If you need some high-quality sausage in your life, there’s one place you should get to: Eastern Market. It can be easy to miss if you’re wading through the crowds on a busy weekend, but the market’s South Hall is a veritable sausage mecca. Home to an absolutely dizzying array of tubular meat, there’s nary an animal that hasn’t been ground up and stuffed into a casing.

South Hall is home to a number of different sausage slinging vendors, including Canales Delicatessen, Canales Quality Meats, Market Poultry, and Union Meat. While Market Poultry specializes in turkey sausage, the remaining vendors cover the rest of the barnyard, from chicken, pork, beef, lamb, venison, rabbit, and duck sausage. As far as style, these tube meats hail from all over the globe, including the quintessential D.C. half-smoke, chorizo, boudin blanc, sweet and hot Italian, knockwurst, and even blood sausage.

With so many tube meats, how does one begin to choose? I embarked on a Tube Meat Week mission to try all the sausages in Eastern Market, only to realize that my goal was nearly impossible. There’s just too much sausage. After pacing around South Hall, I settled on a variety of sausages from Canales Quality Meats and Canales Delicatessen (the owners are brothers). Below are the results of my unscientific taste test.

The Winners
For a nice a twist on an Italian sausage, try the pork, fennel, and whiskey rendition from Canales Quality Meats. This sausage strikes the right balance between salt, smoke, and sweet from the licorice-y fennel seed. Juicy and with a nice snap, it’s perfect on a bun with a hefty squeeze of mustard.

As soon as I saw duck sausage in the cooler at Canales Quality Meats, I knew I had to have it. Stuffed with a mixture of duck, duck liver, and armagnac, this sausage put all the others to shame. Utter. Shame. This is the sausage of kings: incredibly rich, brothy, and oozing the foodie equivalent of liquid gold (a.k.a. duck fat). Too many of these will probably bring on a case of gout, but they’re completely worth it.

The Italian herb and white wine chicken sausage from Canales Delicatessen was the real surprise of the bunch. With a firm, bouncy texture somewhat reminiscent of Vietnamese pork roll, the flavors were pleasantly delicate and refined. Wine and herbs add complexity without overpowering the taste of chicken, resulting in a sausage fit for a fancy dinner. It was the un-sausage of the group, but in a good way.

The Losers
Oh, the tube meats I wanted to love, but, alas, could not. Despite a fervent devotion to lamb chops, Canales’ lamb sausage was distinctly gamey, a bit dry, and turned an unappetizing gray color when cooked. Their take on an Asian BBQ pork sausage held much promise, but I was again disappointed. The meat only had the faintest taste of Chinese bbq pork, and the texture was oddly crumbly in the center. The chicken habanero sausage, on the other hand, was plump and moist but tasted mostly of habanero and burning.

DCist’s Quick and Dirty Eastern Market Sausage Shopping Guide

Canales Delicatessen
Best if: You love international tube meats
Canales Deli carries many European varieties of sausage, including all manner of ‘wursts (knockwurst, bratwurst, weisswurst), chorizo, and morcilla (Spanish blood sausage). The deli also has a good selection of chicken sausage as well as New Orleans specialties andouille and boudin sausage. Tubes starts at $5.49/lb.

Canales Quality Meats
Best if: You like eating unusual animals in tube form
Canales Quality Meats has the biggest sausage selection of them all, including the more uncommon lamb, rabbit, and duck sausage. They also make a number of their sausages in house, including both types of Italian pork and chicken sausage, chicken habanero, bratwurst, and lamb. Sausages start at $4.99/lb.

Market Poultry
Best if: You love sausage and your arteries
Market Poultry is the only vendor with a really wide variety of turkey products. This includes a sizable selection of turkey sausages in flavors like apple, raspberry maple, feta and spinach, pepper and onion, and andouille for $5.99/lb.

Union Meat
Best if: You want meat in a tube right now
Looking at all that sausage can really get one’s appetite going. While Union Meats may not have the variety of some of the other vendors, one very important thing sets them apart: immediate gratification. Union Meats sells freshly grilled sausages and hot dogs on a bun so you can grab a quick lunch to fuel the rest of your market shopping.