Craic Sauce

When hot sauce aficionado Brian Ruhlmann hosted a St. Patrick’s Day pop-up tasting party in 2018 featuring corned beef smothered in various fiery concoctions, he popped in his own invention, Craic Sauce, as one of the samples.

It was a fitting debut.

Craic (pronounced “crack”) is Gaelic for, roughly, “good times,” though Ruhlmann said the term doesn’t really have an English equivalent.

For him, it is one of the best words to describe what it’s like to eat hot peppers, loaded with the natural compound capsaicin, in any form: “You let your guard down and enter a state of euphoria when you push your capsaicin limits,” he said. “Like letting your guard down when eating hot peppers, it’s another way to describe having a good time or laugh with friends.”

His brand and values came together in introducing Craic Sauce that St. Paddy’s Day, he said, and the same sensibility is brought to Cambridge this summer as a vendor at the Kendall farmers market.

“My dad would always have green Tabasco, and I started to really like that when I was around 10 or so,” he said. When his father decided to grow ghost peppers in the family garden years later, Ruhlmann was happy to sample some. “I ate one and almost threw up because it was so hot. So, I was like, what did I do with a hundred of these?”