(dramatic music) - [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 bayous in Southern Louisiana. It was first made by Edmund McIlhenny, and the company has stayed
in family control ever since. Every single CEO has been
a descendant of McIlhenny. Nowadays, hot sauce is everywhere and although Tabasco is seen
as a fixture in the industry, it's important to remember
that when Tabasco was created, we were still over 100 years
away from the buffalo wing. Hot sauce just wasn't a thing back then, and Tabasco laid the foundation
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 take
for granted 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 take shortcuts on 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
fruitessence variety 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 pickling 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 to be grown until the 60s right here on Avery Island, then we started growing around Louisiana and then into Mexico and
Venezuela and then all over. - [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 send away 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, mostly, 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 to get off. - Are they all picked by hand
or do you guys have machinery? - No, they're all picked by hand. 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 stop you from 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, the seeds 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
ground 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 fill up a day? - 100 barrels.
- 100 barrels. k- Average. - Is this a one person job?
- Mm-hm. - You can do it all on your own? - 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. What separates us from
everybody else is what we do, '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 a bunch of 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 spicy. 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 lid here, obviously a solid top. Maybe if there's a small
imperfection in that lid that we don't see, that
salt jams 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
warehouse 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 down. - 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 warehouse. Right here, we have three years from now. We're time traveling. - Correct. (hammer banging) - So this is the same? - Absolutely.
- It's lost all this water? - All this moisture. That's part of the fermentation process. You have evaporation and things like that. - Does it lose some of the spice? - No. - You almost get a miso vibe. You get that fermentation. It's not just straight salt,
it's one cohesive unit now. Not just a bunch of lone rangers in a barrel over there.
- That's it. - This is the blending department. This is where we take the
three year old aged mash and we make it into
Tabasco red pepper sauce. - The three year old
mash then makes its way into the mixing room where
it's combined with vinegar at a measure of 70-30 and mixed for approximately three weeks. Is this hot sauce heaven? - Hot sauce heaven, right there. I call it Sauceville. - Sauceville. Are you the mayor?
- Sauceville, Louisiana. I'm the mayor. Come see me anytime. These are my vinegar tanks. I get about two truckloads
of vinegar every day. 12,000 gallons go really, really fast. - This is the three year old mash. - That's three year old
aged mash ready to go. - From here what happens
is the three year old mash gets sucked into one of those machines and then mixed with vinegar. - To the mixing tank upstairs.
- Gotcha. One of the ways Tabasco
keeps the product consistent is by blending all of the peppers from the different countries
together in each batch. - We use 12 barrels. A mixture of different countries together. I might put three to
four countries together. That's how we get the 96
barrels that we use every day. - The nose in here is quite pungent. It smells like...you get a
little bit of the hot sauce, but it's just a lot of vinegar. How is it? You get used to it? - Oh yeah, you get used to it. After a few years of working over here, you get used to the smell. I don't smell anything. - Even when you walk in
first thing in the morning? - First thing in the morning. - You think it smells
like everything else? - Smells like go time to me. - From the storage tanks down there, they get pumped up into here. - And constantly stirred 14-28 days. It's the 12 barrels of mash,
vinegar, all mixed together. - So from here it gets strained. - Every tank you gonna
get anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 pounds of seed, and pepper pulp, you're gonna get about
30-40 pounds of pepper pulp. - After everything comes
out, then you get this, which is finally what we know of as Tabasco.
- Tabasco sauce. That's ready to go. Only thing I gotta do here
is take a sample to the lab, let them test it for me. They test the salt, the pH,
the acidity, the pungency, and they tell me if it's good or not. We only make good stuff over
here so it's gonna be good. - So what keeps you interested and excited is making something
that is as close as possible to the thing that's
been done for 150 years. - Yeah, so knowing that,
it's tradition for me. When I go in the store, I get to see Tabasco brand
pepper sauce on the shelf. I had my hands in making this and it's known all over the world so I'm just proud to be a part of it. The tradition that keeps going and going and going and going. It don't get much better than that. I like it, I can do it another 40 years. If I come to your house and you don't have Tabasco
brand pepper sauce, it'll be a quick visit. (laughs) Just make sure
you have it on the table ready to go. - You'll leave a restaurant if they don't--
- I'll leave a restaurant. - [Daniel] Once Tabasco sauce
is finished and approved, it makes its way to the bottling facility, which is literally next door. Just a reminder that everything Tabasco happens on this island. So what goes on in there? - It's really, really pretty simple. The sauce comes down into a filler. You'll see the bottles go around. They get filled. They get labels put on them. They go in a carton and
then they go in a box. Really, really simple, but
it's moving really fast and it's really pretty cool
to see how dynamic it is. - And how many bottles do
you guys get through a day? - So on a good day.
