Move over Carolina Reaper, there is a new king in town. Pepper X is in the Guinness Book Of World Records as the hottest pepper on the planet. Ed Currie, founder of PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina, created the tiny, inferno-hot beast which is now the king of the hill.
Developed in 1912, the Scoville Scale is used to calculate the intensity of a pepper by measuring the concentration of its heat-wielding chemical compounds called capsaicinoids.
A jalapeño measures just 2,000 SHUs, the previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper, averages 1.64 million SHUs. Pepper X measures a whopping 2.693 million Scoville Heat Units.
Currie said: "That scale's logarithmic, so it's more like three times hotter than a Reaper."
When asked to describe the feeling of eating a whole Pepper X, Currie said: "There's an intense burn that happens immediately. Then your head kind of feels like, 'Oh no! What's going on?' And then your body just starts reacting.
"You get it in your arms, you get it in your chest. It has no real throat burn like the Reaper, but that comes on later when you're in pain."