To any grown adult with respectable taste buds, Sriracha hot sauce, and finely-aged whiskey are high on the list of life’s finest flavors. So for the two to collide into one mouth-watering mashup seems beyond sensible, but inevitable.

Yet it wasn’t until Bay Area sauce maker, Sosu recently released its Barrel-Aged Sriracha that such a product finally arrived on shelves. What pours out of the jar is as delightful as you’d expect. The only puzzling part of all this was why it took so long to get into my life.

Lisa Murphy takes her sauce seriously. Before launching Sosu in 2013, the East Bay native spent time in Southeast Asia, exploring the kitchens and cuisines of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. When she returned to California, Murphy equipped her kitchen with more than just the fresh, organic ingredients of the Golden State, she had gathered the expertise to apply creatively apply them in way that could pay homage and preserve the authenticity of a distant cultural legacy.