September 2024 Monthly Adventures Series
One Saturday morning in August, I woke up and turned on the local news. I had been trying to figure out what to do in September for my Monthly Adventures Series and perked up when I heard a brief feature about The Austin Chronicle’s 34th Annual Hot Sauce Festival!
Background
If you read my At-Home Travel Tips post, you will notice that I have a bit of an interest in hot sauce. I think it's pretty cool that there's so many different ways to make hot sauce and that allows the experience of eating it to be extremely varied. Yes, hot sauce is about increasing the amount of spice and heat you get when consuming food. However, hot sauce is also about flavor and that's what makes going to a hot sauce festival so exciting! No matter what you're looking for in a good hot sauce, you're sure to find it at a hot sauce festival. I had not been to The Austin Chronicle’s Annual Hot Sauce Festival before, so here's a recap of my experience as a first-time attendee.
Tickets
Tickets are $15 per person when you purchase them online in advance. You can also pay for a ticket the day of the hot sauce festival for $20. One thing that's super cool is that The Austin Chronicle's Hot Sauce Festival is also a fundraiser for the Central Texas Food Bank. They donate $5 of each ticket sold to the food bank!
Getting There & Parking
While it was obvious to me that public transportation would be the recommended mode of transportation with CapMetro as the presenting sponsor, the festival actually insisted that festival-goers take CapMetro services, taxi, or rideshare in an email sent about 15 minutes after the event began. There was limited parking for $20 at The Far Out Lounge where the event was being held along with some parking at the business next door for the same price. I happen to live on the complete opposite side of Austin, so I chose to drive myself and paid to park at the venue.
Experiencing The Austin Chronicle’s 34th Annual Hot Sauce Festival
Upon arrival, my ticket was scanned and I was given a blue wristband before being sent on to experience the festival. As I glanced over the field, I saw a pizza food truck to my left along with the stage and some lawn chairs for the audience, The Far Out Lounge building to my right along with an outdoor bar set up, and directly in front of me were dozens of tents with lines for tasting and purchasing hot sauce along with another food truck and water stations. I made a quick lap to assess my options and picked a booth to begin my hot sauce tasting and purchasing experience for the afternoon.
Hot sauce tasting is an extremely important aspect of The Austin Chronicle's Hot Sauce Festival because there are People's Choice awards given out as some of the awards presented to winners of the festival. The People's Choice award categories were: favorite green, favorite red, favorite pepper sauce, and favorite special variety. You can find a list of all the award winners here.
I went to the hot sauce festival with the intention of finding some flavors that I could use to enhance meals that I routinely prepare. There were so many wonderful hot sauce options, but I only walked away with the four bottles pictured below. My plan is to use the Fxcking Hot Sauces bottle for chicken tenders and chicken bites, the Boerne Brand Texas Style Hot Sauce bottle for grilled meats and marinades, the t0tsauce bottle for tacos, and the Hamigos bottle as a general hot sauce. There were also a couple of companies that stood out to me even though I didn't purchase anything that day. One was Summer Camp Sauces which offered a really good variety with a nice range of heat and flavors that had more of a slow building heat. The other company that I liked was Pretty Thai which had some very flavorful sauces that I immediately pictured myself using for salad dressings and seafood. Pretty Thai is available in H-E-B, so they directed everyone to go there for purchases. For a list of all hot sauce vendors that were at the festival, click here.
As I finished making my rounds at that different booths, I decided to get ready to leave because I had a longer drive home and wanted to be back before it got dark (plus I had some chores to finish up). I went inside The Far Out Lounge to cast my ballot since that had to be done by 7:00 PM any -- just like what will be the case on Election Day which is Tuesday, November 5, 2024. It was tough making my selections for favorite verde and favorite peppered, but I narrowed down my options after some careful consideration. I wish I could have stayed long enough to hear the results, but I also feel like every vendor should have been a winner because they were so passionate about their products and somehow have all crafted unique recipes to make their hot sauces different from all the others. That's impressive!
Wrap-Up
The weather was perfect for a festival! There was a cool breeze, low humidity, and comfortable temperatures. The only exception was the complete absence of clouds in the sky so the peak heat of the day sun was beaming down on the hot sauce festival. A hat and sunscreen or long sleeves were a must. I was so excited to check out The Austin Chronicle's Hot Sauce Festival and the nice weather made the afternoon even better. Trying a bunch of spicy sauces on a hot day wouldn't have been ideal and I think everyone at the festival seemed really happy to just take in the day, taste a bunch of hot sauces, buy hot sauce, eat good food, and listen to live music.
This hot sauce festival felt very "classic Austin" in my opinion. It was all about a niche theme featuring mostly local and Texas businesses and live music. That's what Keeping Austin Weird is all about! A man ahead of me in line at the second booth I visited was attending the festival with his daughter. He told me that this was his 20th year attending the hot sauce festival and that he uses this as an annual opportunity to add to his collection of hot sauces. I don't know that I'll ever have enough space for a hot sauce collection, but I do see this as an event I can look forward to attending year after year.
On to the next adventure!
A.I. Image Note: The cover image for this blog post was generated using artificial intelligence (A.I.). All other images associated with this post were captured by Kimi's Travel Thoughts on an iPhone 13 Pro Max during The Austin Chronicle’s 34th Annual Hot Sauce Festival and at Kimi's apartment in Austin.
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