We're a husband-and-wife team living in the heart of datil pepper country, joined by our friend and business partner Ryan. Thirty years of tinkering with one family recipe, and one rule: a whole heck of a lot of datil peppers.
Everything is made and bottled here in Saint Augustine, in small batches, with datil peppers grown in Florida. No substitutes, no shortcuts, and nothing standing in for the pepper that makes this city's food taste the way it does.
No pepper substitutes. Every bottle is built on real datil peppers, Fresh From Florida.
Three decades of perfecting one family recipe, batch by batch.
Ingredients sourced locally, made and bottled in St. Augustine.
Made by three people who put the sauce on everything they eat.
This is the first pallet of Hamilton Heat we ever took delivery of, backed up to the truck, more bottles than we knew what to do with, and no idea whether anyone would buy them.
They sold. So we made more.
Small batch means small team. She insists on checking each case before it goes out, and we have never once talked her out of it.
The datil is Saint Augustine's pepper. It runs about as hot as a habanero, but the heat arrives behind a distinct sweetness rather than in front of it, which is why datil sauce tastes like nothing else and why it has been a local staple for well over a century.
It grows here better than it grows anywhere else in the country. That is the whole reason this sauce exists, and the reason we won't substitute the pepper out of it.
