Every market weekend, the first question across the table is the same one. Somebody picks up a bottle, turns it over looking for something, and asks: how hot is it?
We don't have a number for you. We never have. And after a decade of this, we've decided that's the right answer rather than a gap we're apologizing for.
Why there's no number on our label
Testing pungency properly means high-performance liquid chromatography, and commercial labs charge somewhere between one and three hundred dollars per sample. That's a fair price for a real analysis. It's an unreasonable one for us.
We're small batch in the literal sense. Every vessel is its own set of peppers, picked in its own week, out of a season that behaved however it behaved. A number pulled from one batch would be a statement about batches that number never touched. We'd be printing precision we don't have.
So we do the thing we can defend. We tell you the pepper, we tell you how long it fermented, and we give you a plain word: mild, medium, hot, extra hot. That word is calibrated to the region we sell in, which is a limitation we'd rather say out loud than bury under a decimal point.
What the Scoville scale is actually measuring
Wilbur Scoville was a pharmacist, and in 1912 he built the test that still carries his name. Dried pepper goes into alcohol to pull the capsaicinoids out. That extract gets diluted in sugar water, over and over, and handed to a panel of trained tasters. When a majority of the panel can no longer detect any heat, the number of dilutions it took becomes the rating.
The original scale, then, is a measurement of human perception, run through five people's tongues. It was built that way on purpose.
Modern testing works differently. High-performance liquid chromatography separates and quantifies the capsaicinoids directly, reports them in parts per million, and multiplies by sixteen to land back on the Scoville scale. Objective, reproducible, no taster fatigue. New Mexico State's chile program has been straightforward about this for years: HPLC is the accurate method, and it also tells you which individual capsaicinoids are present instead of just how much total heat there is.
Which brings up the thing the conversion formula quietly flattens. Capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin don't behave the same way in your mouth. One arrives fast and sharp. The other settles in and stays. The math treats them as interchangeable. Your palate doesn't.
So the modern number answers "how much capsaicinoid is in this" very well. It answers "what is this going to do to me" a lot more loosely, and the second one is the question you were asking.
The number moves before the pepper ever reaches us
Published ranges are averages, and the spread inside a single variety is wider than most people expect. Jalapeño is commonly cited between roughly two thousand and eight thousand Scoville units. That's a fourfold difference inside one cultivar.
The reasons are agricultural. Water stress during fruiting, sun exposure, soil nutrition, and when the fruit was picked all push capsaicinoid content around. Genetics vary within a cultivar on top of that. And inside a single pepper, the placenta, the pale tissue the seeds attach to, carries far more capsaicin than the flesh or the skin.
Two peppers off the same plant test differently. Two ends of the same pepper test differently.
We wrote earlier this month about how a compressed harvest window changes what shows up at our door. This is the other half of that story, and it connects to why where a pepper grows ends up in the bottle. A dry season doesn't only change how many peppers we get. It changes what's inside them.
Then fermentation moves it again
For the lacto line, the research is mixed and mostly undramatic. Work on fermented pepper mash found that fermentation didn't significantly change capsaicinoid concentration. A broader review of fermented chili products notes that lactic acid bacteria and yeasts do break down capsaicinoids along with pectin, proteins, and carotenoids, so the picture depends on organism, salt, and duration.
What we can tell you is what twenty-one days produces on our table. Our lacto habaneros land where a habanero lands: hot to extra hot. Our lacto jalapeños sit at medium. Brine and sliced chilis go in, the ferment does its work on flavor and acid, and the burn shows up about where you'd expect.
Koji is where it changes.
Aspergillus oryzae doesn't just sit next to capsaicin. It acts on it. A 2015 paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry incubated A. oryzae with capsaicin, watched the capsaicin decline as incubation continued, and isolated five separate metabolites the fungus had produced from it. The proposed routes were hydroxylation, alcohol oxidation, hydrogenation, isomerization, and oxidation at the ends of the molecule. Hydrolytic degradation of capsaicin by A. oryzae showed up in the fermentation literature as far back as 1976. Gochujang producers have gone as far as patenting koji processes specifically to bring pungency down.
That's a documented enzymatic pathway, and it lines up with what we taste. #KojiHachi runs a minimum of eight months. Same pepper as its lacto counterpart, and it reads mild, or the mild edge of medium. Our three-year jalapeño reserve is the mildest thing we make, and it started life as a pepper we sell at medium.
