Started in Fredericksburg. Fueled by one very underrated pepper.
I've been growing peppers and tinkering with hot sauces for many years. Nothing I made ever stood out enough to be worth sharing. Every batch was interesting and good, but good wasn't the point.
Then one summer my sister, who lived in St. Augustine, Florida, showed up with two live datil pepper plants.
I quickly learned that datils are not like other peppers. They're demanding, particular, and require more care and attention than anything else I had grown. But at the end of that summer, when I finally pulled those peppers and made my first batch of traditional Minorcan tomato based Datil Pepper sauce, something clicked. The datil brought a heat and flavor I hadn't tasted before — fruity, complex, and genuinely hot in a way that didn't just burn and disappear.
The tomato base wasn't right for what I had in mind, so I kept going. I tweaked the recipe for years. I moved away from powders and started using fresh ingredients, and that was a big step forward — but it still wasn't quite there.
Then I discovered that datil peppers love tequila just as much as I do. A small pour at the end of the cook woke everything up — that agave-pepper note brought the whole sauce together in a way nothing else had. Then came black garlic. Swapping in a portion of black garlic for the regular gave the sauce a deep, sweet, caramelized undertone that rounded out every sharp edge.
That was it. That was the sauce.
Every bottle is made by hand in a licensed commercial kitchen in Fredericksburg, VA, produced under VDACS permit and tested to FDA standards for acidified foods. I grow my own datil plants from heirloom seeds from The Mayhem Brothers at Save the Datil.
