Hi. I’m Senor Weaselo, and I like hot sauce. More accurately, I like hot sauce that if not taken proper precautions with will hurt like hell for the next couple days. Or blind you for a while, if it gets in your eyes. (WARNING: Most sauces I write about here are not for the faint of pain tolerance. If I say it has less of a kick, it might just be because my tongue’s gone numb.)

A few weekends ago was the 4th Annual New York City Hot Sauce Expo, which had been on my calendar since December. I went two years ago with a friend back when it was in Midtown, but they moved it to Brooklyn last year. I have to say the move worked out, the Brooklyn Expo Center has an outside area where they decided to put real food to make sure you have something in your stomach before all hell breaks loose. (Empty stomach plus capsaicin equals terrible pit of pangs and the runs.) There were a few options—oysters, chili, they had offered a special VIP pass to get drinks and a barbeque lunchbox and I thought it meant that I could get a pulled pork sandwich or something but nope.  It’s still a better spread than two years ago, which was nonexistent. I got a macaroni and cheese with smoked sausage which was good but not for what I paid for it in either quality or quantity.

With food in my belly I went inside for the actual hot sauce part of the trip. I somehow didn’t take a picture entering (my photog skills need work) but if you want to imagine it in your head think of three rows of vendors hawking their sauces left and right and giving out samples, with some more along the sides and a stage on the right side from where you walk in.

High River Sauces run the event and the Brooklyn-based company has some really interesting stuff, so I went there first and tried two sauces. I have a bottle of their Rogue sauce and since it has a very fruity flavor (in addition to its heat) I put it in apple cider once, which wasn’t awful. The first sauce I had, a special edition of their Tears of the Sun sauce made with ghost and scorpion peppers instead of habaneros was very sweet to counteract the kick that comes from peppers that hot. It was fine, I tried it because “whoa, new special reserve edition, gotta try it.” The second sauce of theirs I had was an attempt to find myself a good sauce for taco night. It’s easy to find an everyday hot sauce. It’s easy to find wing sauces, and you can take a meh wing sauce and add to it to give you what you want. But it’s difficult to find a sauce that has the right mixture for tacos. I personally want a darker, smokier taste—chipotle flavor is gotten from smoke-drying the pepper (originally jalapeno, but hotter peppers have started getting the treatment). Anyway, I tried their Hellacious sauce, which has won a bunch of “best chipotle sauce” awards in the past, so it was as good as any place to start. Hellacious also has that sweeter, fruitier taste in addition to that smokiness, maybe a little too sweet for me but a good benchmark.

The second taco sauce contender had “taco” in the name, so there was some promise there. Jersey Barnfire, which was the third booth I visited—I did a good job picking early winners!—makes a sauce out of ghost peppers with taco seasoning called, um… Smoked Ghost Taco. Yeah. You can taste the seasoning right away, but I did worry whether the heat was from this sauce or from me still tingling from Gemini Crow’s Salvation next door (a very good, bold sauce where the heat came immediately and lasted, and in case of cross-contamination I went to get a beer after checking these two out–Salvation was a potential buy). I guess that means there’s a chance it may not kill you, so if you can take the heat but not enough to die, I recommend it.

The third taco sauce contender I found was a California company called Ghost Scream. A ghost pepper sauce (it’s in the name), I was surprised by its smokiness. I mentioned to the owners working the stand this and they said that all the vegetables get that treatment before being put into the bottle, and I complimented him, I really liked it. It’s not as immediate or as lasting of a burn as other sauces I had tried and I think could mix with other sauces better than the Jersey Barnfire sauce. And it won Best Hot Sauce Blend AND Grand World Champion this year. They also make a very nice chili garlic paste and a jam, which I tried. The idea of a chili pepper jam was a little bit weird, but it wasn’t too bad. The sweetness of the jam felt weird and foreign to me, but I’d recommend either depending on how you like your marinades.

The last taco sauce prospect was Bigfat’s 508. Bigfat’s is a Chicago-based company with sauces on the whole heat spectrum (so you all can find something), but I’d say their signature sauces are their numbered ones, from 108 (their mildest, a garlic basil base with a little habanero) to 808 (their hottest with ghost pepper). I tried the 508, a chipotle sauce with habaneros. And maybe it was all the hotter peppers and sauces I had had throughout the afternoon, but the flavor and heat died quickly and compared to the other three it felt lacking.

In addition to finding a taco sauce, I’m always curious to see if I can find myself a wing sauce to try. The company that’s currently got a monopoly on wing sauces is Defcon Sauces from New Jersey. They performed the unprecedented feat of sweeping the top three awards for Best Wing Sauce last year and did it again this year, with both their mildest sauce and their hottest sauces winning. Of course I went for the hottest, created for the wing contest at last year’s Expo that according to the owner of the company saw four people go to the hospital. It’s made with both Carolina Reaper and Trinidad Scorpion peppers (the two hottest in the world) and is called Curbstomp.

