Pepper X Unseats Carolina Reaper as World’s Hottest Pepper
The new Guinness World Record holder is three times hotter than its predecessor.
Photo courtesy of Heatonist, Julian Bracero
Shove over, Carolina Reaper. There’s a new world’s hottest pepper. And it was created by the same guy!
Ed Currie, the hot pepper breeder who brought the world the Carolina Reaper, which has held the Guinness World Record for hottest chili pepper since 2013, has bred a new pepper that is three times hotter than its famous predecessor.
On October 9, the Guinness Book of World Records officially named Currie’s new pepper, Pepper X, which he spent a decade perfecting, the world’s hottest chili pepper. While the Carolina Reaper officially clocks in at 1.64 million Scoville Heat Units, the Pepper X notches an average of 2.69 million units — hotter not only than police pepper spray (1.6 million units) but also than bear spray (2.2 million units), notes the Associated Press.
Currie, who is based in South Carolina, tells the AP that Pepper X offers “immediate, brutal heat.”
After he ate an entire Pepper X, becoming one of only five people to do so, “I was feeling the heat for three-and-a-half hours,” he says. “Then the cramps came. Those cramps are horrible. I was laid out flat on a marble wall for approximately an hour in the rain, groaning in pain.”
While the Carolina Reaper is bright red and kinda lumpy looking with a pointy end that looks like a tail and a sweet flavor beneath the heat, the Pepper X is yellow-green and has an earthy flavor following the heat (assuming you can taste anything following the heat).
Currie says he created Pepper X by cross breeding a Carolina Reaper with a “pepper that a friend of mine sent me from Michigan that was brutally hot.”
And while the Carolina Reaper is grown by many and touted on a ton of products, Currie intends to keep Pepper X a little closer to his vest, profiting off it with his own hot pepper sauce company, PuckerButt.
As for any potential danger from eating hot peppers, Currie advises working up to it to “build up a tolerance.”
He has also hinted that he may be working on something even hotter, telling the AP that the Pepper X is “not the pinnacle” of his hot-pepper-breeding career.
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