Spicefreak

This week I have been given another lot of free samples. Not, this time, from the company that makes them but from a local business seeking outside opinion on whether to stock them.

I present to you, the Screaming Chimp

A small batch hot sauce company from Durham with some very strong ape-based branding.

Here’s the box I was given:

As you can see, their line consists of two fruity, two smokey and two regular chilli sauces, each with their own unique colour to their name and border. Colours that are are further emphasised on their website to better differentiate between the bottles that do, otherwise, look just a little too similar.

Not that I’d give up that wonderful screaming chimp logo if it were me making these sauces, either.

But, packaging aside for a moment, the content of these sauces is a little bit different.

The company grow their own chillies for the sauce* and are quite sparing with their use of them, putting a maximum of 5.6% into any of their sauces.

It strikes me as worryingly low but the chillies they use are also on the unusual side, consisting of scorpions, ghosts, fatalii, lemon drop, scotch bonnet and chocolate habanero. A rather fruity sounding assortment of very hot and superhot chillies that they combine slightly differently in each product.

Were one of these chilli blends the main component of a sauce, I would be expecting something in excess of ghost pepper heat. Above my scale’s five out of ten for sure.

As is, however, I don’t know what I’m going to get at all. The hottest of these could be little more than medium or the percentages could be utterly irrelevant and I could be in for a serious scorcher. I have no idea.

I have, after all, had ghost pepper sauces off record that would have made my scale’s five with less than 2% chilli content.

With how little I know about the company and how little I can tell about their heat, all I can really say is that The Screaming Chimp’s chilli sauces look great and that, if the taste of their chillies comes through, their flavour should be even greater.

I don’t have much to go on but I have high hopes for these sauces and will be trying them all very shortly.

To keep from spending months on one company again so soon, however, my reviews won’t necessarily feature on here right away. I’ll be interspersing them with plenty of other items of interest to maintain the original premise of this blog. Variety.

*It has since come to my attention that the original information I recieved was wrong. The majority of the Screaming Chimp’s peppers are in fact sourced from commercial grower Edible Ornamentals.