Tears of Joy, Austin

While walking down 6th Street on a 95-degree day in Austin, we stumbled across Tears of Joy, a hot sauce shop. Oh, how I love hot sauce! The last time I had been in a hot sauce shop was in Louisiana. There really should be more shops like this across the U.S.

Inside, it was a hot sauce lover's dream. The hot sauces were all rated on a scale of 1 to 10 in hotness. There were sections for sauces, chips, spices, and salsas.

But what really caught my eye was the coffin. Inside the coffin were all of the sauces that were rated a 10 including pure extracts! Wow!

It was quite the selection. Eventually, after trying many sauces and burning my taste buds off, I chose to purchase The Executioner Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce, The Hottest Fuckin' Sauce (that is what it is called) and Deano's Jalapeno Chips. More on these items at another time.

As I was checking out, the woman at the register told me to try the extract that was there, I picked it up, smelled it, then decided against it. In the process, a tiny bit got on my finger so I licked it. It almost killed me. For hours later, I could taste it -- it was that hot. I have no idea why anyone would need anything that hot, but now I aspire to get to a point where I could handle that. For now, I'll stick with the ghost pepper sauce, which is plenty hot enough.

This is a great place to visit while in Austin. Highly recommended.

Tears of Joy
618 E. 6th Street
Austin, TX 78701
(512) 499-0766