Butterfly Bakery of Vermont – Habanero Heady Craft Beer Hot Sauce

Bitter: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰

Salty: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Sour/Tangy: ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰

Sweet: ⭐✰✰✰✰

Umami: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Heat: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰✰✰✰✰✰

Quick Flavor Notes: Tangy, bright, biting, hoppy

Recommended: Yes

Texture: Thin and smooth

Ingredients: Honey Field Farm orange and red habaneros, Artesano organic white vinegar, Heady Topper IPA, salt.

Butterfly Bakery of Vermont has done many beer collaboration sauces with Stowe, VT’s Alchemist Brewery. That includes at least three hot sauces (plus a mustard) based on The Alchemist’s popular Heady Topper IPA. I’ve previously enjoyed the original Heady Topper hot sauce as well as enjoyed and reviewed the Red Heady Topper so I was looking forward to giving this habanero based one a try.

According to the bottle this sauce is made for The Alchemist brewery but is also sold through Butterfly Bakery of Vermont. Butterfly Bakery of Vermont does make another sauce sold only at The Alchemist and through The Alchemist’s website, their Local Banger Hot Sauce. Habanero Heady is very similar to their Red Heady Topper Hot Sauce in terms of ingredients, just omitting the jalapenos and focusing entirely on the habaneros. In this case its both red and orange habaneros, organic white vinegar, the Heady Topper IPA beer, and salt. That’s about as clean as you can get. The texture on this sauce is thin and it has been milled smooth so there’s no pepper pulp or seeds left. The habaneros dominate the aroma but there is some vinegar and a hint of something else on the nose.

I’m generally not a fan of orange habaneros. I find they have a somewhat caustic quality compared to their red brethren which are sweeter, fruitier, and more rounded in flavor. With the mix of orange and red habaneros there there’s unfortunately some of that orange habanero harshness that I don’t care for but there is some of the rounded fruity sweeter red habanero flavor as well. The habaneros, both types, are the major flavor driver for this sauce though it’s also quite tangy from the prominent vinegar element. The Artesano vinegar used is more nuanced and delicate in flavor than a typical distilled white vinegar such as the big jug of Heinz you can find at the grocery store. The flavor of the Heady Topper beer mostly comes in towards the end of the taste for me. Since the habaneros provide an instant bright heat since the orange ones are a bit dominating in flavor the flavor of the beer becomes apparent as that fades, a pleasant hoppy piney flavor with some malty backbone that gives Habanero Heady a full and clean finish.

The bottle recommends this on pizza as well as burritos and eggs. Ordering the traditional day-before-Thanksgiving pizza I did find that this is a great sauce for it and the fatty cheesy pizza mutes a lot of the harsh flavors of the orange habaneros plus lets the beer shine through more. I did bring a dressing cup of these to work with me to enjoy with my morning breakfast burrito and it works very well there too with just enough heat to help wake you up in the morning. I also liked this sauce in some frozen dinner shrimp scampi, cutting through the richness and adding a bright tangy element that it needed.

While if I had my druthers I’d rather have Butterfly Bakery of Vermont’s Focal Habanero Hot Sauce as it uses only red habaneros and has an overall better flavor in my opinion, I’ll still recommend this one as it’s quite tasty and is still available while Focal Habanero seems to currently be out of stock. Even with the orange habanero harshness this is still quite tasty as all of the Heady Topper sauces are. This sauce is also all natural with no artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, or thickeners.