Coots Castle Gourmet Hot Sauce is on display at the Packwood Farmers Market.
A pepper hangs at Coots Castle Produce near Randle on Friday.
James and Annie Coots pose for a photo with Junior at Coots Castle Produce near Randle on Friday.
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RANDLE — Annie and James Coots officially started their hot sauce business, Coots Castle Produce, three years ago, but the husband and wife team have been making hot sauce as gifts for friends and family for nearly a decade.
Their sauces were so good that friends kept requesting for more and more. Before long, the Coots were creating handmade labels for the bottles and selling them to coworkers, who refused to take them for free.
The Coots originally moved to Sea-Tac from central California 14 years ago. They realized about halfway into their time living there that city life wasn’t for them. They were spending every weekend and vacation in the mountains, fishing, hunting and hiking.
“We were like, ‘Why do we keep going back to the city?” Annie said.
The Coots, who had been growing peppers on their small Sea-Tac property to use in their sauces, had been trying to figure out how to start a business related to gardening. They soon decided to start selling their hot sauces on a larger scale. James pushed her to start the business, but Annie is the creator of the recipes and the gardening.
“I kept telling her, ‘This is so good. I’m telling you, you can sell this,’” James said. “It was kind of a no-brainer once the idea was thrown out there.”
So they bought property in Randle, which was 40 acres of yellow Scotch broom at the time, three years ago and have been building their homestead up from the weeds. The business started taking off about the same time they bought the property.
This is their first year growing peppers in the ground on their homestead and they are in the process of obtaining a grant through the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to build a high tunnel, which is basically a greenhouse that will help them grow more successfully.
The Coots’ property in Randle is part of the Big Bottom Valley, a 30-mile stretch in the Cowlitz River Valley that has its own microclimate. The peppers don’t grow as well there as they did in Sea-Tac, so the 120-foot-long, 40-foot-wide high tunnel will aid the Coots’ production.
The Coots have already worked with NCRS by putting 20 acres of their property to be designated as forestland. They estimate ¾ of the peppers and vegetables grown in there will be used as ingredients for their hot sauces, while the rest will be canned to use throughout the year.
They currently grow jalapenos for their lime-jalapeno hot sauce; habaneros for mango-habanero hot sauce; and ghost peppers, for a new hot sauce they’re working on: pineapple ghost pepper. The lime jalapeno is a mild sauce, the mango habanero is medium and pineapple ghost pepper is the melt-your-face-off fiery one.
“At the Packwood Farmers Market last year, we took a poll with the community, “Do you want something hotter or something milder?’” Annie said. “There’s a lot of older people in town that hot sauce isn’t really their forte. So we went with the lime jalapeno this year.”
Recipe perfection varies for each hot sauce. The lime jalapeno was longer than most. It took the Coots six different recipes to dial it in. They started with the framework of garlic and jalapeno before realizing that adding lime made the flavors erupt.
“We didn’t want to just do it because we made hot sauce, we wanted to make something that was actually good and tasty,” James said. “We started realizing that, ‘Oh, the lime is really good in this one.’ And the more lime we put, it started having a limey zest to it.”
Coots Castle hot sauces are also thicker than most found in stores, the Coots said, much less runny than a typical hot sauce. That’s due to the amount of vegetables put in, such as bell peppers, carrots, onions and three different types of tomatoes.
“We want something that’s packed with vegetables, we want it to be gourmet, we like it being small batch and be able to say you’re getting a healthy dose of vegetables in each bottle,” Annie said. “It’s not just vinegar and watered-down like everything else you get at the store.”
They had previously been processing everything out of a commercial kitchen in Renton until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. So they canceled their commercial kitchen thinking they could get a new kitchen licensed and ready to go in Randle, but due to COVID-19 the process has taken much longer than expected.
Now, as sales have skyrocketed this summer, they are currently out of hot sauce with no way to properly produce it. They have sold about 600 bottles this year. They sold out of lime jalapeno three weeks ago and their mango habanero last weekend.
“Everybody at the Packwood Farmers Market is like, ‘We want more, we want more!’” Annie said. “We have friends asking us to ship and we’re like, ‘We’re sorry. We can’t do this out of our kitchen, guys. We’re legit.”
Luckily, the Coots met with an inspector on Wednesday to finalize their new kitchen license in Randle so they can make more products. They’re trying to hash out a contract with the Randle fire department to use its kitchen.
Their goal is to get their hot sauces into local stores, barcode the bottles and finish their pineapple ghost pepper recipe. Anyone wanting to buy hot sauce from Coots Castle Produce can do so by contacting its Facebook page, or by visiting its booth at the Packwood Farmers Market from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays.
More Information on Coots Castle Produce
Owners: James and Annie Coots
Location: Randle
Phone: 206-972-0944
Facebook: facebook.com/CootsCastleProduce
Instagram: instagram.com/ccproduce
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Reporter Eric Trent can be reached at etrent@chronline.com. Visit chronline.com/business for more coverage of local businesses.
