The Salsero from Kentucky
The Life and Times of Hot Sauce Maker Tyler Morgan Mains
My latest trip to Barcelona began the way the first one did: breaking my travel fast at Can Paixano with Tyler Morgan Mains.
I’d met Tyler for the very first time less than a year ago; and now it felt like I was meeting an old friend. Much had changed in that time. As Nick put it, we had “been through war together.” If you’ve ever worked for a food startup, or any startup for that matter, you’d know the feeling: like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. Months feel like years; and colleagues, fellow warriors become family. We’ve both since moved on with Tyler breaking off from the incubator program of the company we both worked for to make it out on his own with his hot sauce brand, ONIMA.
Tyler’s story is something akin to a modern-day myth; it’s too extraordinary not to share. His is a life driven, and made richer, by trust-falling into rabbit holes, committing fully to what awaits on the other side. I warn you: it’s contagious. And - like many of our conversations over food and wine - tends to lead to a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated topics that oddly make sense in gestalt.
For this interview, Tyler invited us for a home-cooked dinner. Before we even “officially” started (which we kept putting off) our conversation over dinner went from dreaming in different languages (or not), to cultural repression, pottery, food similarities across global latitudes, the unbearable sound of footsteps through certain sound devices, and the magic of Pinq Solution. Finally, with dishes cleared, I watched Tyler light candles, select the perfect soundtrack in Goat Rodeo, and place a bottle of Cantillon Grand Cru Bruocsella Brut on the counter. While I was anxious to start the interview all night, Tyler had taken his time to thoughtfully set the stage to perfection.
From Kentucky Homebrew to Belgian Bootleg
Tyler grew up on an old tobacco farm that, through a government initiative, transitioned to growing organic vegetables. He was raised by his grandparents and his diet consisted of both high quality vegetables from the farm and classics from the Golden Age of processed foods; Old El Paso taco boxes and Beanie Weenies. Needless to say, this is not exactly how his culinary journey began. It began at the age of 15, when Tyler brewed his first beer. He had found beer in the fridge of a family friend, and when he asked if he could drink it, they jokingly told him he could drink beer if he made it. And so he did.
“Making something from scratch for the first time showed me what it actually takes. When I started the first beers, I wasn’t making it from grain. I was making it from grain syrup. So, it’s cans of sugar byproduct from barley, wheat, whatever. I started reading some of the older literature on brewing, on home brewing, then I realized there’s this whole other world out there, like, ‘Oh my God, beer is actually made from real grains, not sugar syrup in a can.’ And then I started thinking: ‘Okay, if I want whatever it is that I desire in the outcome, I can achieve it. I can do that if I just get back to square one with every individual component, and then make it all, the way that I want it.”
The first of many fortuitous happenstances in Tyler’s story; he just so happened to pick up homebrewing in the time of the craft beer revival. The early 2010s is when microbreweries began sprouting exponentially all over the US, with the last remaining states legalizing homebrewing in 2013. By 2018, the number of craft breweries operating in the US reached record highs of over 7,000. “At the time, in the beer world, (and well, still, it happens) it's basically a pissing contest. Always, it's a pissing contest with who could simultaneously make the biggest most alcoholic, crazy barrel-aged stout, and who could make the most bitter West Coast-style IPA,” Tyler recalls.
Homebrewing turned to commercial brewing, when at the age of 18, Tyler moved to Cleveland to pursue a college degree in music composition, and began working at Great Lakes Brewing Company. Young and motivated, it wasn’t long before Tyler went from stacking pallets of product to managing the bottling line, dropping out of college in favour of brewing full-time. His quick rise up through the ranks was met with resentment from his older employees - relics from the Rust Belt previously laid off from their car factory jobs - who didn’t appreciate taking orders from a teenager. Add to that a breakup and Tyler grew weary and longed for home.
Back in Kentucky, Tyler went to work for West Sixth in Lexington as a brewer, where he made an indelible mark. He introduced oak and integrated a barrel program into their operations. But perhaps his most notable achievement was more of a happy accident. Every year, the brewery released a special edition stout. That year, Tyler had accidentally reversed the hop bill - the type, quantity, and schedule of hops that essentially give the beer its distinct aromas and flavours.
