As I mentioned earlier in some of the quarterly Updates, this was a sort of nervous-making
year, with no strong contenders at all until much deeper into the year. 2015,
however, came on very strong towards the end and fortunately, I didn’t wind up
having to resort to past years or even look at a lower overall aggregate score
than the weighty past victors, something I wasn’t sure would be the case for
the vast majority of the year. The pool, however, seemed shallower and I say
seemed, but looking back, the sauce for last year, Born To Hula’s awesome Ghost
Of Ancho had no competitors at all. 2013 saw Blair’s Pure Death come in and
just take over immediately. Once again, there was no competitors to that,
either. 2015, then, while weaker overall (maybe in 2016, I will do an average
compositing of the aggregate score for the respective years), was the most
strongly contested for the highest title since the year of inception. That
first year, in 2012, was the Happy Beaver from CaJohns’s edging out the BICH,
also from CaJohn’s and the El Yucateco Green, easily the hottest competition
this blog has seen (no pun), since all three of those are, by rights,
champion-level sauce.
This year, as mentioned, not until very late was anything
even remotely in that rarefied air. Then along came October and the Tortuga
Hell-Fire. A short while later, the VooDew Honey Doo sauce came racing up
behind it and the heat, as Glenn Frey once famously mentioned, was on. Both of
these had the same cumulative score, 9, that self-same score of all the
previous champions, though the Hell-Fire had the slight edge in heat and flexibility
and the Honey Doo the slight edge in flavor. They certainly were not making my
decision any easier and I began to debate ways of pitting the two off. Did I
choose which one I finished first? The Honey Doo was gone by the 10th
of December, still a decent amount of the Hell-Fire left as of this posting. Did
I put both bottles on a counter, blindfold myself, spin around in circles and
pick whichever one I closed my fist upon first? Which one I didn’t shatter
after dizzily crashing into the counter? Maybe use a coin toss? Best 2 of 3? 3
of 5? Announce a co-winner?
The Honey Doo, to be frank, has a built-in advantage of
being more flavorful, which is the most desirable characteristic in a sauce. It
also has the “specialness” of being my 100th full review of a sauce
and it seems fitting that that particular hallmark also be the Sauce Of The
Year. I did also finish it much faster, as noted and if I were to pick which I
liked better, it would be that one by a slight amount. So, without further need
for agonizing, I hereby announce the Voodoo Chile Voo Dew Honey Doo as the 2015
Sauce Of The Year from the TSAAF, joining the other luminaries from previous
years, which will immediately follow this paragraph. Before I post that list,
though, I do want to take a moment to say I have been very impressed by the
other offerings from Voodoo Chile and Tortuga and think that both of them are
among the very best companies that the hot sauce world has to offer.
TSAAF Sauce Of The Year winners:
Starting to get a very good statistical backlog here and it
was definitely sort of interesting and fun reading for me to go back to the
other years where I made similar posts and compare. Obviously, the major change
this year was one I had hinted about right around a year ago and that was
adding pictures to the various posts. I started that once I hit 100 sauces
covered with a full review (if I counted the mini-reviews, I hit that figure
long ago, but I don’t count those as that was something I only did in the
infancy of TSAAF and abandoned entirely thereafter). It was, in some ways, a long time coming, but an important thing to remember here is that zero of these sauces are sponsored, meaning that I pay for every sauce that appears here fully, 100%.
