Piquant pride Small-batch craft hot-sauce biz proves to be a spicy success By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:00 AM CST Saturday, Mar. 1, 2025

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This article was published 01/03/2025 (222 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Get it while it’s hot.

On consecutive nights in late February, veteran Winnipeg punk rock band Comeback Kid toasted the 20th anniversary of its seminal album Wake the Dead with a pair of live concerts in the city.

At the shows, in addition to the usual T-shirts, ball caps and music CDs, the group’s merchandise table was stocked with bottles of hot sauce specifically developed for the occasion by Dan Trupp and Josh Ayers, co-founders of small-batch craft hot-sauce biz Intergalactic Sauces.

Trupp and Ayers, who regularly team with different companies and organizations to conjure fiery yet flavourful offerings, contacted the band in early January to pitch the idea of a hot sauce that, in Trupp’s words, “would celebrate what made Wake the Dead such a powerhouse.”

Group members were amenable to the plan, providing the sauce met two conditions. First, it had to be vegan, in keeping with lead guitarist Jeremy Hiebert’s dietary preferences. Second, they wanted the primary flavour base to reflect their Manitoba roots.

The end result — also called Wake the Dead — is what Trupp and Ayers contend is the world’s first vegan, smoked honey-dill hot sauce.

“We actually grabbed some vegan wings with Jeremy during the development phase, but it’s definitely a sauce for everyone, vegans and carnivores alike,” Trupp reports, holding out a freshly sealed bottle of the concoction, which, the same as their other sauces, features an eye-popping label, this one replicating the cover art from Comeback Kid’s Wake the Dead.

“Like all our collaborations, we only did a limited run, but if it proves to be a hit and the band sells out, there isn’t any reason we can’t make more.”

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Trupp, 36, and Ayers, 39, met in 2018, when they found themselves cooking side by side at a popular Pembina Highway dining spot. They quickly realized they had a fair bit in common.

Besides toiling in restaurants for the majority of their adult lives, they were each heavily involved in the local music scene, having played in bands such as Krull and Illusive Mind Gypsy Crew (Trupp, bass guitar), and Doc Walker and Jivetown (Ayers, drums).

At the time, Trupp managed a side gig called Intergalactic Tacos, a pop-up affair that was serving “out-of-this-world” tacos to guests at weddings, socials and music festivals. He mentioned to Ayers how he could definitely use an extra set of hands, to which Ayers responded, sign him up.

“When you’re doing tacos, hot sauce is kind of a no-brainer, so we started making our own, using peppers my mom was growing on an acreage outside of Lorette,” Trupp says, noting while he wasn’t originally “some big hot-sauce guy,” he instinctively knew what ingredients would match well with others, thanks to years of cooking in professional kitchens.

“The sauces weren’t for sales purposes, by any means. We were using them at the pop-ups and if somebody asked, we were happy to give them away for free.”

“The craft hot-sauce market is growing all the time, but I wouldn’t say those of us in the city who are doing hot sauces view each other as competition.”–Dan Trupp

Restrictions associated with COVID-19 spelled the end of the taco pop-ups in the spring of 2020. Trupp and Ayers didn’t want to completely shut out what had become a loyal following, however.

In September 2020 they switched gears, thinking perhaps there was a market for their two most popular flavours of hot sauce: one containing habanero, sweet peppers and garlic that, for commercial purposes, they dubbed Cosmic Coyote, and another boasting red Thai pepper, serrano, garlic and jalapeño cucumber, which they named Taengkwa Sriracha.

Their intuition proved to be correct.

By December 2020, they were selling out of 500-bottle runs of both varieties, and had added a third, Closed on Sundays (dill, pickles, mustard seeds and jalapeño) that was introduced as their least blazing sauce — an “entry-level drug,” quips Ayers — with a 1.5 rating out of 10 on the heat scale.

“That’s the tricky part,” Trupp replies, when asked about taste versus heat ratios.

“Every pepper has its own characteristics, and although you want to play up those characteristics, you still want something you can enjoy without melting your mouth. Even with Friendship, our hottest (sauce) with a rating of nine out of 10, the lime and onion shine through…”

“Before the Carolina reaper just wrecks you,” Ayers pipes in. (Friendship was developed as an homage to Kipp Kocay, a musician pal of theirs who died in 2021 at age 34.)

Trupp and Ayers currently market five core flavours. But as mentioned off the top, they commonly partner with others to produce one-off varieties, often for charitable purposes.

Woof, There It is, a hot sauce they came up with in 2023, raised money for the Winnipeg Humane Society. Part of the proceeds from Grand Peach, a peach and ghost-pepper blend they did in tandem with FM radio station KISS 102.3 this past November, went to Resource Assistance for Youth (RaY), a non-profit agency that assists homeless youth.

And $2 from the sale of every bottle of Meowter Limits, a joint effort between Intergalactic Sauces and Brat Cat Mead Co. that was unveiled on Valentine’s Day, will go to pet shelter D’arcy’s ARC.

Brat Cat owner Stephanie Barten has known Ayers for years, and became excited when he and Trupp suggested joining forces, just after Christmas.

“They like my mead, I like their hot sauces, so it seemed like a perfect combination,” Barten says, when reached at work. “Plus, we all love our pets and since mine is a cat-themed business, donating to D’arcy’s ARC seemed like a natural fit.”

Barten invited the two of them to her locale at 155 Fort St., where they sampled six of her meads. La Uno de Gato, a mead highlighting prickly pear fruit, tickled their fancy the most.

Within a matter of days, they’d hit on a hot sauce that merged it with dragon fruit, lychee, Carolina reapers and — of all things — edible glitter.

“I think I have six bottles left, it’s been going so fast,” Barten says, noting the hot sauce is available for purchase at her space, as well as through the Intergalactic Sauces website (intergalacticsauces.com).

“I like it most with eggs or a breakfast sandwich, though I had it on poutine the other day and that tasted really great, too.”

As for Trupp and Ayers’ own tastebuds, they recorded a lighthearted video last summer wherein they arrived at their culinary choices by spinning two wheels, one sporting the names of each of their hot sauces and another listing foodstuffs such as cantaloupe, Pop Tarts and canned fish.

The winner? A Cadbury Creme Egg doused with Big Sky hot sauce, the latter of which utilizes peppers grown at Courcelles Family Farm, near Richer.

To date, Trupp and Ayers have shipped bottles of hot sauce to chiliheads across North America, and as far away as Australia.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers defensive star Willie Jefferson is a fan, as are the members of American country music duo Brothers Osborne.

And when standup comedian Bert Kreischer appeared at the Centennial Concert Hall two years ago, Ayers, understanding Kreischer was a hot-sauce aficionado from videos he’d posted online, personally delivered a case of sauce to his tour bus.

(What do you call a noble hot sauce? Sir Racha. This summer, Trupp and Ayers will develop a new sauce to coincide with the Great Outdoors Comedy Festival at Assiniboine Park, where Kreischer is scheduled to perform on July 18.)

“The craft hot-sauce market is growing all the time, but I wouldn’t say those of us in the city who are doing hot sauces view each other as competition,” says Trupp, who along with Ayers, ventured to Ottawa last summer, for a one-day, hot-sauce expo. “We communicate back and forth, we bounce questions off one another… it’s become its own little community.

“For sure, if I’m at a market and I spot another vendor selling hot sauce, I’m definitely going to grab a couple of bottles from them, or offer to make a trade. It’s like they say, the more, the merrier.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca