A ferment runs on its own clock and fruit ripens on a season's, and pretending otherwise would mean printing the same label on jars that do not taste the same.
A bottle of hot sauce made this way starts as chiles, salt, and time. Salt the chiles heavily enough and the lactobacillus already living on their skin takes the jar over, eats the sugar, and turns the brine sour. How fast that happens depends on the room. A jar at 75 °F runs roughly twice as fast as the same jar at 65 °F, so two batches fermented for the same fourteen days in different months are not the same sauce.
Rather than hide that, each batch gets a card. The card records what was measured: how many days, at what temperature, in how strong a brine, at what pH, and how many bottles came out the other end. It also records where the chiles came from, because that changes the sauce more than most people expect.
The barbecue bottles are not fermented. They are fruit, vinegar, and spice cooked down in a pan for half an hour, which is a process that corrects itself: you simmer to a thickness and you season to a taste, so two batches made the same way land close together. The variable a cook cannot correct for is the fruit.
A plum picked ripe in the second week of September carries far more of its own sugar, and much less raw acid, than the same variety picked early or trucked in out of season. So the amount of brown sugar that goes in is not fixed by the recipe; it is decided at the pan, against that year's fruit. Those cards therefore record a different spine: the variety, the orchard, the week it was picked, how much went into the pan, and how much came out. A bottle whose fruit came off one tree in one week has something true to say, and one made from whatever was on the shelf in March does not, which is why a batch of it is only worth a card when the fruit is worth naming.
A rub has no clock and nothing to reduce. Mixed to the same ratio twice it is the same rub, and a card that recorded the ratio would be recording the recipe, which is the one thing a card is built not to do. What moves is not the formula. It is the material and its age.
Ground spice fades on a clock of its own, and it fades quietly: it keeps its salt and its color long after it has stopped tasting of much. Fennel toasted whole and ground the same morning is a different ingredient from fennel milled a year ago and shipped, smoked paprika more than a season old tastes of dust rather than smoke, and a chile crop has a year the way a plum has a week. So those cards record the day the spice was toasted and ground, which spices went in whole, and what crop the chile came off. It is the whole difference between a tin made in a kitchen and a tin off a shelf, and it is the only honest read on whether the one you are holding is still worth using.
pH is the one number on the card that tells you the most, whichever way the sauce was made. It is a measure of how sour it actually got, and it is what decides how the bottle keeps. Lower is more acidic and more stable. Anything at or below 3.5 holds well in a refrigerator.
You will notice there is no Scoville number anywhere on this site. Scoville is a laboratory measurement, and printing an estimate of one as though it were data would be the opposite of what these cards are for.
These are made in a home kitchen and given away. The recipes live in a cookbook rather than on this site, because the interesting part was never a secret.
Nothing here is canned, pressure-processed, or shelf-stable, and none of it should be treated as though it were. Every bottle lives in a refrigerator.