Tabasco Sauce & Avery Island

Right as we arrive in Lafayette we see a billboard for Avery Island Tours, the home of Tabasco!  In all of our research somehow we missed this, most likely because we focused on crawfish.  

We get up early and head out to Avery Island, a nice easy ride along a river.  We keep looking for alligators but no such luck.    Arriving at Avery Island, you pay a $1.00 toll and the visitor center is immediately on the left.   As soon as we turn we're navigating the most challenging gravel road and we're engulfed in the wonderful smell of Tabasco.   

The tour is free and we spend about an hour touring the factory and learning lots of cool things about Tabasco. The peppers are grown mostly in in South and Central America and a few are still grown on the Island. However, every bottle of Tabasco is manufactured on site and the mash is made there too.  Mash is peppers, vinegar and salt mixed together and then fermented for 3 years in Jack Daniels barrels.  Who knew that Tabasco was so complicated!

We had the opportunity to see green Tabasco and red being bottled. We also each received 4 mini bottles of Tabasco sauce.  Perfect for packing on the bike.  Tabasco packages sauce in hundreds of languages and ships it all across the country.  

In the museum we find a printing block from the 1950's used for advertising and a poster suggesting that Tabasco would make Italian food taste better.  Mmmm... I'm not sure about that and I'm not sure if Italians would agree.  

After the tour we headed over to the gift shop  for the tasting station.  There was lots of stuff to try!  Along with mustard, bbq sauce, jellies and salsas.  They also have chipolte  raspberry ice cream, jalapeno  vanilla ice cream, Tabasco soda and good ol'fashioned chili.  They even had hot & spicy SPAM - no free samples of this.  Randy was a little disappointed.  We tried everything and settled on a bottle of the Tabasco Reserve which you can only get on Avery Island. Tastes better than basic Tabasco or Habanero Tabasco.    

We thoroughly enjoyed visiting Avery Island and taking the tour.  The ride there was great and I believe the ride around the island would have been wonderful - we just were running out of time. Completely worth the stop and a great surprise!