Though you might not notice unless you know where to look around Denver, chile season is just about to peak two hours south of the city, in Pueblo.

There, dozens of farmers are harvesting late-season red peppers, roasting them at roadside stands and filling the air with pungent smoke before packing chiles up in knotted bags for travelers.

Or they’re chopping and freezing chiles for year-round cooking, or shipping them off fresh to grocery stores and restaurants, as close to home as Colorado Springs and as far away as Kansas, Idaho and Utah.

“Sorry, New Mexico: Pueblo peppers and their incarnations beat all of your chiles,” wrote Gustavo Arellano, a former Westword columnist and current Los Angeles Times writer, in an article last year for Eater.

Pueblo and its chile farmers will hold their 25th annual Chile and Frijoles Festival Sept. 20-22. It draws some 150,000 tourists from around the world, according to the Pueblo Chamber of Commerce.

But just 100 miles north, in Denver, you’ll find only scattered traces of all the Colorado chile excitement.

Around town, signs for New Mexican Hatch chile stands — not to mention promotional billboards — are everywhere. Across local and even farm-to-table restaurants, it’s surprisingly difficult to spot a Pueblo chile this time of year, or anytime, on menus.

“(Denver) has been a very hard market to break into, and I’m not sure why,” said Dalton Milberger, 24, president of the Pueblo Chile Growers Association and a second-generation chile farmer in Pueblo. “I think it’s more that they don’t know it’s available to them,” he said, standing among 50 acres of chile crops, shrugging.

Milberger and his father, Shane, grow their Pueblo chiles (half an acre organic) along with 25 other chile varieties, and they farm around 400 acres more of vegetables, corn, hay and pinto beans, east of downtown Pueblo along US Highway 50.

Around 25 percent of Milberger Farms’ chile crop is sold to Whole Foods stores in the region, while the rest go to other grocery stores and restaurants and sell at the farm’s store, the younger Milberger said. But there are still plenty to go around, he added.

In 2015, the Milbergers and other area farmers came together to form the Pueblo Chile Growers Association to promote their chiles across the nation and to be able to stand a chance against the behemoth Hatch pepper. (Pueblo’s chile output is just 5% of that in New Mexico.) But progress has been slow.

“A lot of these farms are multi-generation, and everybody doesn’t have the same outlook as far as working together to get the word out,” Milberger said of his organization’s struggles.

RELATED: What is the difference between Hatch and Pueblo chiles?

To help guide a larger vision, Visit Pueblo vice president Donielle Kitzman got involved with the growers association shortly after its formation.

“The problem with any of these associations, where they’re farmer-led, it’s all new to them,” she said. “You have a group of competing farms that now had to align with each other with one common goal of promoting the brand of Pueblo chile, not just their individual farm stand.”

Still, the Pueblo brand has gained more awareness in recent years, starting with Whole Foods’ decision to sell Pueblo chiles throughout the Rocky Mountain region, and continuing with the seasonal “chile wars” that pop up from Colorado’s and New Mexico’s governors on social media, to the websites of national news outlets.

“Certainly the rivalry between Hatch and Pueblo has done nothing but bolster the identity of the chile pepper,” Kitzman said.

The identity of the chile pepper is so distinct from the 500 miles separating Hatch, N.M., and Pueblo, according to Colorado State University crop scientist Michael Bartolo, that “it’s kind of like apples to oranges; it’s hard to compare them.”

A Pueblo chile — named Mirasol, for the upward-reaching (rather than downward-hanging) fruit that grows “facing the sun” — is typically meatier than the long and slender Hatch. And it’s more pungent, Bartolo said, due to higher levels of the chemical capsaicin, which determines a chile pepper’s heat index.

Working from CSU’s Arkansas Valley Research Center, Bartolo changed the life-course of the Pueblo chile nearly 30 years ago.

In the late 1980s, shortly after his uncle, Harry Mosco, a Pueblo farmer, died, Bartolo received a gift in the form of one seed bag from his aunt, Mosco’s wife. The scientist decided to plant his family’s seeds for fun, and what he discovered that first season was “one plant that was kind of unique.”

It bore a bigger fruit and had a thicker skin that seemed sturdy for roasting. Bartolo continued to select the strongest plants from his uncle’s seeds, season after season, until after six years or so he decided to give some seeds to other local farmers.

