How hot is hot when it comes to hot sauce?  For you, our valued consumer, the answer is very important.  Peppers of Key West wants you to enjoy the hot sauce that best fits your palette.  Too hot and you weep and grasp for milk.  Too mild, and you're left disappointed, wishing you'd chosen something packing more of a punch.

Your ally in these decisions is an American pharmacist from the early 1900's, Wilbur Scoville.  Wilbur devised a scale that measures the heat of chili peppers that are used in every bottle of hot sauce.  To receive a Scoville Score, five taste testers sample and evaluate the hot sauce (good work if you can get it).  The testers agree on a number - the Scoville Score - that allows future consumers to know what they're getting themselves into.

The scores measured by Wilbur are not perfect.  We think it's interesting that the five people measuring peppers can disagree - sometimes by up to 50% - on how hot a pepper is.  This impacts the final score.  It's also interesting that peppers of the same variety can differ substantially in heat.  Like grapes from the same plants at the same winery produce bottles of wine that taste different, the same type of peppers do not always produce the same heat in hot sauces. 

Modern days have brought a more scientific and more accurate method of measuring a true the Scoville Score - the High Performance Liquid Chromatograghy (HPLC).  Stay tuned for more news about HPLC in a future blog post.

So what's Wilbur's lesson?  Discerning hot sauce lovers should know the Scoville Score for peppers that suit their taste.  The green bell pepper has a scoville score of 0, while the banana pepper has a score of about 500, the chipotle pepper has a score of about 5,000, the cayenne pepper has a score of about 50,000... and so on, up to the Carolina Reaper, which has a score of about 2 million. Choose hot sauces that match the peppers from which they're made.

Peppers of Key West,  the greatest purveyor of hot sauces in these United States, fills its bricks and clicks with bottles that have many degrees of heat.  Sweet & Tangy, Mild Sauces, Hot Sauces, Extremely Hot Sauces, and last but not least, Weapons Grade Hot Sauces! 

Find the hot sauces that are right for you.  Let us know how we can help!