Paddy O's Potion

 

Greetings! With the onset of blessedly warmer weather of the Spring season, I thought that it was time to go down a more refreshing hot sauce route. That brought me to Paddy O's Potion.I actually just ran into it during my online sweep of hot sauces that we had not tried. I didn't realize that it was one of the sauces used on the newer episodes of Hot Ones by First We Feast, a favorite show of mine (I embarrassingly admit that I had not caught up on the show at the time of purchase. As of this writing, I have).
This hot sauce was invented by Patrick O'Shea, once the singer for the band SOJA, who started making his own hot sauce while on break from tour. The sauce quickly became popular with other touring musicians as he brought some of his new creation on the road with himself and the band. The sauce was then passed around to other musicians and touring artists and began to pick up a following. Patrick decided to professionally bottle his sauce, which had previously been hand bottled and labeled, to meet said demand. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The label, while not offensive, is a bit busy. Ingredients, the name of the creation, the logo, and a small illustration assuring us that the product is "The perfect balance of heat and flavor. The logo itself is nice, as a simplistic approximation of a beaker with bubble coming from its liquid contents, all crowd the label. As whole I'd have to say that the bottle does not appeal to me. It should be noted that in all of this the bottle proclaims the sauce to be gluten free.
The color is rather towards the orange side of the color scale. This shouldn't be surprising as, according to the busy label that I alluded to, it contains grapefruit and carrots. It is pleasantly full of sediment that clings to the inner bottle upon pouring or swirling its contents. I think that the general appearance of the sauce fits into my spring explorations nicely.
The pour is a fast one. The drip spout on this one is the standard one which necessitates a shake-pour method of extracting the prize hot sauce. As a thinner sauce I wouldn't normally like it but the heavy ingredient sediment warms me to it (no pun intended). As with all shake-pour sauces, use care when applying the condiment.
The flavor is one that I'll just call zesty. It lights up the mouth with sweetness, but not of the saccharine kind. More of an earthy sweetness that definitely comes from the interplay of grapefruit, carrots, and tomatoes. As you might infer from the previous sentence, the taste is layered and, while not too complex, full.
The heat surprised me. At first it was minimal at best and I poured it directly into my mouth. the one thing I noted there was that the burn sneaked its way into my nasal passages causing me quite a start. My mouth didn't burn but my sinuses tingled! After repeated tastings the lip burn became palpable and the tongue hotness, mostly located on the front, lasted a suprising length of time.
Overall, I am pleased with the sauce. It balances a natural sweetness with a pepper richness while delivering, in its own unique way, the heat. It should be said that http://potionsauce.com does not sell the sauce directly. The site suggests purchasing from Amazon (which I did) or Heatonist. Either way, get some and come enjoy the Spring!