Habanero Drinks

On Saturday, October 9, 1999, the Valley Church Worship Team had a breakfast. We're talking about a great time, especially with that Southern touch (grits - aka "gray-ettes" - and sausage, eggs, fruit, and bagels, OJ, coffee). I brought some bottles of salsa with me - jalapeño, chipotle, habanero. At some point, I put a (small!) splash of the habanero sauce in a coffee cup and filled it with coffee, and a new (at least to my circle of friends) taste sensation was born.

Sometime during that week, I tried adding habanero sauce to a can of Diet Coke (yes, it works in Pepsi too... even root beer!) and enjoyed it immensely. The psychology of these drinks is really interesting... some people will have nothing to do with them, others try them and think they're great. Then there are the people in between... you can get quite a show from people who are violently surprised by the taste!

If you don't already know, the habanero pepper is reputed to be hottest pepper in the world. It's rated between 300,000 and 500,000 Scoville units - jalapeños are a mere 3000-5000, and the wimpy little light green things you find in antipasti or sub sandwiches are another order of magnitude lower than that... you can get a lot of mileage out of one five-ounce bottle of, for instance, "Blair's After Death Sauce" or "Dave's Insanity Sauce". Well, at least until you start building a tolerance which must be overcome with more and more drops of fluid heat.