I am currently at about 42 sauce pics posted out of a possible 106, so roughly
40% there vs. the total, though, again, I will always be a few shy, possibly (probably)
more as I find out more info about what’s actually available out there. I
basically have 2 more solid locations locally to mine, so my guess is that I’ll
probably approach 80 of the already reviewed sauces, but not quite make it. Frankly, many sauces are more trouble
than they’re worth to buy just for a picture or even to find a brick-and-mortar
to hunt them down for a photo. Then we have the Blair’s Death line and the
various Tabascos, which come in boxes, which I won’t be taking pictures of as I will only be posting bottles of the actual sauce, so I
basically have to run into them open somewhere (excepting the Pure Death, of
course, which I tend to keep on hand). The photos I’m going to be putting up
will be those of the bottles only, preferably with at least some sauce still in
them. I’m also going back and continuing to clean up some coding errors, but I
suspect that particular task will never quite ever fully be done…
The final change to both this and the wine blog (HSC) is to
add a TOC page for both. In that process, I discovered some interesting (to me,
anyway) artifacts for this blog. The letters currently NOT represented by any
sauce in that list are: F, K, N, U, X, Y. Part of my subsidiary goals next year
will then be to try at least once sauce starting with those names. The most
well-represented sauce line is a tie with CaJohn’s and Blair’s, both with 6
entries. This is entirely coincidence, though and not representative of
anything other than a random observation. It does, however, stand to reason as
if there are 2 kings, arguably, it would be those two…
My current standby sauces have changed little. They are
currently:
*Emeritus Everyday sauce: Trappey's Red Devil
*Emeritus Asian-style sauce: Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
*= Not looking for a
replacement
Another subsidiary goal will be to try to get the Mexican
sauce more pinned down. While I certainly enjoyed various of the
Chipotle-Habanero combinations this year, I haven’t found “the” one quite yet.
This has actually been somewhat of an ongoing struggle, since a lot of them
seem to like to pollute their sauces with onions, which generally ruins it for
me. So, I limp on by with “making do” sauces…
Let’s get to some metrics. This is post 128, which makes 32
this year, compared to 23 for 2014, 61 for 2013 (though I deleted several in
that broader clean-up I mentioned and the new total is now 52) and 21 for the
last quarter of 2012, which is what was left of the inaugural year of this blog.
I’m not going to include them here, but the breakdown for the various sauce
reviews is available in the other 3 End Of The Year posts for the respective
years, should anyone else be interested in this and so inclined to compare
numbers. Maybe if I wind up doing this 10 years, I’ll do a retrospective graph
or something.
That aside, more blog numbers:
Total posts (including this post): 128
Total views (as of this writing): 8103
Total single sauce full reviews: 104
Total double sauce full reviews: 1
Total sauces full reviewed: 106
Total mini-sauce reviews: 20
Total sauces reviewed, combined: 126
Total unopened sauces waiting on shelf for review: 13
Total opened sauces waiting for review: 0
Total open bottles in fridge: 13
Door sauces: 8
Back of fridge sauces: 5
There is, of course, also the wine thing, my blog there, the
Happy Sippin’ Companion (HSC), which has now 42 posts, 37 of which are reviews.
It has drawn, to date, 449 views. I don’t spend the time there with metrics
that I do here, but I’m not going to take the space for it here, either, save
to say that I do get into that…fairly heavily, in upcoming Editions in that
blog. You can click to that blog from my profile.
Then we have Yelp. My review count is now 977 reviews and 112 updates, which is a total of 1089 reviews, all in. Further, I was
"First To Review" 106 times or around 11% of the
time. I also have 643
"Friends" (feel free to add me, if you wish), 18 "Fans",
submitted 1 Event, which was one I'm enormously gratified to have been able to
take part in (Inland/Outland from Svavar Jónatansson) and created 14 Lists. My
distribution of ratings falls in the order of: 45 or ~4.5% at 5 stars, 302 or ~31% at 4 stars, 480 or ~49 % at 3 stars, 136 or ~14% at 2 stars and 14 or ~1.5% for 1 star, which marks more a
development than anything resembling outright change from last year. Further
metrics are available on my Yelp page, which you can click to from my widget. Additionally,
I also have several on tap that I haven’t gotten around to posting as of yet.
So, as we put another one in the books, as always, thanks
for dropping by. If there’s any changes to suggest or sauces you’d like to see
me get to, please drop me a line in the comment section of any of the reviews.