I do not know what making love to a beautiful woman is like, but I imagine the spoonful of Curbstomp hitting my mouth is somewhat similar, considering my eyes and my head both rolled back. That is not hyperbole. I got a euphoric rush from of it, feeling the heat immediately on my tongue, teetering on the cusp of overwhelming me, then felt it in the rest of my mouth and the back of my throat for the next few minutes. I let them know that yes, I’d be back after I’d made my rounds. Then the owner showed me an extract of 8 pounds of Trinidad Scorpion that he made. It was not for sale.

I tried over 20 sauces, most of them in the upper end of the heat register. My shortlist included Salvation, Ghost Scream, and the Jersey Bonfire taco sauce, and I got a bottle of Curbstomp and a salt with Carolina Reaper flakes called Reaper-Cussions by Gemini Crow (har har… but seriously, this was a good choice). I was going to choose between the two taco sauces, but… more on that later.

I did have things other than hot sauce that afternoon (Carolina Reaper chocolate bars, good but not amazing chocolate with some heat; some hot BBQ sauces, even though most of the time I prefer my BBQ sauces on the sweeter side, I liked CaJohn’s Jolokia BBQ’s mixture of brown sugar, black pepper, and ghost pepper, but it could have been even a tad sweeter; spiced chocolate fudge sauce by Sweet Heat Gourmet), one of the things I looked forward this year was seeing the evolution from my two years ago. The hot pepper world has had its own nuclear arms race over the last decade or so as peppers are cross-bred to get hotter and hotter—the habanero, longtime torchbearer, barely scratches the top 10 nowadays. The current king, the Carolina Reaper, averaging at over 1.5 million Scoville units and topping out at 2.2 million, was only created in 2013. When I went only a couple companies had created sauces with it. Two years later, more companies have had a chance to work with it, figure out what could work well with it (for instance I had a black cherry bourbon Reaper sauce—I didn’t love it, too sweet, but it was interesting). According to my notes I had at least seven Reaper-featured products, and I could have had more but some of them I had tried last time and there’s only so much capsaicin one man can take.

…Which leads to why I didn’t choose a taco sauce. Remember when I said there was a stage on one side of the room? Well, on that stage was all the competitions from the weekend. This included a taco eating contest (which was about to start as I arrived, or else I may have taken a crack at it), a Bloody Mary contest, and the finale and highlight of the weekend, the Carolina Reaper eating contest, complete with a rep from Guinness to determine whether anyone had broken the world record of most Reaper eaten in one minute. I briefly thought about entering, but thought “I’ve had a whole lot of hot sauce and I’ve had three beers, and I don’t want to throw up today if I don’t have to. I just want one, and I want to have it at my leisure, with candles, and Barry White.” This was sensible. Then after the competition they threw a bunch of leftover Reapers into the crowd. The group next to me got a whole bunch, and I asked if I could take one, which they agreed. I then proceeded to toast them and pop it down the hatch. This was less sensible. For ten seconds or so this wasn’t a bad idea. It has an interesting flavor, bitter from the spiciness, but with a… little like a citrusy bell pepper taste?

And then the heat set in. And kept building. And like the competitors I tried to see if I could last a minute before drinking something. (Oh yeah, that’s a rule.) I’m not sure how long I lasted before going to my beer (I ran into a cousin, he bought it for me, don’t like having a fourth, couldn’t say no) and taking a sip, but I’m going to estimate about 40 seconds, so I missed qualifying. The beer didn’t help, so I backed away from the crowd to try and get some air. Still didn’t work, and at that point I was wondering when the Space Coyote was going to tell me to find my soulmate.

I knew I had to cut my losses and go throw up. I nearly walked into the women’s room, realized my mistake, went into the men’s room, found a stall, and spent the next few minutes praying it wouldn’t be too bad. I still have an esophagus lining so I guess it wasn’t (yay?), recovered, grabbed some milk because they had a couple left and “Hey, I had one of the Reapers they threw to the crowd, please, thank you.” I chugged that, went outside, found the crew who was standing next to me and gave me the pepper, and got mad props from them for the balls of going through with it and not doing it for a reaction vid but just because I wanted to try one. I was visibly shivering for a good, I don’t know, 20-25 minutes. While recovering, they closing up so I couldn’t try them again to pick, and thanks to my Reaper experience I had called it a day. So all that and I didn’t get myself a taco sauce. But I will return. Next year, unless I’m gigging.

All in all, a fun experience, 10 bucks in advance, 15 day of, and if you like hot sauce, go. I think New York City’s is the biggest one out there but there are others around (Portland Commentists, yours is in August), and there are plenty of shops that carry these and other sauces if you look around. And the Internet has everything.

To top it off, here’s a cool thermal imaging gif of me trying out 10^32 Kelvin, the special limited edition sauce that G.E. (yes, that one) and Thrillist came up with. It was not for sale at the Expo like I hoped and wherever they were selling it had already sold out. (Ebay currently has bottles for sale between… $51 and $800.) I tried the sauce, got pictures taken, and got a free ice cream sandwich.