Spoiler alert: Wisconsin winters aren’t ideal for growing hot peppers because these plants typically come from places like Brazil and Mexico. But one local man is bringing the heat, literally, to a hoop house in Bay View.

Drawing on a dozen years living in Brazil, Michael Arms created PepperRich Farm in December 2019, specializing in rarely seen organic peppers including the scorpion pepper, one of the hottest peppers in the world. Products from his hoop house, along South Sixth Street, are sold to chefs and at farmers markets, and his specialty is hot sauces.     

Growing up in a semi-rural part of Knoxville, Tennessee, Arms loved being a collector. “As a kid I had a collection of comic books, then a ceramic dog collection and rocks and shells,” he recalls. Decades later, Arms still loves amassing collections,

“I have a creepy, life-size ceramic cat collection …if you put them someplace, they startle people,” he adds with a chuckle.    

Arms credits his collector’s mentality, combined with an early exposure to gardening, for his current obsession for cultivating. “My family had a little farm and always grew tomatoes, so I grew up with a little bit of that,” Arms explains.  

After a stint at the Atlanta College of Art, Arms worked in special effects in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, and he took up organic gardening.

“In California, I turned my entire yard into a garden,” Arms says. “They (California gardeners) were at the forefront of the organic stuff, maybe before other places.”

Arms traveled to Brazil to work on a stop-motion beer commercial and stayed for 12 years before relocating to Milwaukee.

“I moved here because of a friend and started working at C-Viche as a server, I also made ice cream and cheesecakes,” he recalls.

Being immersed in C-Viche’s food culture sparked his pepper passion.

“Having lived in Brazil, then being exposed to Peruvian food and learning the new ingredients at C-Viche, I was a nerd and thought, ‘why can't you buy these peppers in stores?' Oh, look, I found some seeds, I’ll grow my own,’” Arms recalls.   

“My weird curator obsession became, ‘I’ve got to find all the peppers … what if there's a good one out there that I don't know about?’ That ended up with me growing like 45 or 50 kinds of peppers one year,” Arms adds.

Arms took advantage of his connections to Milwaukee’s gardening community to find his current space, the former home of Growing Power, which closed in 2017.

“I dreamed about this,” Arms explains. “I knew I wanted a greenhouse after that first year. My friend Erin Dentice is a teacher at Parkside; she does aquaponics and special education. I participated in a market Erin did here, then she put me in touch with the landlord.”

And the rest is Milwaukee hot pepper history in the making.

The 12 years Arms lived in Brazil introduced him to the region’s tastes and flavors,

“When I was in Brazil, I wasn’t that into peppers but I knew about some, which made it easier to go back and find out about all these types of peppers,” Arms explains. “There’s a newer culture of people that are into hot sauce but, in general, people in Brazil don’t really like super spicy foods.”

PepperRich Farm has a scorpion pepper that will satisfy even the most heat-obsessed, but Arms swears that hottest isn’t necessarily best.

“With my peppers, it’s more about the flavors than the heat,” he adds.

PepperRich Farm products cover a broad heat spectrum from the mild, fragrant peppers: cheiro de acemira, to a middle level of heat: aja angelo, to the hottest,: the scorpion pepper.

“Even with the scorpion pepper, for that split second, before it treats you really bad, like it's very floral and fruity,” Arms warns. 

In the winter of 2021, Arms faced his biggest challenge, retaining heat in the hoop house. Keeping the roots alive requires a temperature around 40 degrees, he said.

“Last year the lows got down to negative 14 and it was near zero during the day for days in a row,” Arms recalls. “I would go in middle of the night and use propane to heat it up a little bit. I’d have to go back later and make sure it didn’t get too cold again.”

 Arms created a more effective system this past winter,

“The tent inside the tent gives me an extra buffer. and there are a couple of electric heaters. I heat a 55-gallon barrel of water with an aquarium heater and connect it to a submersible pump on a timer. Ten times a night for 15 minutes, it pumps warm water through hoses along the base of the plants,” Arms explains. “If you accumulate enough heat in the ground, you’ll survive better.”   

Sometimes summer heat can be a problem, too, causing the flowers to drop. Last year Arms installed an exhaust fan linked to a heat sensor, he said. 

Pepper Rich farm is completely organic and uses compost from a neighboring hoop house, Kompost Kids, along with Blue Ribbon Organic compost.

Arms and his neighboring hoop houses also use a major sustainable growing practice,

“We have a cistern and we pump water from the parking lot,” he says.

This season Arms is growing a manageable 25 varieties, with the possibility of adding a few more as the season progresses.  

Having a hoop house allows the plants to grow year-round and allows them to be perennials, lasting 15 to 20 years, he said. Harvest happens multiple times a year,  

PepperRich Farm sells peppers to local chefs, but as a way to use and preserve more peppers, Arms started making hot sauce. 

“These peppers are super rare and you’re not going to find them anywhere else. The flavor just doesn’t compare, but they’re very expensive. It’s more value added when I make them into sauces,” Arms explains.  

He sells more than a dozen types of hot sauce, each with information about the peppers' origins and their rating in Scoville heat units.. 

With the support of friends in Milwaukee’s food community, Pepper Rich Farms hot sauce business is off and running.

“Nathan Heck is a Braise alumnus and he now has Hot Dish Pantry in the 3rd Street Market. That’s one of the places you can try my hot sauces,” Arms says. “Strega chef/owners Katie Gabert and Sam Sandrin have used PepperRich Farm peppers in some of their pasta dishes.”  

After losing in-person sales during the COVID pandemic, Arms plans to sell hot sauce at local farmers markets this season; the sauces are also sold at Lion’s Tooth Bookstore/Café in Bayview and at pepperrichfarm.com.    

While Arms continues to build PepperRich Farm, his ultimate dream is to share his pepper passion through a bigger platform,

“I have an idea for a show, Pepper Hunter, where I go to little markets in South America for peppers and then go to people's backyards and see what they grow,” Arms explains

Joan Elovitz Kazan is a Milwaukee-based freelancer who frequently writes about food and other feature topics. While Kazan prefers writing about food than cooking it, her husband, three kids and dog would argue that she’s a pretty decent cook, too.

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