Bristol · est. 2019 · bottling batch No. 214
Ember & Oak is two people in a railway arch off Kingsland Road. We brine British-grown chillies with nothing but salt, leave them in oak somewhere between eight and fourteen months, and bottle what comes out — unpasteurised, three hundred bottles at a time, numbered by hand.
Wild-fermented No vinegar added British-grown chillies Unpasteurised Keep refrigerated
The range
Every sauce starts as the same three things: chillies, salt and time. What changes is the chilli, what we add to it, and how long we are prepared to wait.
Flagship
The one we put on everything.
SHU 24,000–32,000
Red Fresno and smoked garlic, eight months in neutral oak. Tastes like roast pepper and smoked salt; the heat only turns up after you have swallowed.
£8.50 / bottle
In the Club, or from a stockist.
Seasonal
Fruit first, habanero second.
SHU 55,000–70,000
Fermented quince and habanero, finished with oak-ash salt. Apricot and cider up front; the habanero arrives about four seconds later and stays for a while.
£9.00 / bottle
In the Club, or from a stockist.
Verde
Sharp, green, gone by spring.
SHU 7,000–11,000
Tomatillo, black garlic and charred serrano. Green tomato and lime leaf. It is the sauce that ends up on things it was never intended for, including eggs and, once, a baked potato.
£8.50 / bottle
In the Club, or from a stockist.
Reserve · 60 bottles
Small bottle. Long goodbye.
SHU 150,000–210,000
Carolina Reaper, fourteen months in a first-fill oak barrel we bought used off a Speyside distillery. Cocoa, campfire, and a finish that outlasts the meal.
£14.00 / bottle
Club members get first refusal; six shops get the rest.
The method
This is the whole recipe. There is no fifth move, and there is nothing in the bottles that is not on this list.
Chillies, salt, and a 2.5% brine by weight. We do not add a cultured starter or a vinegar kick because the skins already carry everything the ferment needs. The salt decides which microbes get to stay.
The mash goes into oak in an unheated arch under the railway. Somewhere between eight and fourteen months later the pH has fallen to about 3.4 on its own, and the flavour has gone somewhere we could not have taken it on purpose.
We blend with the brine the chillies fermented in, taste it, and stop. No thickener, no sugar, no vinegar top-up and no pasteurisation — which is why every bottle tells you to keep it in the fridge.
Three hundred bottles a batch, filled and labelled by hand, each stamped with its batch number and bottling date. When a batch is gone, it is gone until the next one is ready.
If we wanted to make this faster, we would have to make it worse. We have done the maths on that twice a year since 2019 and it has not changed.
Heat
Measured by HPLC at a lab in Cardiff, on the bottled sauce — not estimated from a chilli chart, and not decided by somebody eating a spoonful on camera.
Figures are the midpoint of each batch's range. Fermentation moves the number around a little from barrel to barrel; the label always carries the range for the batch in your hand.
The Ember Club
Three ways to subscribe. Skip a month, change your heat, or cancel whenever — all from the dispatch email, in one click, with no minimum term and nobody to telephone.
Option 01
£26 every second month
Option 02 · most chosen
£19 a month
Option 03
£58 a quarter
Every dispatch goes out in a moulded pulp carton with paper tape — no plastic, no polystyrene, no shrink wrap on the caps. Payments are taken the day before dispatch, and you can stop them from the same email.
Stockists
We deliver by van to the south-west and by courier everywhere else. These six carry the full range for most of the year; the other thirty-odd carry whatever survived the last dispatch.
Gloucester Road, Bristol
Full range, including the Barrel Reaper allocation.
Kirkgate Market, Leeds
Full range. Ask at the counter — it is kept behind the till.
Stockbridge, Edinburgh
House Ember and Green Riot all year; Quince & Ash from October.
Owen Street, Manchester
Full range, plus whatever barrel experiment is current.
Chapel Street, Penzance
House Ember and Green Riot. Barrel Reaper in December only.
Pontcanna, Cardiff
Full range. Also the closest thing we have to a tasting room.
We wholesale by the twelve-bottle case, with no minimum order after the first, and we will swap out anything that is not moving. Trade sheet, case prices and shelf-life notes.
What we do not do
There is no customer review section on this page, because we would rather tell you the awkward parts ourselves.
Barrel Reaper is 100 ml rather than 150 because fourteen months in a first-fill barrel costs roughly twice what the same time in a neutral one costs. We would rather sell you less of it than make it out of a flavour concentrate and call it the same thing.
The Dispatch
What is in the barrels, what is being bottled, and a warning when a batch is nearly out. No drip sequence, no discount codes, and one click to leave.