When tasting a chilli or a hot sauce, your experience is predominantly defined in two ways: flavour and heat. Many are well-versed in describing the former. We talk about the fruitiness and richness of a hot sauce or the sharp brilliance of a specific pepper. Sometimes, we're more specific, recognising elements of food associations, tasting pineapple or chocolate. These are the characteristics, or notes, of a sauce that might appear on a bottle as they would a bag of coffee beans or a bottle of wine. 

When it comes to describing the heat, however, we're not always as comfortable. The same resource of language doesn't seem to exist. In fact, in the Blesys Sherp lab, we often find ourselves steering away from verbal descriptions and picking up a pen instead.

This process of mapping out heat is something that we began early on. We were trying to describe the way in which certain chillies feel different on the palate. Taking a bite of an orange habanero, for example, is like eating a firecracker. Immediately, the heat explodes on the tongue, scorching the area and spreading quickly across the mouth. It's an exciting (and, often, surprising) experience. 

A yellow ghost pepper, however, feels much different. At first, there's very little warmth, a slow-motion heat that allows complete focus on the fruitiness of the chilli. Then, slowly but surely, the heat creeps in, radiating around the entire palate and growing into a cannonball experience. It isn't simply a more intense heat or hotter experience but it's an entirely different shape. So, to better and more accurately characterise chillies, we began sketching the shapes of our heat experience by taking a pen and drawing a two-dimensional graph of how the heat hits us. 

Sometimes the scribbles we make can be messy, especially when dealing with the heat beyond a million Scoville. We find ourselves grappling with the pen and trying to interpret the euphoria that is happening in our heads on whatever tiny notebook is close at hand. Other times, we're more composed, turning the pages of Kev's illustration paper to chart heat over time and on an axis. Neither way is perfect but we're working to make the practice a standard part of our hot sauce development, with the intention of better mapping out the taste profiles of chillies.

Watch this space!