Hot Sauce Review - Heartbreaking Dawns 1841

Hot Sauce – Heartbreaking Dawns 1841

Company – Heartbreaking Dawns.

Contact – John McLaughlin

Online Order – Yes

Online Shopping Experience – Good, product arrived quickly via Priority Mail

Ingredients -

Pears, applesauce, cider vinegar, Ghost peppers (Bhut Jolokia), water, onion, carrot, lime juice, sugar, sea salt, garlic, white pepper.

Packaging / labeling -

The bottle is a standard 5 fl oz bottle with black heat-shrink cap. The label, though depicting a fairly gory/graphic scene, is quite subdued by modern hot sauce standards. The label does not use process printing so the graphics appear fairly 2-dimensional. The label contains a short story relating to the origin of the name.

Aroma -

Pop the seal and lid on this sauce and you are met with a wonderfully fruity aroma, followed quickly by the acidity of the apple cider vinegar and a hint of garlic. After a second the aromatic identity of the ghost pepper shines through the mix, leaving you with a sense of great overall balance between sweet, heat and acidity.

This is one of the most pleasant hot sauces I've nosed up to.

Consistency -

For my tastes this hits an almost perfect consistency. It's sufficiently free flowing to enable easy pouring, yet has sufficient body to cling sufficiently to foods. Invert the bottle then turn upright and there's a 4 or 5 second run-down of solids on the inside of the bottle, with seeds, fruits and skin pulp particles clearly visible on the inside of the glass. Seeds and particles remain suspended in the sauce, so only a gentle shake is necessary to create an even consistency and solids distribution throughout the bottle.

Color -

The 1841 has a nice red color, a little reminiscent of Tabasco original but without the translucency. The particle suspension creates a nice visual blend with the redness of the sauce, with deeper red slivers of skin/peel accenting the base color.

Taste & Heat -

The initial sensation on the palette is the sweetness of fruit. The acidity of the vinegar and a slight bite of salt quickly blends with the sweetness, giving the sense of a well rounded sauce with good balance. The heat hits in the throat area first then deep on the back of the tongue. The heat builds forward quite slowly into the mouth from the back, catching the sides of the tongue, under the tongue and then the lips. From the first hit of the Bhut Jolokia, to developing a full mouth burn takes around 30 – 45 seconds, with a deeper burn developing over a period of approximately 3-5 minutes before it begins to subside.

The heat has an extraordinary way of making you aware of the potency of the ghost peppers without masking the wonderful array of fruit flavors and the flavor of the chile itself. Approaching the 1 minute mark as the burn starts to take hold and the flavor of fruits diminish, I was drawn to taking another hit of sauce to restore the sweet taste of the pear and applesauce. It's one of the first sauces that I've tried that I would describe as addictive, in the sense that the heat level is tolerable, and you just want to restore the intensity of fruit flavors on the palette as the heat tries to overcome them.

Overall the heat from a single teaspoon sample of neat sauce never overwhelms the system. It remains tolerable through all stages of heat development, with just a slight discomfort from a burning in the esophagus towards the later stages of heat development.

Conclusion -

Don't get me wrong, this is a HOT sauce in every sense of the word, it just doesn't have the killer burn of the hotter extract based sauces.

For those people new to the hot sauce experience this would not be a good place to start out. You certainly need to have the benefit of some 'preconditioning' before venturing down this particular path. But for those with a few different sauces under their belts, the 1841 proves to this reviewer to be the perfect every day sauce. Its flavor profile lends itself to most foods, particularly those of Asian origin. A Thai chicken dish would benefit perfectly from the combination of heat and sweet, as would something like a mango chutney, used to accompany an Indian Phal or Vindaloo dish.

Yet it's versatile enough to go with anything, including BBQ food such as burgers, steaks and ribs. In fact I grilled a ½ pound 'Juicy Lucy Burger' (two ¼ pound patties pressed together with cheese in the middle) for dinner and sauced it with a liberal dose of 1841, and the added flavor was just delicious – and yes, plenty of heat too.

This is an absolute must have for anyone with a passion for hot sauce, I'll be ordering another few bottles in a day or two and plan to keep the fridge well stocked.

Ratings -

Packaging 3.5 from 5
Aroma 5 from 5

Consistency 4.5 from 5

Color 4.5 from 5

Taste 5 from 5

Heat Balance  4.5 from 5*
[Heat Intensity Scale  3.5 from 5*]

Overall Rating - 4.5 from 5

* When I rate "heat" I separate intensity (absolute heat, measured against the hottest available) from heat balance. The heat balance is an indicator of how well the heat level compliments the flavor of the sauce as a whole. It's a more subjective measurement of my own personal preference for the level of heat intensity, and not the rating of heat intensity measured against an absolute. In producing the final rating for the product, I omit the Heat Intensity Scale from the rating, since it is misleading in the sense that a lower score does not necessarily indicate a below par performance.