And you thought the ghost pepper was the hottest. Ha. The Carolina Reaper has been measured at more than 2,000,000 on the Scoville heat scale. The ghost pepper is a mere 1,000,000. Habaneros are 350,000, while jalapenos are a piddly 7,000.
He says he has spent about $12,000 to get the Guinness Book Of Records to call his pepper the hottest, presenting the organization with the evidence from Winthrop’s lab, where chemist Cliff Calloway has been testing exactly how hot the peppers are.
Calloway says that, on average, Currie’s pepper tests out to be the hottest in the world, having the chemical composition similar to pepper spray.
Interestingly, most of the YouTube videos showing people eating Carolina Reapers have “vomit alerts.” Like Edmund Hillary and Everest, they do it because it is there.