About Hot Sauce Boss

My name is James A. Beck Jr. aka HOT SAUCE BOSS. I'm a capsaicinfluencer, entrepreneur, entertainer and expert in the world of fiery foods. My spicy journey officially started in 2009 when I launched the hot sauce review blog EatMoreHeat.com, followed by iBurn® in 2012, and HSB Media in 2024. I've always enjoyed spicy food. From putting mounds of jalapenos on my nachos at Astros games (in the Astrodome) as a kid, to trying my 1st Habanero in 1994, then getting hooked for life when I attended my first hot sauce festival in 2003. I've gone from a background in financial planning and real estate to exploring the world of hot sauces and chile peppers. I've dedicated the last seventeen years of my life to tasting the biggest, boldest and hottest that the spicy world has to offer. In 2010, unbeknowst to me I helped pioneer the spicy challenge genre of video content when I posted my 4 Horsemen Burger Challenge to YouTube. That accomplishment earned me the title of "Spicy Challenge OG" from my TikTok followers.

A few months after launching Eat More Heat in April of 2009 I made the decision to change from written reviews to video reviews. That decision made me one of the 1st hot sauce reviewers in the world to post to YouTube. I also co-hosted a live video webcast called “Eat More Heat Live” on a platform called Stickam from 2011-2013. During the 18 month run of the livestream (before Stickam sold out to YouNow) it recorded over 1,800,000 live viewers, including a livestream for the launch of Blair's Jolokia Chips in 2011. We were the most popular food livestream in the history of the platform. Thanks in part to the live webcast, EatMoreHeat.com had the distinction of being the most visited hot sauce review site in the world for most of 2012.

I've made numerous television and radio appearances. Most notably was in 2011 when I was featured on the History Channel show “Hairy Bikers”. That episode had the highest ratings during the only season it ran in the United States with over 1.5M viewers watching it live. In 2017 I shot a pilot for Travel Channel that never aired. In my 17 years of doing this I have been approached by more than a dozen production companies, but I still haven't had a television or streaming show that I hosted get picked up by a studio. 

After a long hiatus (to focus on iBurn) my spicy social media was reborn in 2020 during the pandemic. In only 4 years I've built the largest independent hot sauce related social media following in the world. At nearly two million combined followers/subscribers, over thirty million likes and over five hundred million video views my content has educated and entertained millions of people around the world.

In 2020 and again in 2023 Pepsi contracted me to develop two different Mountain Dew Hot Sauces for promotional giveaways. “MTN Dew Hot Sauce” and “MTN DEW Baja Blast Hot Sauce” were developed from scratch and garnered national media attention and resulted in rave reviews from the media and influencers alike.

I'm the only man ever to complete the Four Horsemen Burger (Chunky’s, San Antonio, TX) El Diablo Burger (Rockwell Tavern, Houston, TX) and Bushido Spicy Tuna Roll (Bushido Sushi Bar, Charleston, SC) eating challenges on video. I've sampled over 5,000 hot and spicy products in my lifetime, and I attend every major hot sauce event that my schedule will allow.

In September 2012 I launched iBurn.com. We were the FIRST spicy specialty and hot sauce site to taste test and approve every product offered. The site did so well that in September 2013 I opened iBurn®, Houston’s only hot sauce shop and spicy specialty store. iBurn saw record growth from 2013 to 2017, but that growth slowed dramatically after Hurricane Harvey tragically displaced the majority of our customers that lived close to the store. We started to get back on track in 2019, but that rally was cut short by the pandemic. Although I invested what I had left saved for retirement to save iBurn it wasn't enough. Unfortunately, in 2021 we were forced out of our flagship location by a greedy landlord named Don Nettles. I attempted to recreate iBurn at a smaller location, but our customers never followed at the volume of our original location. In 2024 I made the difficult decision to take iBurn to online only, but after a less than expected online only reboot I decided to retire iBurn for good.

• September 5, 2013:
  
  We opened our first brick and mortar storefront on Bellaire Blvd in Houston, which had the beautiful street art mural (created by Gonzo24/7, pictured above). At our peak in 2016 our store carried over 500 hot sauces and 1800 spicy products total.