- On a good day. - On a good day we'll make
about 700,000 equivalized units. - My great-great-great-grandfather... - You're related! - I'm related. In his lifetime, he made 350,000 bottles. 30 years, 25 years of
making Tabasco sauce, he made 350,000 bottles. That's a shift right now,
not even, half a shift. - [Daniel] So really, the
stages of this factory are organizing bottles, filling
bottles, closing bottles. - [John] Pretty simple. - [Daniel] But it's pretty
cool that you guys do it here. How often is this factory running? - At this time of year,
during the fourth quarter, holiday season, we're
running five days a week almost 24 hours a day. - No s***. - Yeah, yeah, we're busy.
- Oh my god. - It gets kind of mesmerizing. You can sit and watch this stuff and you just feel your mind go blank. It's really kind of incredible. - [Daniel] In trying to
figure out how Tabasco has gotten so popular over time, I think it's important to
look at the consistency. The company is literally
run by descendants of the same person that started it and every single person who works here is obsessed with making the product as closed as they can to the
original product that was made. - You've seen the process and you've tasted the mash,
you've tasted the pepper. - Frankly, I tasted too
much product and by-product because I was just eating
that and nothing else. - As a reward for all of
your hard work, we have a... - Whoa! - This is a stainless steel spoon. It's like a badge of honor. When you walk around the factory, people know that you tried the mash. - Will they let me in the bars in New Orleans with this thing? - No, they'll probably arrest
you if they see you with it. They'll think it's something else. To grandaddy. - Yeah, let's move mountains. - The process for making sauces nowadays, you grind everything up within it. We have to take stuff outta this one. When you look at the flavor
profile, it's fairly flat. It really needs to work with something. That's what we want,
that's the purpose of this. - I gotta say, I've said this before, but going through all the stages today and meeting all the people that really care about what goes in here,
it changes it a bit for me. I enjoyed that Tabasco
bite a little bit more than I usually do. - That's really good to hear. That's what we're here to do. - Thank you so much for having us today. - Thank you for making the trip down and spending the time to
learn about us a little bit. - [Daniel] At this point
I think it's safe to say that hot sauces may come and go, but Tabasco has proven
that is has staying power. (gentle music)
Amazing that they make so many a day when I'm pretty sure the same bottle has been in my parents' fridge all 30 years of my natural life.
Fun fact.
McIlhenny Company (Tabasco Hot Sauce) is on the list of Royal Warrant holders of the British Royal Family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Royal_Warrant_holders_of_the_British_Royal_Family#cite_note-121
Lol at the end when he said they’d arrest him because it looks like a coke spoon. Great product and process though.
I toured this place in 83 with my family on Avery island. You really gotta love the smell of Tobasco. I was 9 and did not. However, it was a great tour and my dad took some cool photos. The fact they used jack Daniels barrels was kinda neat. At the time we were there, all the plant workers I remember seeing looked like slightly overweight versions of Laverne and Shirley in hairnets.
I always took this sauce for granted. Cool video
I wonder if they sell the mash before they add vinegar to it. That's the one thing I despise about a lot of hot sauces, they just dilute the shit out of it with vinegar which makes it taste awful, in my opinion.
I'll never forget running across the Tabasco sauce plant while driving through Louisiana, I love the stuff. The plant was extremely underwhelming though, it's amazing how small it actually is for something that is served everywhere.
It looks like it's expanded some.
I hate tabasco, but I kind of want to buy the straight mash and play with that in the kitchen.
It really is a perfected recipe. The aging process results in fermentation, which allows the mash to bond with the vinegar. That is why Tabasco is the only sauce with as much vinegar in it, any non-aged sauce with that much vinegar would taste all wrong - the pepper wouldn't really mix with the vinegar. It also is the only product I know of that hasn't seen a loss in quality along with its increase in production. Most companies find a way to cheapen their product in the name of profit margins and quarterly earnings, but Tabasco keeps making a proper sauce.