My Mouth is On Fire

I recently took a trip up to London, Ontario (in Canada) to visit with family. The specific reason was that they wanted to go to a hot wing festival and they absolutely wanted me to go since they know I love spicy food. I have solid heat tolerance and can really enjoy the hot peppers, so a hot wing festival is really right up my alley. The fest was twelve hours away from me, but with it also being a trip for family it was the perfect excuse to do both over a long weekend… and then see how many wings I could eat.

In point of fact the total was six wings, but there’s a reason for that we’ll get to momentarily. It was the Heat Wave Hot Sauce Expo and, if you bought your tickets early you could also get one pound of wings as well. We did that, with tickets and wings for myself, my wife, and my sibling, all so we could attend and stuff ourselves silly. We didn’t, but that was the intent.

The first thing to note is that one lound of hot wings isn’t actually all that much. It sounds like a lot, but a pound of wings actually came out to just six wings. You could refill at any time, for the cost of $18 CAD, but that was a pretty steep price for such a paltry amount of wings. Of note they did also have vegan wings, and apparently you get more wings for your money with those, but in my opinion if you aren’t eating meat off the bone you aren’t really getting the wing-a-ling experience. So with my six wings in hand I set off to see the festival.

While my sibling pitched it as a hot wing fest, since there are wings on offer there, in reality it’s better to call it a hot sauce festival. And even then, it’s not so much about just tasting sauces as it is buying them. There were over fifty vendors at the expo, each with booths set up for you to go up, taste test the sauces, and see if there were any you wanted to buy. The variety was pretty large, and while plenty of booths had the more traditional sauces – a green jalapeno, a hot buffalo style, some kind of sweet habanero – there were plenty that had something different to showcase.

Just a few of the favorites that I had to sample and get stuff from were:

• Ot Mama, who had sweet and spicy garlic sauces with plenty of kick to them. They did some damage to one of my Canadian friends, so I had to test them out myself.
• The Hub Sauce Co., who had farm fresh sauces that were on the safer end of the heat spectrum, including maple barbeque and tomato chutney sauces I had to have.
• Luci & Pharaoh, which has sauces in some pretty unique flavors, including a couple with an olive-based blend that didn’t taste like anything else I’d had there.

Needless to say I spent way too much money on hot sauce (something on the order of $300 CAD, which was ridiculous once I realized what I’d done). I’ll be eating on these sauces for months, maybe years, and it might be some time before I actually have to go back and get more hot sauces for my collection.

Some of the sauces were safe, others were blazing hot. Only two were so bad that I had to stop and wait a few moments for my mouth to stop burning. It was delicious. As I said I like hot sauce, and none of these at the expo were the worst I’ve ever tasted (that would actually be a sauce I sampled in New Orleans which was marked as “The Hottest Hot Sauce in the World”, and I sampled it with a piece of popcorn before having to sit down because my vision blurred and I couldn’t stand up any longer… it was very hot), but I loved the variety on offer.

What was nice was that every single booth has tasting sauces on offer. If they sold it, you could taste it. Most of them had spoons or chips they’d prepare for you with a dab of the sauce. You could taste as many as you wanted, and then take your pick as to which (if any) you wanted to put on your wings. It really did provide a solid tasting experience, letting you sample the whole gamut of possibilities in one location.

In fact, I would argue that the wings were superfluous to the whole experience. You only get six for the whole run, and if you started sampling every sauce on a wing, you’d be out of wings by the first booth. With every booth having spoons, chips, pretzels or some other way to sample instead, the wings actively took up space in my hands and only got in the way. If I were to do this event again I’d likely avoid the wings altogether, eat before I went in, and then grab lunch after to cool off my stomach once everything was said and done.

And I’d argue that the event is really pretty expensive. Getting in isn’t bad, as the tickets were on the order of $15 CAD preorder (more at the door) and wings were only about $10 a set if you bought them ahead of time. That’s a lot for a small sample of wings, and the prices were higher once you got in, but that alone wasn’t bad. Of course, once you were in you were locked in, effectively, and they could charge you $4 for a cup of craft soda (which, in fairness, were pretty good), double that for a beer, more for a cocktail, and then there was refills of the wings, poutine on offer for $15 bucks, and more. Plus, once you factor in that most vendors were selling their sauces for at least $15 a bottle, and sometimes more, you weren’t getting out of the event cheaply at all. This wasn’t a cozy, casual wing event; it was a mercantile experience.

If you didn’t want to eat hot sauces all day you could do some other stuff. There was a little event stage where they were running wing eating and beer drinking contests, and some of our Canadian friends participated in those. You could also just sit back and listen to the music that a DJ was spinning if you really didn’t want to be in the press of bodies any longer. There was just enough outside the hot sauces that I could see someone hanging out for a little while… I just wasn’t one of those people.

Once we’d done a round of the booths and sampled all we wanted to sample (by the end of it I was skipping booths that looked like they were just selling the usual fare) the three of us (me, wife, and sibling) bailed out. It was a lot of people, a lot of noise, and our car was already full of sauce. It was a fun experience and I’m glad I went… but I’m sure it will be some time before I feel the need to go and do it again. It was a lot, for good and ill.