Prototype Club Box 09

This is part of a series of posts covering the contents of each Prototype Club box dating back to November 2022. An overview of the thinking and circumstances around each prototype hot sauce.

BUY ICE CREAM 2024

BUY ICE CREAM is our yearly “dessert sauce gone wrong” concept. We’ve made one every year since the beginning. We always had a thing about hot sauce on dessert. 

It’s a different sauce every year but it’s always “post dinner” focussed. Over the years it’s gone from unhinged to unhinger and even though that isn’t even a word, it perfectly encapsulates the 2024 vintage. We typically make this around summer time but thought we’d focus on the Christmas end of the year this time. We’ve just gone ahead and made a Christmas pudding flavoured hot sauce. It’ll be just as at home on your clootie dumpling as it is on your cheese board. Pretty sure it’ll fully rock a ham also. And what’s more christmasy than that?

This one is special. It’s hot and it’s fruity. We soaked dried fruit and peel in cherry brandy for months to give it a certain something something. Enjoy it but probably best to not muddle it up with that brandy sauce your mad aunties like.

Heat: 4/5

THE FUTURE

Back in November 2020, we were making plans to move our sauce co to commercial premises. We thought we’d make a special hot sauce to commemorate things once we got there. It would be the first sauce to be made in our sauce lab. As bit of a celebration to mark the moment. so we set about filling a 50L fermentation tank with a mixture of “good shit” and salt. We sealed it up, set the airlock and left it in a cupboard for nature to work her magic. 

Time passed and ultimately we did get into a commercial unit. But we didn’t even get through the door until the end of 2021. It took us months after that to get operational. We moved everything out of our home and into the new place. Including that full 50L fermentation tank.
Then things got away from us as we fought, struggled and worked our socks off to meet ever increasing demand and deal with the now fearsome overheads. That fermentation tank became a bit of an ornament. We topped off the airlock now and again but it otherwise sat there looking cool.

Until Prototype Club Box 09.

This is a sauce built on a base that’s been fermenting/aging for FOUR YEARS. Our longest ferment ever and exclusive to you in Prototype Club only. A sauce like no other.

Heat: 2/5

JOE

2024 has been a year where we’ve explored BBQ sauces in a bit of depth. But one thing has been bugging us. It’s fine to have a couple of BBQ sauces in the arsenal but we’re a hot sauce co, not a BBQ co. Wondering how we could bring those two sauce types together civilly, we thought “if these sauce types were personalities, what would be the best medium to get them to chat, without it turning into a bloodbath?” 

And we figured they’d sit down with a coffee by an open fire and they’d probably put the world to rights.

We made a large batch of cold brew and we got to work.

First we made the base of a BBQ sauce and then we made the base of a hot sauce. Then we brought them together over fire with all the coffee. And you know what, sauce types should talk more often. Here it is then, part BBQ, part Hot Sauce, part Coffee. It’s called Joe.

Heat: 2/5