Craft Hot Sauce: Heat Over Flavor? Flavor Over Heat? or, Best of Both Worlds?

It seems these days that the trends of what people are searching for and purchasing to satisfy their hot sauce desires are changing. Their has been a market for "melt your face off hot" hot sauces and treats for quite some time now. Now with so many craft hot sauce makers entering the industry flavor seems to really be an equal target of many. Anyone can produce a decent tasting traditional sauce that is featuring large amounts of super hot peppers, but what happens when you can produce a sauce that is ingredient focused coupled with the extreme levels of heat that so many natural sauces strive for? These are the sauces that seem to be taking off lately in the industry. 

And why not? The best of both worlds in a single bottle leaves enthusiasts with the desire to choose the food they want with their hot sauce instead of the other way around. Their are all sorts of wild ingredient combinations out there that there is truly a hot sauce for everyone. If real heat is important to you, then the sky is the limit to find many sauces that you will enjoy. 

Marketplace hot sauces do not raise the bar enough for true heat seakers. Now with the chili community growing there are more and more people desiring intense heat that those sauces just don't have. 

The future looks bright for hot sauce enthusiasts as their will only be more and more craft/small batch makers that come and go. This fact makes it a wonderful time to be a hot sauce enthusiast.