Expert in peppers from South Carolina Ed Currie already held the record for cultivating the hottest pepper in the world, the Carolina Reaper. However, it seems that he did not fear death and increased the stakes with Pepper X, his next record-breaker.
The Scoville heat scale, which rates hot peppers on a “heatmeter” based on their pungency, says it’s three times hotter than the Reaper.
To give you an indication of how spicy the pepper is, the average jalapeño pepper has 2,000–50,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU). The quantity of the new Pepper X is 2.69 million pieces. According to The Associated Press, bear spray has a SHU of 2.2 million, which is lower on the scale than that.
“I basically have a pepper addiction. I’ve had peppers for a while now.