Hey there, It's Brian from Craft Hot Sauce and Craic Sauce here with our first newsletter of 2021. I hope you had a relaxing holiday, but we're turning up the temp with some new hot sauces and updates! From farm, to ferment, to fire in your mouth! Kitchen Garden Farm & Fraktured Sauces harvest peppers and so much more!

There’s nothing quite like the vibrant colors of freshly harvested peppers glistening out in the sun. A pepper harvest tradition that started with 150 habanero and ghost peppers in my parent's garden in 2014 has steadily evolved into over 900 pounds of locally harvested organic peppers in 2020. 

I'm about to be really busy this month prepping peppers after the harvest, going to some markets, and slanging Craic Sauce at Hot Sauce Alley at Chilifest, put on by my friends Kitchen Garden Farms in Western Mass.

Before the craziness ensued, I went out west with my brother and cousin to visit our cousin in Seattle, and then we all went down to the PDX Hot Sauce Expo together.

One person who makes the craft hot sauce community tighter is Smokin' Ed Currie of Puckerputt Pepper Company, or as Brian Caudle calls him, “The MJ of the pepper world!” Ed, creator of the Carolina Reaper (the hottest pepper in the world), got some recognition from our contributors this month.

Hi there, I wanted to share our latest and one of our favorite craft hot sauce profiles yet. The profile is done by Scott Zalkind by Lucky Dog Hot Sauce out of Hayward, California. I started getting involved in the hot sauce community in 2014, and I came to learn a lot about hot sauces, business, marketing...

Hi there, Hope you're doing well. Since I last reached out we've had a few new Craft Hot Sauce profiles. Check out the maker stories of Chilli Richmond from Virginia, Culley's from New Zealand, and Town Farm Gardens from Massachusetts. Last week I stopped by Alicia's Homemade in Worcester, Mass...

You could almost say January was the month of Sriracha, as we had two Craft Hot Sauce maker stories on purely Sriracha-based companies. Both Jojo's Sriracha and Kitchen Garden Farm are progressive leaders in the small-batch Sriracha area, and it's great to see they are both organic and Non-GMO. We also had Red Hawk Premium Pepper from Pennsylvania featured.