ABASCO^® brand Pepper Sauce was created in the mid- to late 1860s by Edmund McIlhenny. A gourmet and an avid gardener, McIlhenny was given seeds of Capsicum frutescens peppers that had come from either Mexico or Central America. On Avery Island in south Louisiana, he sowed the seeds, nurtured the plants and delighted in the spicy flavor of the peppers they bore. In April 1863, Union soldiers invaded Avery Island during the Civil War, and McIlhenny took his family and fled to east and central Texas. Upon his return after the war, he found that the pepper plants had survived the general devastation of the island.

The diet of the Reconstruction South was bland and monotonous, especially by Louisiana standards. Edmund McIlhenny decided to create a pepper sauce to give the food some spice and flavor — some excitement. He selected and then crushed the ripest, reddest peppers from his plants, mixed them with Avery Island salt, and aged this “mash” for 30 days in crockery jars and barrels. McIlhenny then blended the mash with French white wine vinegar and aged the mixture for at least another 30 days before straining and bottling, regularly hand-stirring it to blend flavors. After straining, he transferred the sauce to small cologne-type bottles, which he then corked and sealed in green wax.

“That Famous Sauce Mr. McIlhenny Makes” proved so popular with family and friends that McIlhenny decided to market it, growing his first commercial pepper crop in 1868. The next year he sent out 658 bottles of sauce at one dollar apiece wholesale to grocers around the Gulf Coast, particularly in New Orleans. He labeled it “Tabasco,” a word of Mexican Indian origin believed to mean “place where the soil is humid” or “place of the coral or oyster shell.” McIlhenny secured a patent in 1870, and Original TABASCO^® brand Pepper Sauce began its journey to set the culinary world on fire.

Over 136 years later, Original TABASCO^® brand Pepper Sauce is made much the same way, except now the aging process for the mash is longer — up to three years in white oak barrels. Labeled in 20 languages and sold in over 100 countries and territories, it is the most famous, most preferred pepper sauce in the world. The bulk of the pepper crop is now grown in Latin American countries, but all of Original TABASCO^® brand Pepper Sauce is still made on Avery Island, Louisiana and closely supervised by direct descendents of its creator, Edmund McIlhenny.