“I was like, ‘Fuck, I can't tell anybody. It's an expensive beer to brew - this is the one time a year they brew it. I’m just gonna let it fly.’ And then right after that, I quit, not for that reason, but I quit. And then there was this app at the time, Untappd. And I remember all the reviews (which, fuck reviews), are saying: ‘Oh my God, they've totally changed, like they've upped their game. This is cool.’ It was a total accident. I didn't do anything on purpose. I felt ashamed because I had this dirty secret with me that I wasn't gonna tell anybody, because I just ruined their business. But, thankfully, on the way out, I did them some good.”
Tyler left Kentucky again, this time, to follow a girl to Istanbul. But, after a few months, he grew restless; while she had gone there for school, there was nothing there for him and he struggled to adapt. Belgium, the global capital of beer culture, was calling. In fact, Belgium’s beer culture is so ingrained into the country’s way of life that in 2016, UNESCO inscribed it into the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The plan was always to go to Belgium, and now was the time.
Photo courtesy of Tyler Morgan Mains
He knocked on the door of Brasserie Cantillon, a fourth generation family brewery in Brussels, exclusively producing lambic beers since 1900. In 1978, it also became a living museum, The Brussels Gueuze Museum, with a mission to preserve the centuries-old production techniques of lambic beer making. Every day, Tyler showed up during the early brewing hours looking for a job. And every day, he was told ‘no’. He would loiter to watch them work and eventually, noticing inefficiencies in their bottling line, stepped in uninvited and started labeling their bottles in an effort to reinforce their weakest link. Cantillon saw no choice but to accept the foreigner who spoke no French as one of their own, and let him stay for their short brewing season. Tyler quickly became part of the family; they trusted him with tasting and he helped blend the beer.
At the time, in the early 2010s, the lambic beer tradition was undergoing a renaissance and Tyler was in the thick of it. “These are old dusty relics from the past that nobody had been paying attention to. The dad couldn't even afford to put [the beer] in glass bottles. So he would put barrels on carts and take horses out to the town square. And try to peddle it by the glass, straight from the barrel and people wouldn't buy it. This is historically poor people beer,” he said, to which I gasped with incredulity, my mouth full of this liquid gold I struggled not to spit out.
Springtime arrived, announcing the end of the brewing season, and it was time to go. Luckily, at the time, Tyler met the owner of a famous beer café in a small city about an hour away by bus. In de Verzekering tegen de Grote Dorst (In the Insurance against Great Thirst) is an award-winning lambic bar open only on Sundays after church lets out and on church holidays. It is operated by two brothers, Kurt and Yves Panneels, and at the time, their mother Lydia who has since retired. They invited Tyler to live with them and, together, they traveled across Belgium hosting dinners called The Great Belgian Beer Dinner, inviting chefs from around the country to come and cook at their events.
This is how, under Lydia’s tutelage, Tyler really learned how to cook: on the job. “Lydia was the first time that I saw somebody give a shit about a proper beef stew at home in the kitchen. And it was like, ‘Oh, this is good. This is what good food tastes like, huh?’.” His only experience cooking so far had been as a line cook for an uninspiring vegan falafel restaurant back in Kentucky. And now, he was cooking, curating beer pairings for their pop-ups, and working at the café on Sundays…until he got deported. Tyler had unknowingly overstayed his tourist visa by almost a year.
Tyler landed back at square one: Kentucky. He ended up in Louisville, bartending at the Louisville Beer Store while figuring out what to do, until he received a phone call from Raf Souvereyns, an up-and-coming blender he’d met in Belgium. Blending, Tyler explains, is equally as important as brewing in the lambic world. In fact, it’s quite the common and respected practice for blenders to buy lambic from various producers to formulate their own product. Raf was home blending, collecting lambic from brewers around the city in jerry cans, hand bottling his experiments; something Tyler was also doing during his stint in Belgium. Knowing Tyler wanted to find his way back to Europe, Raf had found a job for him at Mikkeller in Copenhagen. Mikkeller wanted to open a lambic bar and hired Tyler to do it. The idea was to work at Mikkeller for the security of a salaried job and a work visa, while working with Raf on their side project, making frequent trips to Belgium to visit Raf in his hometown of Hasselt, an hour from Brussels.
