It's not the kind of sales pitch you would hear in many food shops, but as he lifts an innocent-looking bottle from the shelf, Nick Moore chuckles, "Try this one – I've seen it make grown men cry."

The 43-year-old from Portishead is excitedly scouring the shelves of bottled chilli sauces, apparently eager to find the one that will cause me the most pain. Journalism never tasted this spicy. Welcome to the surreal world of Dr Burnorium's Hot Sauce Emporium.

Subtlety hasn't been the driving factor in the design for Nick's new shop, which enjoys a commanding position at the main entrance to St Nicholas' Market in Bristol.

Brightly coloured signs indicate the range of sauces on offer, with those on the far left delivering a relatively mild spicy kick to your supper.

They build up in scale, all the way to the 10+++ range on the far right of the shop, which promise to give you an insight into the final moments of "spontaneous human combustion" victims.

"I've designed the shop so that you can stroll from mild to wild," Nick laughs.

With name's like 100 Per Cent Pain and Colon Cleaner, it's hard to know which product to try first. It's certainly a world away from Paul Newman's cook-in sauces.

Nick says the new stall, which is setting Corn Street ablaze, is the country's first "hot shop" devoted entirely to chilli sauces.

Nick is an enthusiastic aficionado, with an intimate knowledge of all 80 product lines he currently stocks, and little remaining in the way of tastebuds.

"I was converted to chilli sauce back in the mid-1990s," he says, with hushed reverence, like St Paul recalling his journey to Damascus. He reaches for a bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce.

"This little bottle changed my life," he says. "I tried this 20 years ago, and from the moment it hit my tongue and I enjoyed the explosion of flavour, I knew I'd never think about food in the same way again.

"Food that doesn't contain chilli sauce is just plain bland," he adds. "Most of the food in this country just doesn't taste of anything. I don't go anywhere without a little bottle of chilli sauce. If I find myself eating out, I pull it out of my pocket and sprinkle it over my grub, no matter what it is."

Back in the Nineties, Nick was so inspired by the revolution taking place on his tongue that he set up his own catering business – selling comforting spicy nosh to local workers from a van on the Avonmouth Trading Estate.

"I spent five years serving up dishes like chilli con carne – always with that chilli sauce twist," he says. "It became very popular with the guys working down there, and I sold a few lines of chilli sauce by the bottle, too.

"But 16 years ago, I decided to focus more closely on the chilli sauce, so I set myself up with a weekly stall in the Corn Street farmer's market and a website, from which I was able to sell chilli sauce to fans around the country.

"The business went from strength to strength over the years, but I was limited by the size of the stall to about 45 varieties of sauce. It also meant having to set the stall up and take it down again at the end of the day.

"When this indoor stall became available, I jumped at the chance to take it on, because it is much more of a permanent shop – I've been able to build shelves and cabinets, and double the range of sauces I can offer."

Though still not as popular in the UK as it is in the United States, Nick says the chilli sauce culture is developing a growing following.

"It really is massive in the States, and has been for years," he says. "My wholesaler, which is in America, sells more than 2,500 varieties of chilli sauce. I've made it something of a labour of love to taste most of them, and whittle them down to the ultimate 80 varieties, which I think the people of Bristol will love.

"It's not all about the intensity of the heat," he adds. "There is a great complexity to the different flavours that the different sauces offer.

"Sometimes you want one of the milder varieties, just to lift a dish, and sometimes you want a tiny amount of the really spicy stuff to set the whole dish on fire.

"I do get a lot of customers who just see it as some kind of challenge to see how hot they can go, but that's certainly not what it's all about."

That said, Nick proudly displays some of the world's hottest chilli sauces in a special case in the new shop.

"The really hot ones are not to be messed with lightly," he says.

"Take this one for example," he continues, picking up a bottle. "This is Mad Dog Midnight Special. This is seriously hot. If you took a teaspoon of this, you would probably end up in hospital. When you get to this scale, you need to taste it in the tiniest quantities – a dab on the end of a cocktail stick is enough.

"We measure the heat of chilli sauces on something called the Schoville scale. To give you some idea of how it works, Tabasco sauce – which most people find rather hot – is about 2,500 on the scale. The Mad Dog Midnight Special measures two million on the Schoville scale."

Before I have chance to politely decline the offer, Nick has opened the bottle, and is preparing a sample of the sauce on the end of a cocktail stick. He applies the sauce extremely carefully, as if he's conducting some kind of dangerous chemistry experiment. Which, I fear, he probably is. I nervously dab the cocktail stick on my tongue, like a bomb disposal expert cutting a wire. Only, at first, nothing seems to happen.

Sure, the taste is spicy, but it is by no means unpleasant. But just as I start to think this, something begins to erupt in my mouth.

"Some people have described it as lying under a Nasa rocket during take-off, with your tongue out," Nick says.

The burning builds gradually, before exploding in one massive nuclear reaction – it feels as if there should be a pair of cartoon-style mushroom clouds emerging from my ears. Nick watches my face like a doctor. I imagine I'm turning an interesting shade of purple. The flavours burn around my mouth, and they just don't go away. Five; 10; 15 minutes later and the burning on my tongue is just as intense. You have to wonder how such a tiny amount of chilli sauce could have this sort of effect.

"They use the hottest kinds of chilli," Nick explains. "And they compound the heat by cramming thousands and thousands into each bottle of sauce.

"Once you have tried them once, it really will change the way you think about food."

Dr Burnorium's Hot Sauce Emporium is now open at St Nicholas' Market, Corn Street, Bristol. For more information, visit www.hotsauceemporium.co.uk