2026 Q2 Update

2026 Q2 Update

For as much time and angst as I’ve spent bemoaning the backlog of content, one of the good parts about it, which is why I do always want somewhat of one, is when something happens. It could be vacation, an extended work project, or, much less fortunately, what it was for nearly all of April, some medical-ish stuff. In this case, it was an old root canal that went really, really south and created all sorts of havoc and misery for nearly the entire month of April and extended into May. On the plus token, I only had a single video to film and I’d be set through June as far as the FOH series went and had a good couple week cushion or so on the blog front. Keeping the scheduled stream of content uninterrupted, even if relatively unimportant in le grande scheme of things, turned out to be a nice saving grace.  

Along the way, this quarter also saw the blog hit 700 overall posts. The 700th overall hot sauce review will be at some point, probably fairly early in the quarter, for Q3. Further, it took around 9 months to go from 100K views to 250K, where it was closing in on the 2026 Q1 Update. As I type this now, if we’re not there already, we’re now closing in on 500K. 

Hot Ones Season 30 had the sauces announced on the Ides Of May and it looked to be yet another onion-heavy season. It added a total of exactly one to the upcoming Hot Ones sauce hit list project, which will be detailed a bit more below. Also, it took until about then for me to get the necessary parts and the weather to start to look to be cooperative enough to kick off grill season, which is probably the latest in the year it’s been in recent memory. Sure is a good thing that fucking up the weather patterns won’t have any future repercussions or anything...the delay was fine, though, given how utterly trashed my appetite was from what I mentioned in the preceding section...although, after replacing the heat tent, I now need to once again re-learn the whims and whys of my increasingly questionable grill. 

That aside, for the last 2 years, I’ve been looking specifically at the most represented sauce makers for full reviews in this blog and if you check the Q2 for both 2024 and 2025, you can see the lists there. This will be the third year and once again, there are changes. Let’s start with where we left off last year, as usual these numbers are not reflective of any sub-lines, such as vanity sauces, co-packed sauces, etc. OR of Mini Reviews.

2025 numbers:

1. CaJohn’s [21] (19 videos posted)
2. Angry Goat [20] (all videos posted)
3. Hellfire [15] (12 videos posted)
4. Silk City [14] (all videos posted)
5 - 7 (tie) Karma* [8] (all videos posted) 
Pex [8] (all videos posted) 
Puckerbutt [8] (all videos posted)
8-10 (tie) Bravado [7] (5 videos posted)
Torchbearer [7] (5 videos posted)
Volcanic Peppers [7] (6 videos posted)

I was not expecting much, if any movement, given what I had planned ahead for the rest of the year, as has been documented a bit in the other Quarterly updates. As has also been documented, I wound up with a lot more flexibility and took a look at a couple of sauce makers I meant to explore more fully. Those were both on my favored nation sauce makers, which was the subject of a different blog post that you can access via the TSAAF SOTY link at the right. The thing here is that if I discover a sauce maker makes a sauce I enjoy, if it is of sufficiently high level, I will be motivated to go through their entire line-up of offerings. This doesn’t necessarily mean I will do that, but the impetus is there. 

With that, let’s take a look at the revised numbers for 2026, which are updated with a new total that I added for funsies of the cumulative rating for each maker, given the sauces I’ve reviewed. This data is near-worthless as it is very skewed, given my proclivities and food intolerances, so take it only as a point of interest reflective solely of the data on the blog, itself also highly subjective. I try to be as neutral as possible, but reviews are opinions and all opinions ar e inherently subjective. The cumulative average rating for the blog, as of December 2025, is 4.64, as a point of reference.

Anyway, the format is [Position]. [Sauce Maker] [Number Of Full Reviews On Blog] (Number of Support Videos Available) {Cumulative Average Rating Across All Full Reviews}:

1. CaJohn’s* [21] (19 videos posted) {5.19}
2. Angry Goat [20] (all videos posted) {5.35}
3. Hellfire [15] (12 videos posted) {5.4}
4. Silk City [14] (all videos posted) {5.71}
5 - 6 (tie) Butterfly Bakery [13] (12 videos posted) {6.15}
Gindo’s [13] (all videos posted) {6.84}
7 - 9 (tie) Pex [9] (all videos posted) {4}
Puckerbutt* [9] (all videos posted) {4.44}
Volcanic Peppers [9] (6 videos posted) {5.33}
10 Karma* [8] (all videos posted) {5}

 
*Does not include any sub-lines, such as specific vanity sauces, the Smokin’ Ed, and/or Hot Ones branded sauces.

I was not expecting movement near the top, as Angry Goat was one I made a point to explore and kept tabs on from time to time. CaJohn’s was a larger name during the formative years of this blog, so much of that came from early on, when I was exploring the lineup back when John Hard still owned the company. Today, unfortunately, I feel as if the company has fallen off notably since that time and I don’t know that they’ve introduced any new sauces at all under that nameplate. That top spot is perhaps more inertia than anything. 

I had similarly also explored Silk City, though that company is on my list to return to for some newer stuff at a future point, with the entire line-ups of Hellfire, Karma, Bravado, and Torchbearer being pretty well mined, as far as I was concerned. For Pex, there was a couple of sauces in which I had casual interest, and have a sauce from Puckerbutt at hand, but have not gotten to as of yet. This is all relatively minor movement from what is mostly a point of curiousity list. Volcanic was the only one that had potential to move the needle, but I had (and still have) a pretty solid glut of sauces that are more or less in the Louisiana-style category, so it looked to be a while for those as well. 

Gindo’s, which has the highest composite score by a sizable margin, had been on my list to try and explore in a similar way as I’ve described above for a while. Butterfly was another in that vein in which I was very motivated to dig further into and for both of those, the stars aligned very nicely with some sales in which I was happily able to pick up a slew from each. This has moved the threshold for entry into this into the high single digits rather than the middle single digits as previously, with over half of the makers into double digits. If I had to guess, and as soon as I do, will undoubtedly be proven wrong, but I’d suspect the cap would be at around a couple dozen. 24 sauces from a single brand is quite a lot, I think, given that I am not counting either sub-lines or known relabels. There will probably be a bit more movement for next year as well, as I’ve still got a few Butterfly sauces on tap waiting on the shelf to be opened.

One of the other things I like to do for this mid-year update is to take a look at The Hot Ones project. Let’s turn now to that The Hot Ones sauce coverage project. All of this, as always, is updated on the Hot Ones Sauces page (link at right) as to which sauces are still under consideration and which are not, along with the reasons why not.

The big change here, I guess, is that I finally have, in my grubby mitts, the Torchbearer Zombie Apocalypse sauce, so I guess I will get to that this year, to kind of cement the early seasons. I am now concluded through season 23, barring a single sauce here and there in some of the seasons. By the end of the year, that may wind up being the case through season 25, bringing me ever close to at least closing in on being caught up. This project is still being slow-walked, due to the variety of factors I’ve mentioned in other updates, including the end of the year update from 2025. For now, we continue at the pace of one Hot Ones sauce per quarter, rather than one a month. 

Current to now, the seasons with sauces outstanding are:

Season 3 - 1 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 4 - 1 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 21 - 1 remaining 
Season 23 - 1 remaining 
Season 24 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 25 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 26 - 3 remaining 
Season 27 - 6 remaining 
Season 28 - 4 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 29 - 5 remaining
Season 30 - 3 remaining

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

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

*For one of the #3 slot sauces, it has appeared in other seasons at the #2 position, but they have moved it for Season 30.