OUR SToRY
I started my first garden in 2014. It was mainly a 'salsa garden' with tomatoes, onions, green peppers, cilantro, and of course, spicy peppers. I first planted jalapenos and serrano peppers. The garden really took off that year and I had an abundance of jalapenos and serranos. I did not know what to do with them but remembered an old-timer at work had made his own hot sauce in the past. Not wanting to waste the peppers, I figured it would not hurt to give it a try. After researching hot sauce on the internet, I had some ideas. While the first batches would never be something that people would rant and rave about, by the end of the season, I had a decent sauce. That was how the original was born.
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Once I started to enjoy my own sauce, I was hooked. I had a craving for creating a delicious sauce that included the heat from the peppers. Flavor became number one with the spiciness just being a product of the peppers. The heat was never the focus. The next year I expanded and threw in quite a few different peppers. While I worked to perfect the original, I got into all kinds of hot sauce combinations.
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One of the basic recipes that started to take shape that year was the base for the habanero-mango sauce. A couple of years later I started to jar more and more sauces. I would take loads of 4oz ball jars, filled with my current creations, to friends, family, and co-workers. People really took to the sauce so I came to realize that maybe taking this fun hobby and turning it into something that more people could enjoy was the way to go.
It was always about the flavor and was never about the super-hot pepper craze. In 2019 I started receiving requests for something much spicier. I received some ghost peppers and figured it was worth a shot. When working on the ghost sauce I did not want it to be all heat with no flavor. I had to create some underlying flavors that would really compliment the ghost pepper sauce. I had been roasting vegetables for a recipe when I had an idea to include that into a sauce. The first smell of the roasted garlic and I knew I had to incorporate it into my sauce. After a year of experimenting the Ghost and Roasted Garlic was born.
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Flash forward to 2021 and I was finally ready to make the jump into sharing my hot sauce everywhere. I needed a name and was not really looking for a gimmick. I thought about naming it after my last name, but I have always found that people could hardly pronounce it when reading it, or spell it from the pronunciation. I ended up mashing my wife and kids’ names together to come up with the name of Grayson. Seeing as I add more than just peppers, water, and vinegar to create my sauces, I went with Grayson's Craft Hot Sauce.
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I am currently offering my Original, Habanero-Mango, and Roasted Ghost and Garlic sauces with plans to expand my lineup in the future.