Marie Sharp’s – 40th Anniversary Special Habanero Pepper Sauce

I’ve long been a fan of the Marie Sharp’s brand of hot sauces. The company has a wide range from mild to rather hot but most follow the same basic formula of being very savory, a bit saltier than average, and being a bit chunkier than main competing brand, but those features make them pair very well with a variety of foods, and I’ve always preferred sauces with some texture over those that are overly smooth.

This particular sauce was released in 2021 for the company’s 40th anniversary, but I only became aware of it relatively recently. Their Belizean Heat sauce is a staple in my pantry, as I’ve found it offers the best blend of flavor and heat for my personal tastes in their lineup, but after I discovered that this existed I knew I had to try it.

After some Googling I discovered a small sweets shop in Canada actually had a number of bottles still in stock, and through some e-mailing with the owner I was able to secure several bottles to be shipped to me in the USA.

The sauce itself uses the same basic formula as other Marie Sharp’s sauces, but ups the ante in a number of ways. The first is the use of the ‘Red Hornet’ peppers, a special cultivar of the Scorpion pepper that the company developed on their own and is unique to them, the second is using red habaneros that have been barrel aged for an astounding 8 years, and the third is the use of special cane vinegar.

The result is a sauce with an astounding depth of flavor and a solid punch of heat. This is the only sauce other than the company’s hottest offering, their Red Hornet Sauce, that uses these special Red Hornet peppers, and depending on the day I sometimes find this sauce spicier than that Red Hornet Sauce, though that may be due to this sauce being thicker and chunkier, which makes it stick more easily to food and your tongue so that heat transfers more readily.

The aged peppers do give that complex funk you can only get from the generous application of time, and the Red Hornet peppers work better in this sauce than in the eponymous Red Hornet sauce to my taste, being rounded out by the sweeter ripe habaneros. The support players of the onions and garlic take a back seat to the pepper flavor in this sauce, but they do help round out the flavor profile overall.

This is a delicious sauce worth savoring, and while it mixes extremely well with any Latin foods such as Moro Rice or Puerco Asado, it’s tasty enough you could eat it with a spoon.

If you happen upon a bottle for sale anywhere I can’t recommend picking it up strongly enough. If not, the 45th anniversary is only a couple of years away.

Ingredients: Hornet Pepper, Red Habanero, Cane Vinegar, Sea Salt, White Onion, Garlic.

Heat Level: 5/10 This is a very spicy sauce, and one that will give trouble to those not used to habanero-level heat.