Our Story
Hello, we are a small, family-owned business. My name is Greg and along with my wife, Deanna started The Little Bohemian.
Why the name, “The Little Bohemian”?
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Many of the boutique hot sauce brands out there scream something about heat, or have their name on it i.e., “Fred’s burn your butt habanero sauce”. We wanted something personal, a name that meant something to us, and one that people could perhaps connect with.
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I am an American of Czech descent. My great grandparents immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia and one of the terms for those of Czech descent is “Bohemian”. I am very proud of my Czech heritage. My parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles instilled a strong work ethic and family values in me, my siblings and cousins. One of my favorite memories is going to my mother’s parents and having grandmother pull fresh hot kolaches (Czech pastry) out of the oven.
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Additionally, my family and I are not the tallest people in the world. Hence, “The Little Bohemian” or “TLB” for short (pun intended).
Why hot sauce?
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I like hot sauce but could not find one in the market that I REALLY liked. The ones with heat tended to be all heat and little flavor besides vinegar. The ones with flavor tended to have very little heat. The handful with both heat and flavor tended to have some polarizing component that was off-putting to me.
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I am a food scientist by training and trade. It was a natural transition to do some research and try to “fix the problem”. Around 2010 I started playing with different processes and recipes for a hot sauce I really liked. After much trial and error, I landed on a product that we liked very much. As chance would have it, the vast majority of other people who tried TLB, liked it as well.
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And who knows? What starts with hot sauce could very well grow into various other products that my wife and I create. We enjoy making our own marinara sauce, preserves, etc. and the line may grow.
Garden to bottle.
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My love of gardening developed from watching and helping my grandparents and father grow fruits and vegetables. One grandfather was fond of growing hot peppers. As I grow older, I am growing more and more nostalgic and grow many of the same fruit trees and garden vegetables that they grew. Using our own hot peppers from our garden we developed the TLB line of hot sauces we sell on our website today.
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As we move forward our little garden will no longer be able to support 100% of the mash and sauce production but each bottle will contain at least a portion of mash from peppers grown in our garden and aged to perfection. And our sauces are made with all natural ingredients.
