The stars finally aligned and we were able to go down to the North Market and put the finishing touches on the “Epidemic Proportions” hot sauce collectible that has been the centerpiece of our Raising the HEAT for Autism charity fund raiser that’s been going since mid-December. Mugging for the camera, you can see Joe raising one of the finished bottles in triumph after an afternoon of bottle-decorating creativity. Those of you who have ordered bottles and paid for them, we should be able to ship them out in the next week or so.

Just for fun, let us walk you through how these were made…just so you in the Internet ether can see what fun we had doing this and what went into making the latest in collectible hot sauces for your display shelf, or for culinary use in your kitchen.

The bottles were previously sealed, but had yet to be labeled. So, each bottle had their label affixed by hand. Unlike some bottles where the number in the series is written in gold ink or something like that, each bottle has the number printed on the back (e.g. 1/150) so there’s no ambiguity as to which bottle has what number.

Once all the labels were on, they were ready for the wax. Above you can see us lining up the bottles ready for the next step in their artistic creation.

Next up, the wax. The dominant label colors are white and blue, being the colors of the ribbon for Autism Speaks. Like fondue pots, those cookers have hot wax in them and we gave them each a stir with a spoon to test their liquidity. At skin-scalding heat, you gotta be careful with the hot wax…which was a lesson we learned the hard way a few times this afternoon.

The underlying wax is the white, so that is the first dip. Even though it’s sorta off the top of the picture, you can see that the bottles are dunked, cap-first, in the wax to coat the very tops of the bottles with white wax. These are then allowed to dry before the next step.

After the white, next up was the blue wax. Here you can see the “action-shot” of dipping the blue on top of the white. The super-cool part is the getting the blue wax tendrils to coat down over the white wax and the top part of the bottle.

There’s no “I” in team, and you can see us both pitching in to get this all done. Joe’s on the left doing the labeling of the bottles while Linda’s there on the right doing the wax-dipping. Again, gotta beware the hot wax! No animals were harmed in the making of these bottles.

Above is the gratuitous advertising photo. While not being flattering to our backsides, you can see the CaJohns sign hanging there as we work at the Flavor and Fire store down in the North Market. We were there doing this for more than 3.5 hours, yet only a few people were brave enough to ask us what we were doing. Perhaps they thought we would fling hot wax at them or something…LOL!

Ah, the finished product! 5 boxes filled with 149 bottles of collectible Epidemic Proportions hot sauce. One of the bottles perished earlier on the way to the market, so that one will still need to be made. However, it’s a later number in the series so we have plenty of time to get that done.

There are still over 100 bottles still available for purchase, so we plan to continue to sell them until the end of January and beyond until they are all gone. Pleas email us through our CONTACT FORM if you are still interested in a bottle and we’ll save one for you.

Thanks again for all your support!