Spice has been a part of the human palate for thousands of years, and in countries like India, spicy food is a staple of what they eat daily.

It has only been in the last 100 years that truly spicy peppers have become more popular around the world, and right now we’re currently living with incredible hybrids that put natural peppers to shame.

For many, it’s not about adding heat to food – it’s often just about creating the best of the best. This is certainly the case with pepper experimenters around the world.

These are farmers and gardeners who combine different strains together to create something entirely new, always aiming to make their produce move up higher on the Scoville Scale

What is The Scoville Scale?

Developed by scientists and determined through chemistry, the Scoville Scale was created to give a scale to how hot a pepper is.

It’s impossible to subjectively understand how truly spicy a pepper is through taste, as often your mouth ends up feeling completely numb, and some people might be more tolerant to spice than others.

The answer, then, is the Scoville Scale, a system that uses real chemical analysis to compare different levels of spiciness.

For many pepper growers out there, getting to the top of this scale is the holy grail of growing peppers – and for those that grow the hottest in the world, it can mean a place in the Guinness World Records, as well as international fandom.

High ranked peppers can be so challenging to eat people even place bets on those seemingly brave enough to try at Australian betting sites in the hope that the potential guinea pig wimps out before taking a bite.

The Hottest Peppers In The World

The Scoville Scale starts with the average bell pepper, most commonly used for cooking and in your more common recipes.

While it can have a tiny bit of a bite, its comparison to other peppers means that it’s right at the bottom of the scale – with a Scoville rating of exactly zero. Peppers like the Jalapeño sit at around 5000 Scoville units, while Cayenne sits higher between 30000 and 50000.

Moving up the list, the Red Savina habanero, which is often used in hot sauces, holds between 350000 and 577000, often rounded off to around 600000. For many, the habanero is as hot as they can handle, but this only scrapes the surface.

For many years, the Carolina Reaper held the world recorder as the hottest pepper ever and it’s not one you’d find in many party snacks.

Its first award came in 2012, when the Reaper maintained an impressive 1569300 Scoville Units. They’ve since improved the strain, pushing it up to 2200000, making it the third hottest pepper in the world. Some liken eating the pepper to biting down on a flaming coal or taking a gulp of fresh, molten lava.

In second place on the list right now, and former reigning king of the Scoville Scale is Dragon’s Breath, a pepper grown in association with Nottingham Trent University in Wales.

Lastly, we have Pepper X, an experimental pepper being developed by the same man that created the Carolina Reaper.

As this is still an experimental plant, the Guinness World Records have yet to officially confirm it, but Ed Currie, the farmer in question, believes that the pepper sits at 3.18 million Scoville Units; making it the hottest pepper the world has ever seen.