Seeking Advice on Spicy Beer

First of by Spicy I mean "hot sauce" spicy. I know this sounds very strange, but as I am a lover of beer and also a lover of hot sauce, I figured why not combine the two.

I got this idea after reading the extreme brewing book by Sam Calagione. In this book it mentioned "Don't be afraid to let your freak flag fly." So I decided to give this a try.

I was thinking of starting with a Belgian ale type recipe since those are "spice" spicy by nature and then adding a bit of habanero or ghost peppers to add the "hot" spice.

My questions are:
When should I add this to the brew? during the boil, at knock-out, in the secondary?
Also, should I add diced peppers, or roasted peppers, or use actual hot sauce?
Also, and perhaps most importantly would the capsaicin adversely affect the yeast health?

Here's a good article, below. Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing also discusses this.

http://byo.com/component/resource/article/864-hot-hot-hot-brewing-with-chili-peppers

not that strange lots of people make chili beer.

you have 3 options on when to add the chilies. you can add them during the boil or knockout, during the secondary, or one chili in each bottle at bottling time. each will give you a different level of hotness i would suggest experimenting and finding out which works best for you. if you go with the one chili per bottle the hotness will increase with time to a point then level off. and of course the level of hotness will depend on what chilies you use.

i would suggest using actual peppers. again this is up to you. you definitely need to split them so the seeds can get to the beer and release their hotness.

since i've heard of people putting chili peppers in the primary i would say no they don't hurt the yeast. just monitor the PH and keep it above 3.7 or so.

I have not gotten into All grain or partial mash brewing yet. Does anyone have an extract with specialty steeping grains recipe for one of these beers?

Brew a recipe you already like, from a kit if you prefer, something straight forward like a pale ale, then when you bottle, put a pepper (slit as suggested above) in each bottle.