The Trade Journal for the Modern Chilihead
NASA’s PH-04 experiment grew chile peppers on the International Space Station for 137 days. A newly published microbial analysis of the returned fruit raises a question worth chewing on down here: is sanitizing seed too well actually costing plants their defenses?
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Gettysburg’s two-day pepper festival that raises money for first responders — and now hosts the League of Fire World Title. Recap of the 2025 event and a preview of what’s coming in September 2026.
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$3 billion in retail sales. The end of heat creep. Fermentation as baseline. What 2025 told us about the hot sauce industry, and what the makers, growers, and distributors should watch in 2026.
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Hot sauce doesn’t burn anything. It binds to a single receptor in your nervous system and lies to your brain. Here’s how the mechanism actually works, and what it means for sauce makers.
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The mold that makes soy sauce is quietly rewriting craft hot sauce fermentation. Here’s what koji does, who’s using it well, and how to try it in your own ferments.
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Ed Currie spent over a decade developing the pepper that would replace his own Carolina Reaper. Pepper X is what came next — and it’s built for the people who actually make hot sauce.
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I had no intention of our first post being on Wendy’s but here I am. Wendy’s is known for having
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