BBQ SAUCE OF THE WEEK: Head's Red

Head's Red is the name of the barbecue sauce, but it's also the name of the competition team of Bill Mehilos, who developed the sauce several years ago, when he couldn't find a commercially available sauce to his liking. Bill's nickname is Head. He's not a redhead. But the sauce is a deep dark red color.

It's a thick sauce, and has a complex aroma when you uncap it. It has a relatively smooth consistency, with a few small chunks of onions and such interspersed. The sauce is pretty balanced between the sweet, the tangy, the savory, and the spicy. It's definitely ketchup-based, with bright tomato flavor. The molasses and brown sugar sweetness is tempered by a healthy dose of vinegary tang. The burn that eases in at the end is relatively mild. This is a nice, if unspectacular, all-purpose barbecue sauce, with a balanced flavor profile that will appeal to a lot of people.

Grade: B+