Now, Bartolo’s Mosco chile is grown across some 30 Pueblo farms, he estimates, and it has become synonymous with the Pueblo pepper.

“This idea of saving seeds — done for hundreds if not thousands of years — has fallen by the wayside with the use of hybrid seeds,” Bartolo said.

His peppers are varietals of the same chiles that have been growing in this region for more than a century. They likely originated in Mexico and were carried north, through New Mexico and Colorado, where some villages have been growing the same “landrace” chile varieties for generations.

Most recently in Pueblo, he developed the Giadone Mirasol strain, another variety that’s about twice as hot, on average, as the Mosco.

On the Scoville scale, which measures pepper heat, Pueblo chiles can stretch from 5,000 to 20,000 heat units. The Mosco chile usually clocks in at 5,000 units, while the Giadone sits nice and fiery around 10,000 units. Hatch chiles mainly fall in the 500- to 3,000-unit range.

“The Pueblo chile is a much bolder chile, and it has a little more variable swing on the heat index,” Kitzman, with Visit Pueblo, said. “On the same plant, one pepper could be much warmer than another, and Hatch is much more consistently mild in flavor. Not everybody can handle that variation in heat index within a recipe.”

In Pueblo they can. At restaurants such as Gray’s Coors Tavern, locals and visitors alike partake in the town’s most well-known chile dish: a cheeseburger smothered in red or green chile and referred to appropriately as “The Slopper.”

Over at Bingo Burger, chef and owner Richard Warner created something novel as a special for Pueblo’s chile festival one year. Its success caused him to refocus from fine dining to a burger shop, where the beef patties are mixed with diced red chiles and fried up for a subtle, uniform heat across every bite.

A few miles down the road from Pueblo, past the farm stands along Highway 50, hot-sauce maker Jolene Collins has just set up shop for her Jojo’s Sriracha brand inside an abandoned middle-school building in nearby Boone. It’s in the process of being repurposed as a food hub for the Arkansas Valley Organic Growers association.

Since founding Jojo’s in 2012, Collins first relocated from Brooklyn to Denver and now to Pueblo, where she’s closest to the farmers behind her product’s main ingredient.

“This is the first place where it’s just such a good fit,” she said of Pueblo. “It’s like chile nerds everywhere.”

Collins interacts directly with her organic chile and garlic farmer Dan Hobbs (he’s behind the food hub’s creation, along with farmer Doug Wiley). And unlike many food business owners, she gets to oversee the process from farm to jar. Her product is made from just chiles, garlic, salt, coconut palm sugar and vinegar.

When she makes each batch, Collins says she’s crafting various combinations of heat and flavor, across green, red and unicorn (mixed chile) blends. She called her very first sriracha “OG” (original gangster) while another became “OGX” (slightly spicier), and the latest is “PFH” (think about it).

In Pueblo, when you talk to makers like Collins, chefs like Warner and seed scientists like Bartolo, the trend seems to be pushing hotter and hotter.

But in Denver? Maybe this trend just hasn’t reached us yet.

For people who don’t know it, Collins describes Pueblo as “the last frontier of Colorado.” Along with recently being named the 10th hottest housing market in the country, it’s surrounded by 20,000 acres of fertile farmland and has an opportunity to brand itself as the next state-favorite produce region, in the likes of Rocky Ford and Palisade.

Of course, this all comes back to Pueblo’s chiles.

“With so much growth and change, I think there’s somewhat of a longing to hold on to historical connections and roots with our food,” Bartolo said. “Things like chiles … kind of help us keep a little more grounded against the urban sprawl that we have to face every day.”

Pueblo chiles on the menu

Head to these restaurants around Denver for a taste of Pueblo:

Beast + Bottle owner and chef Paul Reilly uses Pueblo chiles in a dressing over Bibb lettuce salad at his 17th Street restaurant.

Chef Daniel Asher uses the local chiles across his menu at Boulder’s River and Woods restaurant — in his salsa verde served with meatloaf, roasted atop poutine and also smothered over the breakfast burrito.

And at Old Major, executive chef Sarah Khosravani uses Pueblo chiles in her grilled ham, cheese and chile sandwich on the Highland restaurant’s lunch and bar menus. “I actually grew up with Hatch chiles,” Khosravani, who’s from El Paso, said. “But when I moved to Colorado and discovered the Pueblo, I found it to be just as good, and since it’s local, that’s our driver for using them in our kitchen.”

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