As per the official Guinness World Records (GWR) website, this chilli has been grown by Ed Curry, who is the founder of America’s Puckerbutt Pepper Company.
He unveiled the chilli in an episode of the popular YouTube series ‘Hot Ones’, where the Scoville score was examined by Winthrop University in South Carolina by comparing it to other popular peppers and was found as the hottest chilli in the world. This means that till date such hot chilli has never been produced anywhere in the world.
Ed Currie holds a handful of his Pepper X peppers on Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023, in Fort Mill, S.C. The pepper is now the hottest pepper variety in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)
In general, the SHU of a common chilli is around 5,000, but this Pepper ‘X’ has the SHU of 2.69 million from which only one can imagine the spice quotient. It is so spicy that hardly anyone can eat it. To this end, Ed has spent more than 10 years in the field cross-breeding Pepper X’ with other hottest peppers to enhance its spiciness. As per official reports, Ed made more than 100 cross-breedings every year and hoped that in 10 years 1-2 chillies will meet the spiciness mark. He disclosed in a video of ‘First We Feast’, “When we started the cross, there were two peppers that I really loved the flavour of, but neither of them were gonna be hot enough for my tastes.”
It’s not the first time that Ed has won a Guinness World Record. He also holds a GWR for Carolina Reaper, whose average spiciness quotient is 1.64 million SHU. As per reports, this pepper has a green-yellow colour with unique curves and ridges. A New York post report suggests that when Ed tried this chilli for the first time, he had extreme cramps and was laid out flat on a marble wall for almost an hour in the rain, and that the heat feeling was there for three-and-a-half hours.