definitely a huge factor, just as it was with this next sauce.

My personal favorite overall sauce of the year, the Angry Goat Heatonist No. 7, didn’t score high enough to be in deliberation, though I’m singling it out because it is a fantastic, truly special sauce. So, while I don’t really go in for Honorable Mentions too much, I’m going to make an exception for that utterly incredible sauce, which I was quite sad to see go.

Previous TSAAF Sauce Of The Year winners (links to reviews in SOTY Table Of Contents link to the right):

2012: CaJohn’s Happy Beaver
2013: Blair’s Pure Death
2014: Born To Hula’s Ghost Of Ancho
2015: Voodoo Chile’s Voo Dew Honey Doo
2016: Pirate O’s Surface Of The Sun Hot Sauce
2017: Z’s Shield Maiden Hot Sauce
2018: Taco Jesus Cayenne Pepper Sauce
2019: Torchbearer Ultimate Annihilation
2020: Mikey V’s Sweet Ghost Pepper
2021: Gindo’s Original
2022: Hellfire Hellboy Legendary AF

If you want to read more from me, check out the YouTube Community page, which also contains a number of photos of different food things, as well as brief little notes to span the gap between the quarterly postings here.  

I also have another blog, where I type about wine, the Happy Sippin’ Companion (HSC). It has been put on inactive status as of 2019, with no plans to resurrect it, but still remains up for viewing (link also on right).

I also still slug away on Yelp, which you can click to from my widget. I’m finally resuming posts from my earlier layoff, but it’s still way off the pace from pre-pandy years. My distribution of ratings and further metrics are available on my Yelp profile page....I think. Maybe.

As always, I appreciate you dropping by. If there are any spicy products or sauces you’d like to see me get to or any video ideas you may have, please drop me a line in the comment section of any of the reviews or videos.