5-Hour Energy’s Got a New Product: Barbecue Sauce

This summer, 5-Hour Energy has a new product to help take your backyard barbeque up a notch, but what it’s offering might be different from what you expect. Just in time for the year’s biggest day of grilling, July 4th, the brand is debuting its own energizing barbeque sauce, created in partnership with The National Food Lab, which debuts on June 27. (Yes, a barbeque sauce, and yes, it’s caffeinated.)

The company is also getting a little help launching the sauce from the barbeque master, Brian Baumgartner, whom you might know as the giant pot of chili-wielding Kevin Malone from The Office.

Now, a few years after his time at Dunder Mifflin, Baumgartner is fresh off the launch of his barbeque cookbook, Seriously Good BBQ Cookbook, last month. Baumgartner, a Georgia native, says that barbeque has been a big part of his life since his early days with his family.“One thing that I love and feel closest to is grilling and barbeque,” Baumgartner tells Food & Wine. He says he uses cooking, especially things like barbequing meats, for an extended period of time as a way to let everything else go.

He says that knowing his cookbook was coming out, 5-Hour Energy approached him with the idea to try the peach-mango-flavored sauce (aka the same flavors as 5-Hour Energy) on something long form. He decided to try it out first on pulled pork, which he realized was a bit of a gamble given the amount of time and effort that went into preparing it and that he hadn’t actually tried the barbeque sauce yet.

“I spent seven hours making this thing, have never tasted the sauce, and then suddenly put the sauce on to try it,” the 51-year-old actor says. “So it was the biggest investment of time, effort, and energy hoping that it was going to be good.”

Luckily for him, it was. “I’m typically not even a fruit-forward person, but the tanginess and slight sweetness that the peach and mango gave was really delicious,” he says. “Thankfully, it turns out it’s really good.”

He says it would be good on slow-cooked meat like the pulled pork he used it on, but it would also be good on ribs and other meats or even drizzled on grilled asparagus. “Truly whatever you put barbeque sauce on,” Baumgartner says. 

“Especially if you’re having a party [it] gives a little kick, the energizing part of the barbeque sauce, which I think can be helpful.” And that energizing kick might just be enough to get you over the lunchtime post-meal slump while saving you a trip to the coffee machine — each serving packs 21.5 milligrams of caffeine, equivalent to half a cup of coffee.  

The sauce’s energizing nature is also why Baumgartner thought a partnership with the company was a good idea. “I thought it would be fun,” he says. “I like to bring a certain energy to the videos and stuff that I’m creating, so I thought that it was just a really authentic match between the energy that I like to bring to the video and cooking.”

If you want to get your hands on a bottle of the sauce, you can snag one on 5-Hour Energy’s website today. The company also has additional drops planned for July 2, July 9, and July 16 — and each bottle, including shipping, is on the house.