3 spicy limited editions, a 3 year journey
This story goes back to spring of 2019. It was in March of that year that we’ve launched our sweet&spicy soy sauce. Basically we got forced by some people who simply told us that we couldn’t keep that product for ourselves. But here we are and what started as a simple experiment has become one of our most popular products. At Tomasu we take pride in doing everything ourselves. So as soon as we realized that the sweet&spicy soy was here to stay, we’ve started our search for unique varieties.
Our relentless search for flavor brought us to the pepper collection of the Centre for Genetic Resources, The Netherlands (CGN) who kindly provided us with some unique varieties. CGN focuses on conservation and use of vegetable crops. And so, it happened that in in 2019 we ended up receiving 5-10 seeds per variety which we started to grow, test and multiply ever since.
Growing peppers require quite some tender loving care. Luckily for us we got the help from Zorgboerderij Beversoord. And to be honest, we couldn’t have done it without them. Growing these peppers for the first is already quite a thing but growing them to collect seeds in order to multiply requires even more dedication. There tremendous effort led to a minimum 10 kilograms of each variety. Exactly the amount we need for a one-barrel-recipe. So it was at the end of last year that we were able to fill up 3 barrels with 3 different varieties.
The first person outside of our team who tried these products was no one other than Sergio Herman.
So far so good! Now the proof is in the pudding. And yes, we liked it! But that’s just us. And believe it or not… the first person outside of our team who tried these products was no one other than Sergio Herman. Who accidentally, because his South Africa trip got cancelled due to Covid, visited our brewery with a full scale camera crew. The result of that show can still be seen on Netflix (Sergio over de Grens). His response (you can see it for yourself) made us decide to release all three of them. So, we’ve asked our illustrator to come up with some illustrations so that we could officially turn these experiments into actual products.
With the final product in our hands, all we want to know is what you think of these products. Your opinion will influence our next steps. We want to select one variety which we can continue to work with. And to be honest… we can’t make the decision ourselves. That’s why we need your help. To let us know which one you like the most! And hopefully this will help us to make the decision. And if not… well… we might continue with all 3 of them!
All of this if totally new for us and we don’t know what to expect. We’ll simply see where this ends! For now, we are just very happy to release these products.
Hope you enjoy them as much as we do!
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