- [Excited Man] Carolina Reaper!
- [Camera Man] Go ahead and put it in your mouth.
- Go!
- [Narrator] Since the first time it was announced
to the public that we were growing these, there were
literally thousands of YouTube videos of people eating
Carolina Reapers all over the world.
I get a kick out of most of them.
- I made a huge mistake!
- Though it can be unpleasant, it's not a dangerous thing
to eat super hot peppers.
- Oh my God!
It's only getting worse!
(coughing)
- [Narrator] It's a chemical reaction your brain perceives
as heat so you will stop doing it.
- I'm gonna lay down.
This sucks.
(uptempo modern classical music)
- I'm “Smokin’” Ed Currie.
I created the Carolina Reaper.
I got into breeding peppers in college and just really
was interested in getting hotter and hotter peppers
once I tried them.
Guinness awarded me the world record for the hottest
pepper in November of 2013.
To breed these things, I crossed a ghost pepper
with a habanero, and what came out was this evil
looking pepper that had warts all over it,
blisters they call them.
And the first time I tasted it, it knocked me to my knees.
(uptempo flamenco guitar)
We get our peppers tested regularly at Winthrop University
by doctor Calloway in the chemistry lab.
All peppers are measured by Scoville heat units,
which tell you how hot the pepper is.
Bell peppers have zero Scoville heat units.
Jalapeño is about 5,000, a Serrano 20,000,
red habaneros 200,000, ghost peppers 600,000,
then you get to the Carolina Reaper,
which is 1,569,000 heat units, the hottest thing
in the world.
(playful string music)
When you eat the Carolina Reaper, the first sensation
you get is sweet, and then all of a sudden the heat
starts going, it's like burning, burning, burning!
Then the physiological stuff starts.
Your eyes will bloodshot, they just start
tearing up and watering, the skin flushes,
you start breathing hard, your metabolism
starts raising up.
Some people say it's like eating molten lava.
Others will say it's like licking the sun.
To me, it's like eating a charcoal briquette
and no matter what you do you cannot get that burn
out of the back of your mouth.
I mean it's crazy.
A lot of what I do is creative expression.
You look for traits in one pepper, and you look
for traits in another and you try to combine them
and keep both those traits.
There are other breeders who are trying to break our record,
but, uh, we've been holding unreleased peppers in our back pocket
that are twice as hot or more than the Carolina Reaper
that we could submit to Guinness at any time.
My perception of what the limits are of how hot
you can breed a pepper has changed as the science
has progressed over the years.
Just tell me something can't be done, I'm gonna figure
out a way to do it.