The judges never saw our label.
That's the rule at the Scovie Awards. Every entry arrives at the judging table stripped of its branding, poured into a sample cup, and passed down the line to a panel that knows only the category it's tasting. No bottle art. No founding story. No hashtag. Just the sauce.
In 2022, the year we entered for the first time, two of our sauces came home with medals. Habanero #HUSTLE took Silver in the Natural Habanero category. Habanero #CrazyAsAPeachOrchardBoar took Bronze in the Habanero category.
We talk about those medals on our labels and on our site, so it seems fair to explain what they are, how they were earned, and what they can and can't tell you about a bottle of hot sauce.
How a Scovie gets judged
The Scovie Awards are named for Wilbur Scoville, the pharmacist who built the first chile heat scale in 1912. The competition is run by the producers of the National Fiery Foods & BBQ Show and judges fiery foods in more than a hundred categories. Hot sauce is only part of it. Salsas, seasonings and barbecue sauces all get their own tables.
2022 was the competition's 25th year, and it was a crowded one. Entries jumped by more than half, from a typical field of around 600 products to 1,050. Organizers had to bring in more judges, and each judge tasted more than a hundred products instead of the usual sixty or so. Every single entry was still tasted by at least five judges.
The panel is made up of food-industry palates: chefs, restaurant owners, food writers. They score each product within its category, the scores get tabulated, and the medals follow weeks later. Judges are asked not to discuss products at the table. They're even told not to make faces.
The part that matters most is the part we started with. The tasting is blind. Whatever a judge thinks of a sauce, they think it without knowing who made it.
What the judges tasted
Both medal winners come from our lacto-fermented line, and both are built on habaneros.
Habanero #HUSTLE is where Off the Deck started. In 2016 we sliced a batch of Peach Habanero peppers, packed them in salt brine, and waited. That experiment became #HUSTLE, and it's still the sauce we hand people first when they ask where to start.
Habanero #CrazyAsAPeachOrchardBoar carries the same pepper variety plus actual peach fruit. We added the fruit expecting it to soften the heat. It did the opposite. Fermentation consumes the sugars that would normally buffer capsaicin, and the fruit's aromatics push perceived heat higher. We wrote about that surprise in We Added Peaches to Make It Milder. It Got Hotter.
Both sauces go through the same process. Sliced chilis go into a salt brine and ferment for a minimum of 21 days while Lactobacillus and its relatives convert sugars into lactic acid. After the ferment we purée, adjust consistency with a measured return of brine, and add a small amount of apple cider vinegar for consistency batch to batch. The finished sauce lands at pH 3.5 or below. It's cold-processed and never heated. If you want the full walkthrough, What Is Lacto-Fermented Hot Sauce? covers it.
We sent what we sell
There's a temptation with competitions to treat the entry as a showpiece: a special batch, tuned and hand-picked, that never quite matches what goes out the door.
We didn't do that. The bottles that went to the 2022 judging came from a normal production batch. Same peppers, same brine, same 21-day minimum, same bottling day as everything else on the shelf.
The recipe hasn't changed since. The #HUSTLE and #CrazyAsAPeachOrchardBoar you buy today are built the same way as the bottles the judges tasted.
That's the only version of a medal we'd want. If the award belongs to a batch you can't buy, it doesn't tell you much.
What a medal tells you, and what it doesn't
The medal has limits, and we'd rather name them than let it say more than it does.
We didn't get score sheets back. We didn't get judges' comments. We know where each sauce placed in its category and nothing about why. So we're not going to tell you the judges praised the brightness of the ferment or the length of the finish. We don't know what they wrote, and we won't invent it.
What a Scovie medal does tell you is narrower and, we think, more useful. At least five experienced palates tasted the sauce with no idea who made it, scored it against everything else in its category, and ranked it near the top. In a year with more than a thousand entries across the competition, that carries weight. The sauce held up on its own, with no story attached.
What it doesn't tell you is whether you will love it. A category ranking can't account for how much heat you enjoy, what you plan to put it on, or whether fruit in a hot sauce makes you happy or suspicious. Heat in particular is personal, and a number on a scale doesn't predict it well. We explain why in How Hot Is It? The Honest Answer to the Question We Get Most.
So treat the medal as a reason to try the sauce, not a promise about how you'll feel when you do.
Why we haven't gone back to the Scovies
We get asked this. If the first entry went that well, why not enter every year?
Because the medal was never the point. It's a good accolade. It gives someone who has never heard of us a reason to trust a bottle from a small maker, and it sets us apart on a crowded shelf. We're glad to have it. But we don't make sauce to win competitions. We answer to ourselves first.
What we do instead is spread out. Different competitions judge differently, and we'd rather put different sauces in front of different panels than send the same two bottles back to the same table. Right now we're waiting on results from the ATL Spicy Dragon competition.
Taste them the way the judges did
You can run a small version of a blind judging at home, and it's the best way to understand why two sauces built on the same pepper landed in different places.
- Have someone else pour, so you don't know which sauce is which. A label shapes what you think you taste more than most people expect.
- Put a small amount of each on a spoon or a plain tortilla chip. Food changes the sauce, so taste it close to bare.
- Start with #HUSTLE and finish with #CrazyAsAPeachOrchardBoar. The peach sauce runs hotter, and if you reverse the order its heat will flatten the first one.
- Between tastes, take a sip of water and a bite of plain bread or a cracker, then wait a minute.
- For each sauce, note what hits first (acidity, fruit), what builds in the middle (the habanero itself), and what's still there a minute later.
Try the medal winners
Both Scovie winners are in our Award Winners Flight, $45 for three bottles, which clears our free shipping line of $40 or more. It's the set we point people to when they want to understand what we do, and it's the easiest way to run the side-by-side tasting above.
The third bottle in the flight is Fresno #KojiHachi, from our koji-fermented line, which won Bronze at the 2024 International Flavor Awards. That's a different competition and a different fermentation: koji enzymes building umami over eight months or more. It rounds out the flight with a sauce built an entirely different way.
If you'd rather start with one bottle, Habanero #HUSTLE and Habanero #CrazyAsAPeachOrchardBoar are both available on their own.
0 comments