When I wrote about the Berlin Chili Pepper Festival last week, I ended the column by saying I would report back on how it went.
Well, I survived. More importantly, I had a hell of a good time.
Walking into downtown Berlin, the first thing I encountered was the chili pepper-eating competition. These weren’t people nibbling on jalapeños and pretending to be tough. Competitors had traveled from around the country to willingly eat increasingly hotter peppers in front of an enthusiastic crowd.
There were tears. There was sweat. People reconsidered some of their recent life choices. And somehow, everybody was having a great time.
My friend Toby Gilbert of Gilbert’s Provisions had grown many of the peppers and was co-hosting the madness. Round after round, the heat increased until the final two competitors were challenged to eat as many whole ghost peppers as possible in 20 seconds.
It looked extraordinarily painful.
Afterward, I saw one of the younger competitors hunched over and clearly hurting. I went over to make sure he was OK.
He was. But he was definitely going through something.
That’s part of the strange beauty of chili peppers. Heat is the spectacle, but flavor is what brings people into this world. Peppers can have incredible fruitiness, sweetness, bitterness and complexity before the pain ever enters the equation.
Eventually, it was my turn to experience some of that pain.
I competed in the festival’s “Hot Ones”-inspired wing trivia competition, where we ate 10 progressively hotter wings while answering Delmarva trivia questions.
I felt confident about the trivia and have a fairly high tolerance for spicy food. Both helped.
The wings were delicious. Toby had a hand in many of the sauces, and even as they became hotter, there was actual flavor behind the heat. A couple eventually started getting to me, but a milkshake tempered the burn enough to keep going.
After 10 wings and all the questions, I had tied the previous year’s champion, a teacher at Stephen Decatur High School.
Naturally, there was only one reasonable way to settle a deadlocked hot-wing trivia competition:
We had to flip over our plates and draw a mermaid using hot sauce.
I thought my mermaid was pretty good. The crowd disagreed.
My opponent, the returning champion and hometown favorite, won the audience vote and walked away with the trophy and coveted bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
I can live with that.
Winning wasn’t really the point. I answered a lot of questions correctly, ate all 10 wings and had a tremendous time.
Downtown Berlin couldn’t have been a more perfect setting. Its historic architecture framed this wonderfully weird celebration of food, pain and community. Hot sauce vendors lined the street, people wandered from booth to booth tasting things and everyone seemed genuinely happy to be there.
My son Maxwell came along, and afterward, he said he couldn’t wait to return when there wasn’t a festival so he could explore the shops and other places around town. I think that says something about Berlin.
Another ingredient really made the afternoon for me: the music.
Hot Sauce played after the pepper competition, filling the streets with a colorful mix of Latin American music and American influences. At one point, the band handed maracas and sombreros to the little kids dancing in front of the stage.
That was probably my favorite image of the day.
Kids shaking maracas. People getting out of their seats. The streets of Berlin filled with music. Somewhere nearby, somebody was probably eating something they were going to regret in about 30 seconds.
It was joyful.
Before heading home, I stopped by Gilbert’s Provisions, where Toby gifted me a collection of hot sauces to explore at a more reasonable pace. And I will.
The festival reminded me that chili culture isn’t really about proving how much pain you can tolerate.
It’s about flavor. It’s about curiosity. It’s about growing things, making things, sharing things and occasionally daring your friends to eat something they probably shouldn’t.
And if you ever get the chance to hear Hot Sauce play, do it. Because as I learned in Berlin, nothing seasons a chili pepper festival better than the sounds of Hot Sauce.
