When CaJohn calls you over to try someone’s sauce, you tend to listen. Just such a situation happened at this year’s Weekend of Fire. CaJohn called me over and said, “Passow! Try this sauce.” The sauce in question was called Grizzis Anal Ambush and is a homemade hot sauce by a man named Jack Sturgill. It is amazing and I’m lucky to have gotten a whole quart jar of it for review. The time has come to get ambushed!

Grizzis Anal Ambush Ingredients: Tomato juice, ketchup, brown sugar, onions, cinnamon, Habaneros, Jalapenos, Banana Peppers, Tabasco Peppers, Habanero extract, Ghost Pepper, Red Pepper, salt, Cajun spices, and garlic.

This is a thinner consistency sauce with some small chunks and seeds here and there. You can even see all the cinnamon dots suspended in the viscous liquid which I can’t tell is cool or not. Right off the bat is the taste of cinnamon with a nice background of Jolokia and just a hint of bitterness from the extract. Now, I know what some of our readers will say, “Ugh, extract, icky bitterness”. While I do taste the extract, it isn’t pronounced. In fact, it so subtle that if you didn’t know it was in here you wouldn’t even have picked up on it in the taste profile. You’d probably confuse it for some of the residual “dry” cinnamon taste. Up next is the tomato/ketchup followed by the brown sugar and all the peppers. The onions, garlic, and Cajun spices then flow into the after taste with a nice sweetness lingering around.

The cinnamon taste is really what makes this sauce over the top fantastic. Few people can pull off this bold of a cinnamon taste and still have it so well balanced. Most of the companies that use cinnamon use it for a background taste and not a main headliner. Hats off to Jack for hitting this out of the ball park on that fact.

Ahhh, the heat. This one is interesting. The heat ramps up to a good solid medium and then stops abruptly in its tracks. Every person that has tried this sauce so far has commented on that and I have no explanation as to why this is happening. Maybe Jack has found some secret, ancient pepper combination that has been handed down for thousands of years that only the Illuminati and the Masons know about where he can dial in the exactly heat level he wants it to stop building at. I imagine he knows some secret handshakes…

Anyways, there’s a nice emphasis on the back of the throat burn but it eventually moves into the extract burn of staying in your tongue pores where ever it touched. But like I said, it only builds to a medium and then stops abruptly and recedes to a low flame.

When cooked with, the cinnamon, tomato, and brown sugar become the main emphasis and a lot of the heat dies out. My main use for this was as a dipping sauce for bread and pizza crust. Anal Ambush is currently just a homemade sauce but Jack has told me that he is doing the head work on marketing the sauce. So hopefully the rest of the chili-head world will someday have the absolute pleasure of trying this sauce.

Taste: 9.5, Heat: 5