Breaking news coming out of the competitive chile pepper growing world: Ed Currie of Rock Hill, South Carolina has been certified by the Guinness Book Of World Records as being the grower of the hottest chile pepper on earth.
Currie’s Carolina Reaper chile (known formally as “Higher Power, pot number 22, plant B.”) clocked in with 1,569,300 Scoville Heat Units.
As you may know, the Scoville system was developed by pharmacist Wilbur Scoville (seen above) in 1912 to establish a common metric for determining the heat of an individual pepper. These days, gas chromatography is used, then the numbers are converted into Scoville units using a mathematical formula. Winthrop University conducted the tests on Currie’s winner.
Chile peppers are serious business. And big money; last year Currie harvested 15 million pepper pods, producing about one million pounds of peppers.
The deposed king of the chiles was the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion grown by Jim Duffy of Refining Fires Chile Company.
Of course there was an entirely separate groups of claimants to the title who maintained that their Butch T Trinidad Scorpion was the genuine wearer of the crown.
How hot is this Carolina Reaper? One internet scribe compared eating one to “like being face-fucked by Satan.”
The timeless appeal of chiles.
Grow your own
– Refining Fire Chiles
– The Hippy Seed Company
– Old Barn Nursery
I am thinking the reason there is debate between the Butch T fans and the Reaper fans is because it is not all about DNA, not at all. Sure, the Carolina Reaper will almost always be hotter than the Ghost Pepper because the Ghost Pepper genetics don’t get it close to the heat of the Reaper. But the Butch T and the Carolina Reaper are close enough that soil nutrients, sunlight, water, and other factors probably make one batch of Butch T hotter than a batch of Reapers and visa versa.
Hey Pepperman
Let me know if y’all need anybody to run tests on some of those seeds in the rich southeast Louisiana soil