After a month of voting, we can finally announce a winner for “The Hot Zone Online takes hot sauce on a world tour contest. We saw an interesting pattern in the voting. Peppermaster got out to a strong start and dominated the voting for the first two weeks or so. Then, the legions of Heartbreaking Dawns came out and blew by Peppermaster to take a commanding lead of their own. Late in the process, the army of Benito’s Hot Sauce followers came out and made a valiant effort to supplant the leaderboard. After a pitched battle over

the last weekend in which the vote-leader changed hands multiple times, the winner emerged as:

As the top vote-getter, the folks at Benito’s Hot Sauce will have a bottle of their hot sauce travel with us to Europe to expose to the sauce-bereft Europeans we encounter and to hopefully have some photo ops that they will have as a source of pride.

However, all is not lost for those fans of Heartbreaking Dawns…which includes us as well. Some of Johnny’s hot sauce creation will come with us for tasting/eating purposes only. We will be taking a portion in one of these:

The Sauceman’s Satchel is specifically designed to be airline-friendly and we will have a couple of different sauces on our person throughout the entire trip.

Congratulations to all who participated and thanks to all of you who took time to cast votes for your favorite sauce!