Tabasco Was Stamped Out in Cologne Bottles in 1868 and Aged Three Years in Whiskey Casks

Edmund McIlhenny was a banker in New Orleans whose career didn't survive the Civil War. He moved with his wife back to her family's estate on Avery Island, Louisiana — a salt dome rising out of the marsh, with its own working salt mine — and turned to growing peppers. The variety he settled on came either from a Mexican soldier's gift or from his neighbor Maunsel White, a politician who had been growing the same chiles on his plantation since the late 1840s and may have shared the recipe. The first commercial batch was bottled in 1868. McIlhenny called it Tabasco, after the river in southern Mexico, and sold it for a dollar a bottle.

The production process is recognizable today only because almost nothing has changed. Workers harvest tabasco peppers (now mostly grown in Central and South America, since Avery Island can no longer supply the volume) at a precise red-ripeness color matched against an old wooden paddle called le petit bâton rouge. The peppers are mashed with Avery Island salt and packed into used American oak barrels — typically Jack Daniel's casks — and topped with a wooden lid weighted with more salt. They ferment, anaerobically, for up to three years. After fermentation, the mash is mixed with vinegar, strained, and bottled.

The original bottles were a coincidence. McIlhenny needed something to ship his sauce in, and a New Orleans glass supplier sold him a lot of small unused cologne bottles meant for perfume. The diamond-faceted shape stuck. The McIlhenny family has owned and run Tabasco continuously for five generations, and Buckingham Palace gave the company a royal warrant in 2009 — Queen Elizabeth II reportedly took it on toast.