Journal
Working notes,
while it ferments.
Eight weeks of waiting is a lot of thinking time. These are the decisions as they got made, including the ones that are still arguable. The ferment log itself lives on the Batch 001 page.
28 July 2026
The label has to say we are unlicensed
Under the Food Freedom Act every bottle carries a sentence: produced at a private residence that is exempt from state licensing and inspection. Some makers treat that as a wart and set it in six-point grey at the bottom of the back label.
We are going to set it properly. If the deal is that Tennessee lets us make this at home in exchange for telling you plainly, then the honest move is to tell you plainly. It also puts my home address on every bottle, which I have thought about more than I expected to.
24 July 2026
Why the hot one is not the point
Every hot sauce brand eventually gets asked to make something stupid. The pull toward a fourth sauce at 300,000 Scoville is real, because it is the one people photograph.
The problem is that the Scoville arms race is where margins go to die, and the people who buy the novelty bottle buy exactly one. Hackle sits at 8/10 and stops there. It is genuinely hot and it is still a sauce you would put on an egg.
19 July 2026
4.6 is the only number that matters
Below pH 4.6, Clostridium botulinum cannot produce toxin. That is the entire reason shelf-stable hot sauce is safe, and it is not a matter of opinion or recipe preference.
The myth I keep seeing repeated in hobbyist forums is that getting under 4.0 exempts you from the acidified-foods rules. It does not. It only changes which measuring method you are allowed to use. We will be using a calibrated meter either way, and publishing what it says.
14 July 2026
Three sauces, not one
The advice for a first run is usually to make one thing and make it well. It is good advice and we are ignoring it, carefully.
A single-SKU condiment brand has a repeat-purchase problem: a bottle lasts a household a couple of months and then there is nothing else to sell them. Three gives us a bundle, a gift box, and a reason for the second email. The cost is that we learn three recipes at once instead of one.
9 July 2026
A chicken cat is a thing that should not work
Two animals with nothing in common, welded into one creature that somehow looks like it was always meant to exist. That is the sauce too — fermentation is patient and quiet, chiles are loud and impatient, and most hot sauce picks one.
The design rule that came out of this: the name is the joke, so the drawing has to be completely straight-faced. A cute chicken-cat is a six-dollar novelty forever. A chicken-cat drawn as a specimen plate, with a Latin binomial and a plate number, can hold fourteen.