Hoooooot! The fruity hot Huckleberry Habanero BBQ Sauce comes to us all the way from Florence Montana. It marks two firsts for me – the first sauce I’ve reviewed from Montana and the first sauce I’ve tried with huckleberries. The maker is Grandma Hoot Products hence the initials “GHP” on the front of the label and the picture of Grammy Hoot on the back of the label.
Outside the Bottle
The bottle’s appearance is high quality and professional – but has a slightly generic slant to it.
There’s Grandma Hoot! When’s it’s not in italics, it occurs to me that the spelling of habañero is off. Not a deal breaker but it looks a little funny.
It looks OK, but I’d like to see a little more personality applied to the label in the way of “Grandma Hoot.” The name has a nice ring to it and has a history, so I’d like to see that come to life a bit more. I mention the same thing to other sauce makers who’ve named their sauce after a person or a character. Maybe introduce Grandma Hoot on the front instead of the back.
Inside the Bottle
Opening the bottle and dipping in a finger into the uncooked sauce provides a nice balance of heat and flavor.
The taste uncooked has a nice habanero flavor – you can taste the peppers but not too much. For a habanero sauce, it’s done just right – usually they go overboard on habanero flavor. It’s fruity and hot and spicy – like a pile of grape jelly added to your favorite BBQ sauce. Although some HFCS is present in the Ketchup and Worcestershire, it’s not overly chemically infused and the flavor is natural and peppy.
Cooked – it retains the same flavor and the heat cools off a bit but retains much of the bite and tang of the uncooked flavor.
Bottom Line:
There are many great qualities to this sauce from the inside to the outside. I like the BBQ sauce /grape jelly flavor and find it unique and very flavorful. In the end I feel the label is really not providing as much information as it could in order to sell the qualities of the sauce inside the bottle. The green and white GHP logo doesn’t provide much value and makes it looks more generic – like a store-brand – than a specialty micro-sauce maker from Montana with a unique flavor and a cool story to back it up.
Site Editor, BBQ Sauce Lover, Family Guy, Hi Tech Marketer by Day. He recently wrote the Ebook “How to Market Your BBQ Sauce” which can be purchased on this site.
Could you tell me the life of the huckleberry chipotle sauce I the slender bottle. It has been opened but kept in the fridge.