Three Times In A Bottle

What The Past Brings To This Moment

The past of a Biberify hot sauce reaches beyond the days when its peppers were growing, back to the curiosity that led us to learn about them. Knowledge gathered over eight years of research enters the decisions expressed in our recipes. The peppers’ growth and their transformation through fermentation belong to that past too. Set the bottle before us, and these different spans arrive at the threshold of a single encounter with flavour.

When we first grew peppers, the recipes we would later develop still lay ahead. As our trials progressed, the balance between what had passed and what remained changed; today, we look back on that search knowing where it led. How the same journey appears differently from within its unfolding is a question the bottle opens for us. What happened remains; the moment from which we approach it changes.

In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine considers the past as present in memory, the future in expectation and the present in our awareness of what is before us. His discussion of these three presents turns to attention as that through which the expected becomes remembered. In his example of reciting a familiar psalm, what has been recited passes into memory while what remains is held in expectation. Memory, attention and expectation become aspects of lived time that open onto one another.

Looking at the bottle through this idea, both the maker’s past and the taster’s past acquire a place in the encounter. Our relationship with the ingredient leaves traces in our flavour choices; aromas you already know may accompany your first encounter with it. The pepper’s physical transformation and the meaning we give it reach the present along different paths. What we taste is an ingredient changed over time; the relationship we form with it emerges as we meet it.

• Time and transformation in pepper fermentation

The Present Passing Through A Bite

When we taste the sauce, attention turns from that long past to the bite before us. It may move first towards an aroma, then sourness or pepper heat. Noticing texture opens another aspect of the same mouthful. As seconds pass, the experience shifts too; what we sensed a moment ago accompanies what we are noticing now.

The moment we call the present contains this small continuity. An aroma noticed at the beginning of a bite may enter how we describe the sensations that follow. Curiosity about what comes next also extends attention forward. Memory keeps what has passed close, while expectation leaves room for a detail still to come. Attention engages with the tasting that passes between them.

A duration’s calendar measure does not by itself tell us how we live through it. The course of fermentation accompanies the pepper’s physical transformation; in the brief moment of tasting, we turn towards the ingredient arriving from that past. What we notice, what interests us and what occupies us then shape the place that moment takes in our lives.

• How we think about flavour balance at Biberify

Encounters Still To Be Tasted

As we begin to know a sauce, the future appears as the possibility of another encounter. What other food might we try it with? Which detail of a familiar bite might we place it beside? A meal we have yet to eat finds a place in thought, already entering how we look at ingredients and the small decisions we make.

Meeting a sauce with a piece of bread today, then imagining it with a vegetable dish tomorrow, turns us towards a relationship still to be formed. An aroma or texture noticed in the first tasting may accompany our plans for that dish; expectation becomes a choice in the kitchen.

The future we imagine when preparing the sauce takes a similar form. Without knowing every detail of the dishes it will meet, we want it to accompany the discovery of new flavour pairings. Our intentions and your curiosity may reach towards different places. A bottle’s possibilities expand with the foods it might encounter and the questions brought to it. The future makes itself felt through these relationships still to be formed.

A bottle of Biberify carries a past reaching through research, growing peppers and fermentation. In the bite before us, we encounter a flavour shaped by that past; memory, present attention and expectations of pairings we have yet to try enter the encounter. While the bottle stays where it is, thought reaches from a previous impression towards another possibility. Three times meeting in a bottle is our image for that movement: a flavour arriving from the past, sensed now and making room for what comes next.