Steve’s Snaketuary Cottom Mouth Venom / Irish Spike’s Drunken Green Hot Sauce Review

Steve’s Snaketuary, in Shreveport Louisiana, dedicates itself to helping ease fear of snakes through education about their benefits and interesting biology. They also run a service to safely remove unwanted snakes that wander into homes as well as providing an adoption and rehoming service for pet snakes to prevent them from being destroyed or released as invasive species into the wild. They sell a range of goods to help raise money for what they do including a range of hot sauces. Being a snake sanctuary and not a hot sauce company they teamed up with Irish Spike’s hot sauce to provide their sauce range and each of their available sauces is a relabeled version of one of the Irish Spike’s sauces. This particular sauce, their Cottonmouth Venom hot sauce, is the same sauce as Irish Spike’s Drunken Green.

Cottonmouth Venom has a base that’s very similar to the familiar Mexican style green sauce but then throws it on its head with the addition of a few ingredients you wouldn’t associate with the style. The first is what makes this sauce ‘drunken’ in the Irish Spike’s line – beer wort. Beer wort is essentially unfinished beer, it’s the stage in the process where the grains have been cooked in water to release the sugars that will eventually feed the yeast that will produce the alcohol and actual beer flavors. It’s not something that I’ve ever seen in a hot sauce before, though sauces made with complete beer aren’t uncommon. Another is the addition of malt vinegar. While I love pouring it over fish and chips, it’s not a vinegar I can ever recall seeing in a hot sauce, and certainly not one I’ve ever seen in anything Mexican style. Finally is Oregano, another ingredient not common in hot sauces, and especially not Mexican style ones.

This sauce has a very tangy flavor, with the tomatillos, apple cider vinegar, and malt vinegar all playing big roles in the flavor profile. The unexpected oregano is very forward in the taste of the sauce, which when combined with the sweetness from the wort and the tanginess of the tomatillos and vinegars gives Cottonmouth Venom a flavor that’s peculiar and very different from any other hot sauce I’ve tried. The cumin and lime juice come in a bit later and bring some sanity back to the flavor profile, but the serranos get lost in the mix of everything else going on. I believe that had they used finished beer instead of the wort it would’ve done a lot to bring better balance here – some bitterness instead of the malty sweetness would have made for a more interesting sauce.

When it came to pairing the battling flavor profiles inside of this sauce made it a bit difficult. The combination of strong tang, abundant sweetness, and a spice blend that doesn’t seem to fit into any single sauce style meant that this didn’t work well in places I’d typically use a Mexican style verde sauce like tacos or enchiladas, nor did it lend itself towards breakfast or soups, the sweetness being a bit much in those settings. I found the best application was just for dipping some grilled meats into it, and the tang and sweetness were a solid combination for pork chops and chicken.

In the end I found this sauce very creative, but more interesting from a flavor standpoint than tasty. I’ve opened sauces where I’ve had to hold myself back from finishing the bottle in just a couple of days, and others, this one included, where I’d look at it in the refrigerator and just not want to pick it up because there was always something I’d rather use. Based on that I can’t recommend this particular sauce personally, but the flavor is interesting, so if you’re in the mood for something unique it’s worth a try. This should not reflect negatively on Steve’s Snaketuary however, as they do have a number of other sauces (all of which I have and will eventually get to) which I’m looking forward to trying.

Ingredients: Tomatillos (tomatillos, citric acid), Apple Cider Vinegar, Serrano Peppers, Beer Wort (water, barley, hops), Malt Vinegar, Lime, Sugar, Salt, Arrowroot, Cilantro, Canola Oil, Onion, Garlic, Oregano, Cumin, Black Pepper, Xanthan Gum

Heat Level: 2/10. This sauce is quite mild with not much of any pepper flavor or heat.