History of Papa Joe's BBQ Sauce
In the 1979’s, my father, Earl Morehead was living in Alpine, Texas. In Alpine there was a local Landscape Supply store called “Papa Joes” that was owned by Joe Reed. Joe’s store was well known back then because it was located near the railroad tracks, as well as the local 24 hour bus station and directly across the highway from the local school. Due to its location, Papa Joe’s was a common reference point. “The bus station is next to Papa Joe’s” or “Go about a 1/2 mile past Papa Joe’s”.
My father, seeing a great marketing opportunity, spoke with Joe about renting some extra space that he had as well as running the unused fuel pumps outside. They agreed on terms and my father started selling BBQ and gas out of Papa Joe’s store. Everyone loved it! He even had a special for the school children across the street. Every day the school children would cross the highway and for $.50 they could buy a hot dog and it came with free kool-aid, and then they would spend another quarter on the jukebox, pool tables or pinball machines.
The Local bars would shut down at midnight since they were unable to sell alcohol after midnight, so my father decided to keep his door open until 2am, bringing in everyone who wasn’t ready to go home at night for some billiards and bbq!
There was a company called, Decoty Coffee Company who aside from coffee, also sold bbq sauce. When the company went out of business, my father called the owner Robert, and asked him if he could get his recipe for his bbq sauce because it was the best he had ever had! Roberts response was, “do you have a pencil?” And he gave my dad the recipe.
Being at Papa Joe’s already and the great name recognition he would already have, my dad decided to call his sauce “Papa Joe’s BBQ Sauce”.
That is how our sauce began, but it didn’t take off from there. Time went by and life happens, the store closed down and my dad moved to Georgia and started a few new businesses and Papa Joe’s BBQ Sauce was only known by family and our small circles of friends.
I remember a day when I was around 14 years old, I smelled something throughout our entire house, it was the strongest smell of vinegar I had ever smelled in my life. I followed the smell to the basement carport and found that my dad and my brother Jeremy were making a HUGE batch of bbq sauce in what was the largest pot I had ever seen in my life. It had been years since he had made any, but he was excited to make a new batch with my brother, once they perfected it, we all got to try some for the first time, and we were all instantly hooked!
Sometime after that, Jeremy started smoking bbq.. A lot! He was learning and practicing and he absolutely loved it. He grills on multiple occasions at his shop for all of his employees and and he does a lot of charity fundraisers smoking and selling bbq pork butts. Any guesses on what sauce that he uses and also sells? That’s right, Papa Joe’s!
Bbq, grilling and smoking was always my dad and brothers “thing”. While I’m naturally good at grilling because of how I was raised, that was their thing and at the time my interest were on other things.
In my 30’s I decided to start a Tree Service and after a few years of tree removals, I began using the trees we removed to create side businesses like sawmilling, selling firewood, bbq firewood, bbq wood chunks and wood chips of all different flavors. I was able to get my products into a few local stores on displays that I built. Once I started to design my first display case (built with trees I removed and cut on the sawmill) I saw an opening, literally there was an opening on the shelf that needed to be filled.. It just clicked, I need to have this amazing BBQ sauce that has been a part of our family, on the shelves with my BBQ wood products!
That is where we are today. We’re setting up this website, we’re getting what is left of the original Papa Joe’s labeled bottles into stores and we will soon be ordering a new batch of BBQ sauce that will be labeled to match the rest of our wood products, while also having Papa Joe’s on the label as well. I’m making our BBQ sauce available to everyone so that we can share our story and our love for this sauce with everyone who is interested!