Image of a hand holding up a small hot pepper while flames decorate background

Pepper X is small but mighty.

 Shutterstock.com (fire); Jeffrey Collins/AP Images (pepper) 

Taste the Fire!

Things are heating up! Guinness World Records recently crowned Pepper X the world’s hottest chili pepper. It’s nearly twice as spicy as the previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper, which held the top spot for 10 years. 

A pepper’s heat is determined using the Scoville scale. It measures spiciness in Scoville heat units (SHU). For example, jalapeño peppers score between 2,500 and 8,000 SHU. That’s nothing compared to the Reaper’s average score of 1.64 million SHU. But Pepper X comes in at about 2.69 million SHU—now that’s hot! 

Pepper X and the Reaper were both developed by Ed Currie. He warns people to think twice before trying Pepper X. 

“A Reaper usually takes me about a half hour to recover from,” Currie told Scientific American. “Pepper X took me five to six hours.”

Text-to-Speech