Bottling Batch 24 Fermented Hot Sauce (Part 1)

After four months of fermentation, we’re bottling the first gallon of Batch 24 hot sauce

Batch 24 Part 1 ready for bottling

I started this year’s slow fermented hot sauce back on August 25th, so Batch 24 Part 1 has been fermenting for just a bit more than four months. (Part 2 running in a different fermenter.)

Usually, the whole batch runs from 2 to 5 gallons and is made entirely from “Hidden Lake Hots”, a Cayenne/Thai hybrid pepper that I’ve been growing here at the Acre for the past 30 years or so. But 2023 was a weird year (very cool and not many peppers), leaving me with only a few overwintered pepper plants, and not much fresh seed from which to grow new ones.
Fortunately, one of my kids gave me a variety of hot pepper seeds for my birthday (the kid knows me), so I was able to supplement the Hotties with a selection of other peppers and get a sufficient amount to brew enough hot sauce to last the coming year.

Problem was, unlike just using one pepper variety where each addition of fresh peppers added the same amount of sugar to the fermentation, having five varieties (Aleppo, Fish, Hinkelhatz, and Long Cayenne peppers in addition to the Hotties) made the process a lot more complicated. Each variety had its own ripening schedule and sugar levels, so every time I added new peppers I was never sure where the fermentation would go. Sometimes it kicked along just fine, sometimes it stalled out, and a couple of times it turned into a very messy foaming, fermenting volcano.
I ended up running two separate fermenters – the first consisting of all the peppers harvested from August to October (Part 1); the second the peppers harvested from October to December (Part 2).

Bottling Batch 24 Part 1

A couple of weeks ago it became obvious that Part 1 was done fermenting. It was no longer bubbling, releasing carbon dioxide as the yeasts consumed the sugars in the pepper solution, so I decided to give it a taste and see what it was doing.

Spicy and sweet with a little bit of heat up front and a whole lot on the back end, I decided to bottle it now rather than let it rest for a couple more weeks. Sometimes if it rests too long after fermentation is mostly finished it starts to get a funky, dirty feet flavor. This being an unknown pepper blend, I didn’t want to risk it.

Step 1 – Cook the peppers

Adding the fermented peppers to a pot

The first step in bottling the hot sauce was to pour the peppers and brine out of the fermenter and into a large pot. Then I slowly heated it to a gentle boil and let it simmer for an hour or so. That softened what remained of any solids in the peppers (I put them in the brine whole – seeds, stems and all), and killed off any lacto-bacteria that might still be in the brine.

Step 2 – Puree the peppers

The peppers after pureeing with a stick blender

Once the peppers simmered a while and they were good and soft, I used a stick blender to puree them to a chunky, soup-like consistency. Then I increased the heat again to bring it back to a gentle boil, covered the pot and let it simmer for another hour or so to extract all the flavor I could from the remaining solids (seeds mostly).

Step 3 – Strain the liquid

Separating the pepper solids from the liquid

Once the pepper solution simmered a while, I put a strainer on another pot and ladled the hot pepper solution into the strainer to separate the solids from the liquid. After all the liquid hot sauce drained into the other pot, I removed the strainer with the pepper seeds, stems, and remaining skins, set it aside, and returned the hot to the heat.

All the liquid strained off

The pepper solids will be dried and used as rodent repellent in the spring garden.

Step 4 – Add vinegar to the liquid

Adding white vinegar to to strained pepper liquid

After straining, I had about ½ gallon of liquid. To that I added ½ gallon of white vinegar. The vinegar is to raise the acidity of the pepper sauce and make it shelf-stable at room temperature. You don’t have to go half and half sauce-to-to-vinegar. Three parts pepper sauce to one part vinegar will work just fine. I just found the sauce to be a little sweet from the unusual combination of peppers, so I wanted to raise the acidity and add a little tanginess by increasing the vinegar.

Once the vinegar was added, I brought the hot pepper sauce back to a low simmer and left it there until it was reduced a bit – just enough to make it a little thicker.

Step 5 – Bottling

Sauce bottles ready to be filled

Filling the hot sauce bottles

Once the sauce reached the right consistency, I used a funnel and ladle to move it all to hot, freshly cleaned 5-ounce sauce bottles.

When I was finished I had 13 bottles (65 ounces) of hot sauce. A quick taste test told me it was still a little sharp and tangy from the vinegar, so I move the bottles off to a cool spot out of sunlight in the garage to rest.

Batch 24 Part 1 delivered13 bottles of fermented hot sauce

A week or so in the bottle will knock down the acidity and let all the flavors come together in what I hope will be a tasty (if not unusual) Batch 24 fermented hot sauce.

Author’s Note: Every year since 2001, I’ve made a slow fermented hot sauce from a unique Cayenne hot pepper we’ve grown here since the early 1990’s. The hot sauce takes around six months to finish and, like wine and other fermented foods, each vintage is a little different from the other. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. I write these notes to track the progress and hope I learn how to produce more good than bad.

Batch 24 Timeline