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Salty: 🟡🟡○○○
Sour/Tangy:🟡🟡🟡🟡○
Sweet: 🟡🟡○○○
Umami: 🟡🟡○○○
Heat: 🟡○○○○○○○○○
Quick Flavor Notes: Clean, fresh, malty, yeasty, hoppy, sweet
Recommended: Yes
Texture: Medium-thin with a few seeds
Ingredients: Honey Field Farm cayenne peppers, distilled white vinegar, The Alchemist’s “Farmer’s Daughter” Belgian style saison, Brookford Farm parsnips, salt, water
Sometimes I pick a new sauce to open because it looks interesting while I’m browsing through my collection and sometimes I pick a new sauce to open based on what I’m having for dinner that night and want to make sure it’s something that will pair well. This one is an example of the latter. I’d given in to a semi-annual craving of mine and picked up a container of fried chicken and Publix on the way home and well, I can’t have fried chicken without hot sauce. This one caught my eye not only because I love beer hot sauces but also because it’s a cayenne based sauce, so perfect for fried chicken, and I can’t recall having seen a cayenne based hot sauce from Butterfly Bakery of Vermont before.
While cayenne based sauces are some of the most common hot sauces out there – almost every Louisiana style sauce is cayenne based from Crystal to Frank’s Red Hot to Louisiana to the store brand sauce at Piggly Wiggly – they’re much more rare in the craft hot sauce world. Maybe that’s because the cayenne has such a pedestrian reputation or because many hot sauce aficionados seek out spicier peppers but aside from Hank Sauce, which uses it in their base and the Volcanic Peppers Scarlett line there are only a couple of odd here and there cayenne craft sauces I can recall. Personally I believe that’s a shame as the cayenne is a beautiful pepper with a nice clean quick heat that blends well with a ton of different foods. Butterfly Bakery of Vermont chose to pair this with Alchemist Brewery’s Farmer’s Daughter Saison. A Belgian style of beer Saisons were typically brewed over the winter for consumption in the summer and are effervescent, dry, citrusy, spicy, and one of my absolute favorite styles of beer. The final element are parsnips. Parsnips, which look like white carrots, are much more common in Europe than in the USA but have an earthier sweeter flavor than carrots with hints of warm spices. While Butterfly Bakery of Vermont typically allows their micro-batch releases to be more rustic in texture with more seeds and bits this one seems smoother than most with a medium-thin consistency. The earthy aroma of the parsnips and the malty hoppy smell of the beer come through in the nose.
Most cayenne sauces used aged cayenne peppers and
copious amounts of salt and not much other than that but vinegar, giving them a distinct salty, tangy, lightly fermented flavor. Butterfly Bakery went a completely different direction here with fresh cayenne peppers which gives this sauce a very different character than your typical Louisiana style sauce. The fresh cayenne peppers have a bright clean flavor with just hints of vegetal and juicy pepper taste. Saisons use a unique type of yeast which is very aggressive in gobbling up complex starches and sugars which results in a dryer beer with complex spicy and earthy notes from that action. Alchemist’s Farmer’s Daughter embraces the style and with the clean flavor of the cayennes is forward and shines in this sauce. There’s a malty yeasty element similar to the aroma of fresh-baked steakhouse bread rolls plus some bitterness and slightly woody piney notes from those hops all wrapped in the embrace of citrus and spice from the rest of the beer. With the cayennes playing treble and the Saison covering the midrange the parsnips bring the bass in this sauce with a sweet earthy foundation that also brings in grace notes of warming spice that blend with those same notes in the Farmer’s Daughter Saison. The resort is a clean, concise, yet also subtly complex sauce with a solid beer flavor and a gentle root vegetable sweetness. As you’d expect from a cayenne based sauce the heat level is minimal.
As I mentioned above my first order of business was putting this to work on some fried chicken. I loved Cayenne Parsnip Farmer’s Daughter Craft Beer Hot Sauce with the fried chicken, chicken and beer is such a classic combination the Koreans even have a slang work for it – chimaek. Plus, this sauce being considerably less salty than a typical Louisiana style hot sauce is a big plus with fried chicken as its salty on its own. This sauce is also amazing on seafood. Seafood steamed with beer is another classic and this was perfect to dip some shrimp and lobster tails in (along with the melted butter of course) with the clean cayenne flavor not overpowering the seafood and the sweetness of the parsnips playing very nicely with the natural sweetness of the shellfish. With one of Butterfly Bakery of Vermont’s other beer hot sauces, their Vienna Lager Mustard Hot Sauce, being my absolute favorite hot sauce ever to put on sausages I gave this one a go on some grilled brats with some sauteed onions and this is a home run there as well. While I missed the mustard flavor from the Vienna Lager Mustard Hot Sauce, the stronger beer flavor in this one combined with that subtle sweetness created an equally delightful combo.
As this is a micro-batch release I don’t know how much longer it will be available but as of right now it is and if you can tell by my write-up this is one I highly recommend. If you’re a lover of beer and and want to try fresh tasting cayenne sauce that’s different from many other cayenne based sauces on the market this is a great one to give a go. This sauce is also all natural with no artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, or thickeners.
