It Happens Here: There's brotherly love behind Chelsea Fire Wicked Hot Sauce
CHELSEA - The story behind the Chelsea Fire Wicked Hot Sauce company is one of inspiration.
It was started by John Brown and is named after the Great Chelsea Fires of 1908 and 1973. John passed away last summer after a long battle with osteogenesis imperfecta, the technical term for brittle bone disease.
Now his brother Tim is running the business in his honor.
"This is something that he absolutely loved; this was his baby. Ten years it took him. It took a lot of hard work," Tim Brown told WBZ-TV.
Before he passed away, John worked hard on making sure he got the recipe right.
"The first batches were absolutely terrible. Too hot, too vinegary, too sweet, too everything. But he figured out that if you put another hot pepper with it that had some flavor it counteracted the hotness of the ghost pepper," Tim said.
John designed the original label on the bottle himself.
"Actually, on his computer and then just cut and pasted everything on there," Tim said.
John saw there was no bourbon hot sauce out there, so he made one.
"There are bourbon ketchups and BBQ sauces but nothing on a hot sauce and it's absolutely delicious," Tim told WBZ.
So now the love that Tim had always had for his brother can be shared with others and John will never be forgotten.
"Small stature but the biggest heart. The biggest heart of a person that I have ever, ever met in my life," Tim said. "As far as him as a human, probably one of the best. In stature, he was probably four eleven, but he was the toughest guy I've ever known in my life."
Part of the hot sauce sales go to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.