[Lee Stewart]

Hot sauce can be made fairly quickly but it takes on a new quality when it rests in a barrel for a few years. Tabasco, one of the most well-known hot sauce brands, is aged in oak barrels for up to three years. The aging ferments the sauce and also allows it to take on the flavor of the barrel, much like a whiskey would. Over the last decade, barrel-aged sauces have become more fashionable, with artisan hot sauce makers expanding on Tabasco’s relatively simple recipe.