So what might your plans be for the upcoming weekend? Perhaps you are looking forward to some much needed leisure time. So what will it be? Spending some quality time with the family? Catching up with an old friend over coffee? Clubbing? Or perhaps you’d rather go out and do a little panning for gold with some mates. Say what? If your name is David Bradbury, this may very well be your activity of choice, but more on that in a minute. First, here’s an email I received from Mr. Bradbury of Devon, UK.

Subject: spicy chilli sauce
Message: Sorry I can’t do justice to what I wish to say about chilli sauce, I do have some pix which are so good, the new sauce is so wonderful, even on ginger biscuits. Many thanks for a super sauce.
David Bradbury

I occasionally will receive emails such as this one, loaded with heaps of praise for a sauce which I can take no credit for. If only! I looked over his email and the accompanying picture which contained three bottles of HP Mexican Chilli sauce situated on a rock in the middle of a stream - of which two of the bottles appear somewhat emptied of their contents! Someone really likes his Chilli sauce, but what’s up with the stream? I know I’ve taken pictures of HP bottles in stranger places (ahem), but there had to be a story behind it. I just had to ask…

HP Mexican Chilli Sauce
Submitted by: David Bradbury

Sender: David Bradbury
Message: There I’ve done it, this pix was taken during a gold panning trip on Dartmoor, we, all 3 couldn’t live without our sauce. Keep it going please. Super sauce indeed.

Gold panning?

Hi Brad..well i didnt expect a reply, so good of you to do so. 2morrow i will get some pix to you + my pride in life (next to my wife and two puss cats) is………wait for it…MY SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE…it hides in the shed, if you can get back to myself and tell me what you wish then i will do it…and as an appetizer (chilli sauce type) if you send your address i will post you a bottle. believe me it is soooooo magic chilli sauce..will write 2morrow with pix and stuff.

Wow. Niche little Brown Sauce website, let me introduce you to Mr. Bradbury – a man who pans for gold in southern England, loves HP Chilli sauce and has a scanning electron microscope in his garden shed! Blows the mind. Err..wait, did he just offer to send out a bottle of ‘magic’ chilli?

We exchange a few more emails and I learn a bit more about the kind David Bradbury and his SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) located in his garden shed.

My hobby of geology started as a small child in Swansea South Wales, I can still recall the Germans bombing my small village, didn’t get me. I grew up with a deep interest in metals and minerals and eventually took a degree in chemistry, after some years and problems between I landed with the UK MOD as a lab tech that lasted for 5 years in that time I learned to use a SEM, when that job finished I took another but not in chemistry, missing chemistry I built a small lab near Exeter Devon, then I bought my first electron mike, took me 6 months to make it work then found I could not afford to run it at 15KW power required so I sold it, Last year Sue said “what are you going to do now you are retired” …..I bought another! It has been very diff with the wet clime we have in UK but it gives me the feedback in “my science” that keeps me and my self respect happy, it got in the shed with a load of huffin puffin n shovin, it weighs 2 tons so it wouldn’t go in the attic.

A 2 ton Electron Microscope situated in his garden shed! Whatever happened to simply toodling around the garage doing some simple woodworking - making tables & chairs and other knickknacks to be given away to family at Xmas? Or how about restoring that old car that’s been sitting behind the house for the past 30 years? No, that simply wouldn’t work for Mr. Bradbury. As it turns out, the Scanning Electron Microscope requires the object placed within it to be coated in trace amounts of gold (a small lightbulb appears above my head). This is how and why the bottles ended up on a rock in a stream to be photographed! I’m starting to make a bit of sense of it all.

David Bradbury at his Scanning Electron Microscope
Devon, United Kingdom
^*Click the image above for a biography of Mr Bradbury

So what of the bottle of HP ‘magic’ Chilli sauce on offer? Was it on its way to Canada? It turned out there was some confusion over whether Customs would find it acceptable to have a bottle sent to Canada from the UK (perhaps they’d want to keep it for themselves!), but in the end there wasn’t an issue after all. In fact, Bradbury and his wife even went out of their way to accommodate a request for a bottle of Branston Brown – a commodity which is somewhat hard to find commodity in Devon apparently! In return, all Mr. Bradbury wished for in exchange was a small amount of soil taken from the nearby Red River in Winnipeg to place in his microscope; a request I was all too happy oblige.

With the exchange made, I was all too eager to dive in and try this HP Mexican Chilli sauce variety – a variety not sold here in North America. I was not disappointed and immediately understood Mr. Bradbury’s enthusiasm for this sauce. If you are a chilli (chili in Canada) lover, this sauce is not to be overlooked. It has a very pleasant taste yet chilli hot and not at all watered down or diminished in any way. I would highly recommend this sauce as the perfect accompaniment on barbequed hamburgers (patties made with Worcestershire sauce of course). Another good use would be on nachos and salsa to give it that bit of extra kick. Again, if you like a nice spicy chilli sauce, HP Mexican Chilli comes highly recommended. Ooh, how about a Thai or green curry sauce?

As a side note, although this bottle is not the original variety, it is the first “made in Holland” HP branded sauce I have yet come across. I do have plans on importing a “made in Holland” bottle of the original variety which I will compare with a Birmingham made bottle.

Back to Mr. Bradbury and his Scanning Electron Microscope as I have but one more question to ask: “Btw, what would a dollop of brown sauce look like if inspected with that fancy contraption of yours? Sorry, I couldn’t resist asking! “

Is it possible to combine these two worlds some sort of odd Brown Sauce mineralogical experiment?

TRIED IT..VERY DIFF..COZ IT WOULD BOIL IN THE HIGH VAC …THEN
EXPLODE…BUT..Aha ! AZ THERE ALWAYS IZ..THERE IZ A WAY AND HERE IT IZ…NOW ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY ? AND THE SECRET DARK ART OF TAKING STUFF AND BREAKING IT DOWN INTO SIMPLER COMPONENTS, IN BASIS ITS ALL DUE TO FILTRATION AND WASHING VIA GRAVIMETRIC SEPARATION…STILL WITH ME ?…ANYWAY..AFTER 300 YEARS AND 200,000,000 GALLONS OF WORTER !!!!!
…ERM…ER…NO FORGET IT …LIFE AINT LONG ENOUGH TO EMBARK UPON A LENGHTY “ALCHEMICAL” TRIEST….THE PAIN…SUFFERING…NO SLEEP…AND WORSER…NO DAMN…SAUCE…

Enough said!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 2:04pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.