It’s no secret with us that we’d someday love to own our own hot sauce shop, but this doesn’t keep us from enjoying the stories of others who decide to do that themselves. This is especially true for those who live in places not usually associated with hot & spicy food…like New Hampshire. Check out this article we saw in the online Union Leader showing just such a story:

John Clayton: Turning up the heat with eatable blast furnaces

By JOHN CLAYTON
New Hampshire Union Leader Staff
Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008

BY THE TIME winter reaches this stage — a stage highlighted by multiple snow storms, minuscule temperature readings and microscopic wind-chill factors — everyone in New Hampshire has developed a personal coping strategy.

Some folks fly south.

Drinking works for others.

Wardrobe is another coping mechanism. Nothing bespeaks a New Hampshire winter like a ski parka worn over a business suit — love that static cling — but over in Keene, Clark Anderson deals with winter in his own way.

He goes for internal combustion.

Not the Henry Ford kind.

Clark’s formula for internal combustion involves hot sauce. Make that hot sauces, and there’s a vast array of bottles on the shelves of “Pepper Pete’s Hot Shop.” That’s the name of his operation in Keene’s Central Square, and while I would love to tell you that the shop’s name was coined after years of careful marketing research, that would be untrue.

“I could have called the place ‘Pepper Clark’s,’” he explained, “but who would go to a place called ‘Pepper Clark’s?’ ‘Pepper Pete’s’ just had a better ring to it.”

So does his claim to fame.

“As far as I know,” he said, “I have the second largest selection of hot sauces in the world. I could have said the largest, but I checked, and there’s this restaurant, a place called Peppers of Rehoboth Beach down in Delaware. They have to be ranked first.”

So how did Clark get into hot sauce in the first place?

“I didn’t get into this as a business,” he said. “When I was in the Navy, I traveled all over the Caribbean and Europe and everywhere I went, I tried all the hot sauces. Years later, when I found some I liked, I’d pick ‘em up by the case.

Click here to read the rest of the source article from the Union Leader