Tyler with Raf Souvereyns
Photo courtesy of Tyler Morgan Mains
In 2016, after a few years, Tyler left Mikkeler to work with Raf full-time, who had not only acquired a cult following under his brand, Bokkereyder (named after the Goat Riders of the Dutch folk tale), but his grandmother’s home after her passing, out of which they operated the blendery. That year, Bokkereyder, a producer of non-commercial beer operating out of a residential home, whose primary means of distribution was to sell bottles out of the trunk of a car, (for lack of a blending category) won Best New Brewery by RateBeer.
“At this point, the operation had grown pretty big. We had like 100-200 barrels inside of a residential house in a neighborhood. We were getting freight trucks full of those 1,000-litre IBC totes. We were getting multiple shipments of lambic to a residential home in a suburb and pulling them into the garage, and then pumping them through the garage, through the hallways, down the steps into the basement into barrels,” Tyler recalls. “This whole operation is not just baseline big. This is a lot of fruit. We’re traveling to Mosel, Germany, we're harvesting peaches, we're bringing them back in trucks and it's mind blowing, what actually happened in that house.” These glory days were short lived for Tyler, however, whose work visa had expired. He found himself, once again, kicked out of Europe.
From Amino to ONIMA
The journey back home wasn’t entirely unwelcome. Tyler was burnt out; the inevitable product of 16- to 20-hour days of hard physical and mental labour, passion-fueled or not. He found himself back at the Louisville Beer Store recovering, biding his time.
Tyler with his partner Angel Cho
It was March 2018 when Tyler was walking down the street one night with some friends to see about a house he considered buying at the time. Along the way, he found Angel Cho, to whom he was introduced by their mutual friends. She was sitting on her front porch drinking wine. He asked if he could have some of her wine, she said yes, and then joined the group on their quest. A few days later, Tyler went back to reintroduce himself, and they’ve been inseparable ever since.
Then COVID happened.
In that time, Tyler’s home cooking had progressed significantly. If pandemic hobbies were an extension of our personalities, Tyler’s was a perfect representation of his addiction to rabbit holes. While us mere mortals were tinkering with sourdough, Tyler was building an entire food lab in his house, experimenting with things like koji and garums, applying these concepts to expressions of Kentucky’s ecosystem. He hosted dinner pop-ups to showcase his experiments. This eventually led to a breakthrough: “I had this whole plan,” said Tyler. “I was gonna start this company called Amino. I was going to take food scraps from restaurants and make liquid amino acids with them, then sell it back to them. For example, there was an Italian restaurant that had too many parm rinds and I [made] a pot of parm garum, I did tests, and they liked it. And then they would just dose the risotto with it.” Despite the positive response from restaurants and the impact on food waste Tyler’s closed loop system would’ve had on the industry, the economics and the bureaucracy of US food laws were not on his side.
Meanwhile, Angel was trying to decide where to do her master’s program and landed on The Master in Design for Emergent Futures at IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) in Barcelona. Going back to Europe made sense. In America, Tyler’s experiments were innovative, but in Europe, he considered them to be behind the trend; having lived in Copenhagen, he was heavily exposed to restaurants that were constantly pushing the envelope in that direction. Perhaps Europe would provide the infrastructure and support to see his vision through.
Strategizing began on the plane ride over. He needed something to fund his Amino project, where producing any product could take six months, maybe a year. He needed something with a much quicker turnaround, something people would want to buy. After a week of being in Barcelona, Tyler noticed a gap in the market: hot sauce.
Tyler’s first test batch was a success. Before long, he had immersed himself in the local scene, embedding himself in the home hot sauce maker community, going to hot sauce festivals in Barcelona. This was not a far stretch from his past life in the world of craft beer - the pissing contests, the cult followers, the preference for small-batch makers over commercial producers. In Europe, hot sauce was a burgeoning industry, and again, Tyler had claimed a front seat. “I think being into hot sauce in Europe right now is being ahead of the trend. I even treat the company as if it were a craft beer company in the US in, you know, 1999. We're at that stage.”
