17th Annual Pepperfest

On Sunday, September 29th, peppers are returning to Pittsboro at the 17th annual PepperFest @ The Plant.

From twelve until six at the end of Lorax Lane, there will be pepper dishes, pepper cocktails, a pepper sauce competition, a chili cookoff, and more.  The Solutions along with MixTapes are the live bands scheduled for the celebration.

No ticket is required for this year’s event.

Tour the pepper patch to see the difference between a poblano and a Marconi on the vine. See the Scotch Bonnets (the national pepper of Jamaica) before they are picked for dishes at Kingston 99.

Ask for peppers on your po-boy at JDubs and dine at Lilly Den Farm’s food truck. Get a pepper beer from BMC Brewing and wander the Plant’s eclectic campus.

See how Flying Pepper Vodka is made at the Fair Game Beverage Company—using aji dulce Tobago peppers that were grown in the pepper patch @ the Plant.

The average food miles for this year’s peppers can be measured as roughly fifty yards.

PepperFest originated in Pittsboro in 2007 to support the plant breeding work done by Doug Jones at Piedmont Biofarm. At the first PepperFest, visitors walked through a tent full of raw pepper samples and filled out surveys on clipboards before they could get a beer. Doug was licensing his seeds to seed companies, and he needed consumer data to back up his work in pepper genetics.

From there, PepperFest outgrew the Plant and became a major annual event in Pittsboro—held at Briar Chapel and downtown.