Back label of packaging:
“Texas Hold’em All In – No Limit Hot Sauce is the Original! The taste is Texas Sized and could only be contained in a TEXAS sized 8 oz FLASK! It is 8 ounces of searing Texas heat! Habanero chili peppers harvested form Hell itself gives this a heat that only the surface of the sun could match! Don’t be fooled by the soon to be legions of wannabes and imitators. Order up yourself a FLASK of the Original Texas Hold’em All In – No Limit Hot Sauce and sit back with your favorite meal and sweat it out for yourself! This sauce will make you fold your “nuts” at any Texas Hold’em table. Real Chili Heads eat Texas Hold’em All In – No Limit Hot Sauce.”

The sauce is packaged inside a flask, shrink-wrapped in a novelty box with a white Hanes® tee shirt printed with “Fiery-Foods Show, Albuquerque, 2005 holdemhotsauce.com” in black on the front. “Texas Hold’em All In – No Limit Hot Sauce, Old Pueblo Distribution & Chef Matt’s BBQ Sauces” is printed on the back. The flask bottle comes with a $1 casino chip keychain attached to the neck.

Ingredients: Water, red wine vinegar, tomato paste, habanero peppers, honey, lemon juice (water, lemon juice concentrate, sodium bisulfite), sugar, kosher salt, cornstarch, granulated garlic and red pepper.

Impressions:
When Old Pueblo Distributing and Chef Matt, LLC, both out of Arizona, combined forces to market this sauce, they sure had a lot of good marketing ideas. First you have a ¼ of the front label with a large, colorful outline of Texas. (That will market to Texans and travelers alike.) Next they called it “Texas Hold’em All In – No Limit Hot Sauce” to attract the gamblers and people who buy gifts for gamblers. They put a $1 casino chip key chain around the bottle’s neck with “Las Vegas, NV” neatly printed on it. I see Sin City marketing possibilities. Finally, print “The Original!” down the side of the label so I know that I’m getting the FIRST hot sauce named after the slowly fading popular gambling game. I’m not looking for any counterfeits here!

I keep telling myself, ‘this has to be a repackaged novelty hot sauce.’

Chef Matt phased out his previous eStore and is now taking orders through Pay Pal. You can also check out the official website of the sauce at www.holdemhotsauce.com.

The same ingredient list exists on the back of the “PBR “Buck Off” Hot Sauce, (but I’ve been assured that there is a slight difference from batch to batch.) PBR? That stands for Professional Bull Riders, Inc, and from what I’ve gathered, it’s a pretty big somewhere.

The PBR “Buck Off” Hot Sauce?

Ingredients: Water, red wine vinegar, tomato paste, habanero peppers, honey, lemon juice (water, lemon juice concentrate, sodium bisulfite), sugar, kosher salt, cornstarch, granulated garlic and red pepper.

One thing I like, (manufactures listen up!) is a ‘BEST BY’ date on the bottle. The printed date gives the consumer an idea of how long a sauce can be kept before opening and getting the best results. If every sauce would put a ‘use by’ date, I wouldn’t have to guess how long a bottle has been sitting in my collections. My ‘hold’em’ bottle is printed with a 3-5-07.

In my reviews, (until I find in my best interest to change,) I’ll be using a 100 point scale to give a final number to a sauce.
Criteria Points
Packaging 10
Coloring / Temperament 10
Consistency 15
Heat 25
Taste 40

Now this is all subjective, but I intend to relate and contrast different criteria to best suit the sauce. (ie. If a sauce’s heat overpowers the taste, it gets lower points on both…if the product is packaged like King Tut’s tomb (the Source), I’ll give it a 10 in packaging…)

(One note on consistency; some products will prove consistent by the way the sauce moves out of the bottle and lays on the foods. Another factor will be the sauces ability to stay consistent across a variety of foods. Like, you know, it’s great on fish, but sucks on wings.)

Tomorrow I open the bottle at a family gathering and eat. Stay tuned for the final score.

-thakswet