We haven't put our own bottles through HPLC, so we're not going to hand you a percentage. The mechanism is documented, the enzymes have had eight months to three years to work, and every palate that's crossed our table agrees on the direction.
Long ferments trade burn for depth. That's the bargain, and it's the same reason we still wait eight months. You can't cheat time, and we never tried to.
A bottle is not a pepper
Even a verified pepper number wouldn't be your sauce number.
What's in the bottle is fermented pepper, brine, a supporting cast, and vinegar. Every one of those means less capsaicin per spoonful than the pepper carried on the plant. Rating a sauce by its headline pepper is like rating a soup by the hottest thing in the pot.
Processing runs the other direction. Smoke a pepper, or dry it, and water leaves while the capsaicinoids stay put. Per gram, what's left gets hotter. That's how a powder can outrun the fresh fruit it came from. Nothing we make ever sees heat. Our sauces are cold-processed after the ferment, and the water stays where it is.
The last variable is you, and it's the biggest one
Capsaicin binds TRPV1, a receptor that also responds to actual heat and to acid. Repeated exposure desensitizes it, and unlike getting used to a smell, that desensitization is chronic and holds across days. It's also reversible. Stop eating spicy food for a few weeks and your threshold slides back toward where it started. Genetics account for a substantial share of how sensitive any given person is to begin with.
We have friends from the Carolinas who think everything we make is mild. They also mince reaper into most of what they cook. They aren't wrong about their own experience, and we aren't wrong about ours. Heat tolerance is personal, and it lives inside a regional context.
That's why our labels say what they say. We rate our lineup for the region we sell into, and there are no superhots in it. If your daily baseline is a habanero, our extra hot is your Tuesday.
How to gauge a sauce before you buy it
Five things that will serve you better than a Scoville number:
- Ask what pepper it is. That sets the ceiling.
- Ask how long it fermented. Duration moves flavor and burn in opposite directions.
- Read the ingredient list and look at where the pepper sits. Position tells you how much of the bottle is actually pepper.
- Calibrate against a bottle you already own. "Hotter than X, milder than Y" is more useful to you than any absolute figure.
- Taste it on food, not off a spoon. Fat, starch, and dairy all change the read, and food is where the sauce was designed to work anyway.
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't Off the Deck list Scoville numbers?
Because we've never had our sauces lab tested, and we don't print claims we can't verify. HPLC pungency testing runs roughly one to three hundred dollars per sample, and every batch we make is a different set of peppers, so a single number would misrepresent the batches it never touched. We publish the pepper, the ferment length, and a plain heat word instead.
How accurate is the Scoville scale?
The modern method is accurate about what it measures. HPLC quantifies capsaicinoid concentration precisely and converts it to Scoville units. What it doesn't measure is perceived heat, which is affected by which capsaicinoids are present, what else is in the food, and the individual eating it.
Does fermentation make hot sauce less spicy?
It depends on the ferment. Research on short lacto fermentation of pepper mash found no significant change in capsaicinoid concentration, and our own 21-day lacto sauces taste about where the pepper starts. Koji is different: Aspergillus oryzae has documented enzymatic activity on capsaicin, and our koji sauces read noticeably milder than their lacto counterparts made from the same pepper.
Which Off the Deck sauce is the hottest?
The habaneros in our lacto line. Our jalapeño lacto sauces sit at medium, and the #KojiHachi line runs mild to the mild edge of medium because of the length of the koji ferment. We don't make anything in the superhot range.
Why does the same pepper taste hotter in one dish than another?
Fat, starch, and dairy all blunt capsaicin's contact with your receptors, while drying or smoking concentrates capsaicinoids as water leaves. The same sauce on eggs and on a dry cracker are not the same experience.
What we'll tell you at the table
We'll tell you the pepper. We'll tell you how long it sat. We'll tell you who flinched at the last market and who asked for a second spoon. Then we'll hand you a spoon and let your own receptors settle it, which is the only lab result that was ever going to matter.
If you want to run the experiment yourself, put Jalapeño #LimeHaze next to Jalapeño #KojiHachi. Same pepper. Twenty-one days in brine against eight months on koji. Two completely different burns out of one plant, which is the Scoville problem in two bottles.
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