Pineapple Scotch Bonnet

The Island Fire

Every bottle in this line starts with a pepper and the place that grew it. This one starts in the Amazon Basin, where the ancestors of the Scotch bonnet grew wild, and follows them north by canoe up through the islands, where they were planted, replanted and slowly made into something local. Today Jamaica grows more of them than anywhere else, in all fourteen parishes, and when someone there says hot pepper, this is the one they mean.

The Scotch bonnet got its name from a Scottish hat it happens to resemble, a squat, ridged little thing with four or five lobes. Nothing else about it is Scottish. It belongs to the same species as the habanero and carries the same heat, between 100,000 and 350,000 on the Scoville scale, but it arrives differently. The first thing you get is fruit, bright and almost sweet, with something of apple and cherry behind it. The burn comes after, and it means it.

We built this sauce to keep that order. Scotch bonnet pepper mash leads, pineapple juice concentrate rides alongside it rather than covering it, and onion, garlic and apple cider vinegar hold the whole thing together. Nothing here is trying to hide the pepper. The pineapple is there because the pepper already tasted tropical, and the two of them belong together.

It sits at level two on our scale, the same heat as the Mango Habanero, but it reads warmer and rounder. Put it on jerk chicken, grilled fish, shrimp, plantains, rice. Put it on anything you would take outside. One drop is never quite enough.

Hand bottled in small batches in Florida. Five fluid ounces.