He called it ONIMA: “Amino” spelled backwards. He had envisioned the day he would reveal that ONIMA was merely the precursor to the more expansive, more ambitious concept of Amino. But Tyler couldn’t help it. As he always had, he jumped in, head first into the hot sauce rabbit hole, emerging on the other side fully embracing his new identity as a salsero. ONIMA was no stepping stone. It had a life of its own.
And further down the rabbit hole
What makes ONIMA special is so ingrained in both the brand and its creator’s DNA that it is, beyond a doubt, irreplicable. Tyler’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge, his commitment to the creative process, and his reverence for natural ingredients and their producers come together to represent terroir at its finest, in an industry that too often measures success in scovilles.
“I'm storytelling with the sauce more than I'm actually making [it],” he says. “Whenever I'm making sauce, I want the product to be the best that it can possibly be. But it's weird, because my process for making is creating a narrative, followed by figuring out what ingredients can support that narrative. And then the very last thing is the chili, and just finding the amount of chili to sit right on top of that profile, because the flavor and the whole composition needs to support it. Whereas, I think most people that are making hot sauce, they're thinking chili, and they're working the opposite way.”
Tyler at the Añana Salt Valley
Photo by Leif Friedmann, Courtesy of Tyler Morgan Mains
Tyler finds inspiration for his narratives in the rich and untapped bounty of the Iberian Peninsula. Down this rabbit hole exists centuries (even millenia’s) old ingredients, sources, and traditions just waiting to be rediscovered. For instance, he exclusively uses salt from one of the oldest salt mines in the world, the Añana Salt Valley; located in Basque country, it is 7,000 years old and was once an ocean, covered by land. It doesn’t operate on electricity or gas operated machinery, but harvests the salt manually using wooden equipment to avoid rust, and only under the strictest environmental conditions. Similar to Cantillon, this salt mine is also a museum. It cannot survive on business alone, so the salt mine receives government funding for its historical preservation work and by offering tours.
“I think that there's so much more to be done with those ingredients that hasn't actually been done yet,” says Tyler. “There's not a very strong sense of maintaining heirloom or older varietals of fruits and vegetables, herbs, whatever. It's still considered a very niche thing here. But whenever you get a farmer that is interested, they will do anything for you. They've got seeds, they'll do it. They're like, ‘I don't grow it because no one buys it.’ But they keep it alive. And if you show some interest, they're like: ‘yes, I will do it next year. I'll have this for you.’”
Some very old Cynars bought on Italian eBay.
But why? Why go down these rabbit holes that often turn up what people and time have forgotten? The answer lies at the very beginning of Tyler’s journey, and in fact at the beginning of everything. Back to the revelations from homebrewing, the idea that in order to fully understand something, anything, you must dig deep and find the root of all things. From its history, its traditions, its etymology, lies the key to its evolution. Its future iterations. Wherever the rabbit hole leads from one day to the next, through multiple iterations and manifestations, the process of understanding is what Tyler will strive to follow to the end of days.
Our conversation continued on for hours, similarly to how it started. Tyler pulled out two bottles of old Cynar he bought from Italian eBay that looked like they had survived a fire - one from the 60s, the other from the 70s - not exactly sure which was which. We tried to place each Cynar in its rightful decade and talked deep into the night about gambling strategies, the art of lock picking, the fascinating world of objectophilia, recurring dreams (and nightmares), and by the end of the night, the three of us had woven the narrative for an excellent murder mystery (Hey Netflix, give us a shout!).
Down the rabbit hole we went and we would’ve gladly continued on and on, if not for our need for sleep. There is both thrill and comfort in knowing that the rabbit hole never ends for as long as you choose to explore it. So, don’t be afraid. It might seem dark and uncertain, but as Tyler has shown us time and time again: who knows what endless possibilities await?
Long distance friends: Angel Cho, Tyler Morgan Mains, Kimberley Kwo, and Nick Wong
Words and photos by Kimberley Kwo, with additional photos courtesy of Tyler Morgan Mains.