Brussels. Early morning. The streets are slick and grey and Thibault is pedalling fast. Once a bike messenger hammering a hundred kilometres a day through the city rain, he now channels that same energy into SWET, his small-batch hot sauce company. SWET began as a label for Thibault’s side projects – skate zines, handmade bags, experiments in design. The word stuck and became a philosophy: work harder, make it count. SWET is handmade, uncompromising and built on the belief that what you sweat is what you get. “For me, it’s a fundamental value: pushing yourself and putting in the work. And that comes directly from cycling,” he says.

SWET makes sauces the hard way — or maybe the only honest way. Locally grown chillies and seasonal ingredients chopped by hand. No purées, no powders, no shortcuts. “I’ve always eaten very spicy food. And when you cook spicy, you cook a lot for yourself — it’s very selfish. When you have people over, it can be a real problem. I sometimes had dinners where my guests ate bread because the food was too spicy. And so I started consuming hot sauce, because the principle of hot sauce is that it’s on the table, and everyone eats the same thing, but the person who wants more heat adds it themselves,” he explains. “So I started buying hot sauces here and there as I travelled, trying to find something I liked – something healthy, to begin with, with a good heat and above all a flavour balance. I never found it until I started to make sauce myself.”

Thibault currently owns 16 bikes: cycling is as much of an obsession as chillies and the connection between bike and bottle runs deep. “For me right now, the bike is therapy. I’ve ridden in a lot of different ways over my life — I’ve always been on a bike — but at the moment, it’s that therapeutic side that matters most. I’ll take my cargo bike and my dog and head into the Soignes forest for forty kilometres of gravel. It’s not much, but it’s enough to completely escape.” When he rides, ideas simmer. “It calms me, takes me somewhere else in my head,” he says. “I also ride to ease stress, and, above all, to let ideas settle. I’ll take my fixed gear and ride fifty kilometres along the canal, and during that time, some of the rough ideas floating in my head start to take shape. When I get back, I’m calmer — and reassured — because I’ve sorted through what’s good, what’s not, and the decisions I need to make.”

Today, the SWET Factory is part workshop, part laboratory. It smells of vinegar, roasted garlic, and slow caramelising onions. The team, led by Mathieu, a former semi-pro cyclist, chops, stirs, cooks, bottles, labels. Every batch is made by hand. SWET’s range is divided into three main families: Essential, the everyday sauces; Limited, collaborations and seasonal one-offs that disappear as fast as they arrive; and Super Hot, the same recipes but dialled up to eleven. Hidden in the shadows is a fourth line: Dark — tiny fermentations made in two- to five-litre runs, released without fanfare, “only for people as crazy as we are".

Like a fixed-gear bike, SWET sauces are the product of radical simplicity: “use the best produce possible, and don’t compromise in transforming them,” Thibault says. “It’s what’s driven me since the start of SWET. And what I’m even more proud of is that the sauce I make today is often cheaper than other sauces that use low-quality ingredients – yet I make it in exactly the same way as when I was just making it for myself in my own kitchen. And the local aspect is really important to me. I think it’s ridiculous to bring chillies over from the other side of the world when they’re being grown around the corner. Not for everything, but as much as possible. The spices we use arrive whole, and we grind them by hand.” It’s the same obsessiveness and directness that defines his riding — stripped down, honest and a little brutal. No excess, no escape from the effort.

There’s a shared ethic of obsession with Café du Cycliste. Not just in the kit, but in the shared love of detail, craft, and community. The collaboration between SWET and the Café isn’t just a product partnership — it’s a meeting of minds who sweat for their craft, on two wheels or in the kitchen. It’s not just about hot sauce. It’s a way of working, a way of moving a way of moving through the noise until only the real flavour remains.