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What “Farm-Fermented” Actually Means

By Josh & Zach · Field Notes · June 2026

What “Farm-Fermented” Actually Means

If you’ve picked up a bottle at our table, you’ve probably heard one of us say the word “fermented” about four times in two minutes. Here’s why we can’t shut up about it.

Cooked vs. alive

Most hot sauce — even a lot of the craft stuff — is peppers blended with vinegar and cooked down. It’s fine. It’s just not what we do. We ferment ours: the peppers go into small batches with salt, and we let time do the work, the same way it does for sourdough, kraut, and kimchi.

Fermenting builds flavor you can’t get from heat and vinegar alone — tangier, deeper, rounder — and it keeps developing in the bottle. That’s the whole point.

Grown here, too

The other half is that we grow the peppers ourselves, at 2,800 feet in the Sierra Nevada foothills. We pick at ripeness, by hand, the same week we ferment. What goes in the bottle was on the plant a few days earlier — no long cold-storage, no peppers trucked in from somewhere else.

Grown here, fermented here, bottled here. That’s farm-fermented — and once you taste the difference, the vinegar-cooked stuff is hard to go back to.

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