[Daniel]: For over 150 years,
Tabasco's famous red pepper sauce has come from one place:
Avery Island, a small area of land surrounded by
in Southern Louisiana.
It by Edmund McIlhenny,
and the company has stayed in family control ever since.
Every single CEO has been a descendant of McIlhenny.
Nowadays, is everywhere
and although Tabasco is seen in the industry,
it's important to remember that when Tabasco ,
we were still over 100 years away from the buffalo wing.
Hot sauce just back then,
and Tabasco laid the for this whole movement
that we're finally having now.
Tabasco as a sauce really revolutionized America's idea
of standardization, manufacturing, and distribution.
I think a lot of people how hard it is
to keep a product consistent with changes in weather
and the growth of automation.
There are just so many opportunities that companies have
to their ingredients.
I'm out at Avery Island to see how the descendants
of McIlhenny have been making
the same exact product for 150 years
and meet the people responsible for creating
one of America's most popular sauces of all time.

(hot sauce pouring)

- It's the capiscum Tabasco.
From right here, it's five years from the time this pepper
is essentially made into a bottle of Tabasco's.
This is the original plant that E. McIlhenny,
my great-great-grandfather got,
and then started making the sauce
and it with vinegar to let it sit for three years,
but that was all by accident how he came to three years.
It took him a little while to actually get the final recipe,
but the process itself, as you'll see, hasn't changed much.
There's a few more pieces of equipment, but that's it.
Everything used until the 60s
right here on Avery Island,
then we started growing around Louisiana
and then into Mexico and Venezuela and then .
- [Daniel] The main purpose of the growing operations
on Avery Island is to grow huge fields of peppers
and to choose only the top 1% of seeds
to to be grown elsewhere.
- We look for the right plants, we mark them, we pick them,
and those seeds are used to send to Latin America, ,
where we do the majority of our harvesting.
- Are these financially the most efficient pepper
for you to work with?
- Absolutely not. - Really?
- It's a more attractive looking pepper than a lot of them,
but it's very inefficient.
- [Daniel] Why?
- They're very small, it's hard .
- Are they all picked by hand or do you guys have machinery?
- No, they're all picked .
We've been trying to develop a machine that would do it,
but it's just not very efficient.
- I'm gonna have a bite.
- What you'll feel is it starts working
mostly on the front of your tongue,
then it'll start going back.
(coughs) It'll talking.
That was great.
You ate the whole thing.
- Thanks, just wanted to show my commitment to the brand.
- I appreciate that. - It's also pretty cold
outside and now I feel like I'm a little bit warmer.
I think we both look a little more red.
- Yeah, definitely.
- [Daniel] Once the peppers have been picked,
are extracted
and sent all over South America
and Africa to be grown from seed to pepper.
At that point, the peppers are combined
with a little but of salt and into a pepper paste,
which is then shipped back to Avery Island for processing
in these large containers.
- All right, ready to go!
Woo! (laughs)
- How many barrels do you a day?
- 100 barrels. - 100 barrels.
- Average.
- Is this a one person job? - Mm-hm.
- You can do it all ?
- Mm-hm. - All right.
You needed me a little bit, right?
- (laughs) Moral support.
- Ah, it's so f****** cool.
I'm going.
- Now.
There you go.
That's it.
from everybody else is ,
'cause they age it for three years with this.
This whole process.
There's a lotta people who are Tabasco fans,
love Tabasco, that have no idea the pepper sauce
is aged for three years.
- Now we filled barrels
and we're gonna put the lid on
and get them ready for aging.
All right.
- This is its natural state.
All this is, is ground Tabasco pepper,
the day it's picked, with salt added to it.
Doesn't take much, it is .
Very fresh, grassy notes through it.
Like a fresh chile.
- Definitely get some grass.
♪ Ah ♪
(hammer banging)
- Could you explain the reasoning
for the salt lid that goes on here?
- The salt that you're seeing here
is not actually touching mash at all.
There's a here, obviously a solid top.
Maybe if there's a small imperfection in that lid
that we don't see, that salt itself in there
and acts as a seal. - Cool.
- It's an extra protective layer.
- [Daniel] Now the barrels are sealed
and sent to the aging for over three years.
I can't stress this enough:
all of the world's future Tabasco is in this room.
- [Harold] There's about 55,000 in here
of these barrels. - Jesus.
This is all the future Tabasco?
- All the future Tabasco.
Each barrel makes approximately
10,000 2-ounce bottles of Tabasco.
- Oh my god. - There's a lot in here.
You can look down that one.
- What?
Do you like the cobwebs a little bit?
- Yes, it's a natural way of keeping the insects .
- This is so crazy 'cause the barrels
are like a living entity
and obviously it would be so much easier
to just put everything in a giant bin,
like a controlled plastic or stainless bin.
It's just such a human stage of this process.
Now I got to see what the three year old mash tasted like
after spending all that time in the .
Right here, we have three years from now.
We're time traveling.
- Correct.
(hammer banging)