Most people only see what’s in front of the table. Bottles lined up. Tent looking sharp. A couple of us smiling, handing out samples, talking about sauce. What they don’t see is everything that happens before and after.
Like the time we released “Low Places” at the Vidalia Onion Festival, watched the Blue Angels fly overhead, and lost Donald’s phone in a liquor store parking lot. We ended up hanging out inside with the store owners, doing an impromptu tasting while we waited for the cops to come by with the phone. Turned out they were huge hot sauce fans, and the owner brought out a bottle of his own handmade (super hot) hot sauce for us to take home. It turned into one of our favorite moments of the weekend.
Or the Macon Cherry Blossom Festival two years ago, when the wind blew half our table off and we huddled in the middle of the tent in a full downpour. That was before we had tent walls. We stayed dry enough to keep the sauce safe and had a banger of a weekend. Also, that was the year we accidentally booked our AirBnB for the wrong weekend and had a little unplanned company vacation. It's also, by the way, our only opportunity every year to visit Jim Shaw's in Macon.
We’ve worked festivals in blistering heat, biting wind, freezing cold. We’ve had family jump in and run the table right beside us. We’ve had little kids come up brave enough to try ghost pepper and teenagers pretend to handle the heat while their eyes water. We’ve met people who remembered us from last year and came straight to our booth because they were waiting to buy again.
We’ve swapped sauce with other hot sauce vendors like it’s currency. We’ve had three different Santas tell us it's the best sauce they've ever had. We’ve seen people fall in love with one bottle and end up walking away with three.
And through all of it, there’s that moment where someone tastes the sauce, looks up, and says damn. That’s why we do it.
We don’t make hot sauce in a warehouse. We make it in a kitchen. We sell it at a table. And every single bottle that goes home with someone came through our hands.
That's why we love it.