Early thoughts on the 2022 chile season

For those of you who are looking for more information about the timeline of the Hatch chile season, be sure to read out post on that! In 2024, we will begin roasting chile on Friday, August 2nd.

We started roasted chile three days ago, so these are still very early musings, but I figured I would share them.

Chile seems hotter this year rather than last year. Last year, most chile seemed mild compared to usual. Big Jim especially was mild, and was one of the bigger complaints we heard. Although I don’t have a large enough sample size to say definitively, our first shot of Big Jim is definitely hotter than anything last year. Chile seems to be roasting quite nicely so far as well.

Setting up our tent was harder this year than in the past. We expanded it a lot, and unfortunately the people we hired to change the shape disappeared. It led to a lot more work for me especially, and we had to push our opening back by a day. Luckily, this didn’t impact anything to do with our chile roasting or refrigeration, but we were a bit behind on packaging. This year, we are testing new packaging because we want to get more involved in ecommerce. This is a big step for us, as we haven’t done shipping or anything of that nature before. Hopefully our customers like you will feel our packaging is prettier and also more convenient. Additionally, we are going to offer more sizes of products, including chile powders, chile pods, posole, and chicos.

We are trying hard to make our stand a lot better this year by offering more variety of chile, including superhot chile, such as Carolina Reapers or KS Lemon Starburst. More than just that, we will get different varieties of Mexican chile as well, such as Guajillo and Cascabel. We want to be more of a “Chile Market,” as that is our name.

We are working on getting specialty produce, such as Colorado peaches, but the price is very high, and may not be possible this year. We will definitely have plenty of local produce, as our farmers are still growing, and local is much more affordable due to insane logistics prices in our stagflating US economy. We know inflation hurts everyone, which is a big reason why we are expanding our sizes. We want to have affordable options for everyone, whether they want a lot of chile, or a small amount.

This is our 45th year roasting chile in Albuquerque. We were the originals, and we still got it. Although it is still early season and we don’t have much available yet, feel free to stop in and get some chile. We waited a month longer than a lot of roasters to start, so all of our green chile is nice and mature, and roasts great. Pretty soon, we will get into red chile, which will also bring chile ristras. This time of year is a lot of work for us, but a lot of fun too. Come share the fun with us at 2010 Eubank Blvd NE.