[daunting music]
- [Ed] Your hands will start shaking.
Your heart will start going faster.
You get sweaty, your eyes water, your skin flushes.
The mucus membranes run,
so you get snot pouring out your nose.
- [Narrator] Ed Currie is the evil genius
who brought the world the Carolina reaper.
The world's hottest hot pepper.
The Carolina reaper is a beautiful fruit
that is hiding a package of evil inside
and it's the hottest pepper in the world.
I get to hurt people from all over the world
every single day.
I may have a little sadistic streak to me.
- [Narrator] The aptly named Currie
has been hyper-focused on one thing since 1981,
hot peppers.
More specifically, he is obsessed with crossbreeding
different peppers to make them as hot as possible
by upping their level of capsaicin,
the ingredient that gives hot pepper their heat.
The Carolina reaper is an absolute capsaicin beast.
- I made the Carolina reaper by breeding
a pepper I got from a doctor from Pakistan
with a pepper I got from a coworker at the bank
from the island of St. Vincent.
I was just trying to raise capsinoids levels
in the naga that I got from Pakistan
to see if I could get one of the sub-apsinoids to go higher
and we got the Carolina reaper.
It was a gift from God.
- [Woman] In 2013, Currie's favorite pepper
was officially crowned the spiciest pepper in the world
by the Guinness Book of World Records,
but how spicy is that?
- Everybody knows what a jalapeno is.
They run between 3,000 and 5,000 scoville heat units.
Thai chili is maybe 20,000 scoville.
Habanero is on average, maybe 100,000.
Then you get into ghost peppers.
They're really about 600,000.
Then you got the Carolina reaper
coming in at 1.642 million scoville heat units on average
with a peak heat of 2.5 million scoville heat units.
We're talking roller skates to space shuttle, you know?
- [Narrator] Now, remember that peppers are organic things
with lots of variation, including spice and size.
For example, jalapenos tend to range from 3,000
to 8,000 or more scoville heat units
and are generally twice as big as a reaper,
which themselves range from 1.5 million to 2.5 million.
And heat is a subjective thing, but still,
let's try to put it into perspective.
Roughly 10 spicy habaneros
hold the same amount of capsaicin as one reaper.
You'd need about 60 serranos to match a Carolina reaper.
And it'd take 600 jalapenos, give or take a couple hundred,
to match the amount of capsaicin in one mind,
equivalently-sized Carolina reaper.
- Carolina reaper does not do the same thing
to me anymore because my body is used to it,
so I need something hotter.
[pepper crunching] So good.
- [Narrator] Currie has bred almost 500
distinct pepper plants,
constantly trying to push the level of heat
one pepper can hold and he's not finished.
- Yeah, we're still breeding peppers
that are hotter and hotter and hotter.
I used to think that about 4.3 million
was the hottest you can get a pepper.
I've already proven myself wrong
and science has now proven
that we can get a lot hotter than that.
- [Narrator] While the Carolina reaper
still holds the Guinness World Record,
Currie says his Pepper X is even hotter.
It's the main ingredient in this fiery hot sauce,
the hottest in the hit YouTube series Hot Ones.
To create new super hot peppers,
Currie uses a pretty straightforward
crossbreeding technique,
interbreeding two different pepper plants,
hoping to combine attractive traits
into a brand new plant.
It's the same method human use
to turn a gray wolf into the Chihuahua, the bulldog,
and even the poodle,
except plants need a little more help.
- [Ed] It's a 50/50 crap shoot
but we look for a really nice flower
and we use these paintbrushes to go around the flower
and pull the pollen out
and then when you have enough of the pollen,
you go to the female and you paint that pollen
onto the flowers and then you do this process
over and over and over again.
- [Narrator] It takes patience to create a new breed.
A lot of patience.
Plants in the first generation
tend to carry a lot of their parents' traits.
Breeders can start to tease our specific traits
in the subsequent generations
through selective breeding.
It generally takes about eight to 10 generations
to stabilize a hybridization
and give predictable traits and consistent fruit.
- [Ed] If we get desirable traits
like high indices of any of the capsinoids
we're looking for,
then we'll keep on going on the cross.
If it doesn't work, then we gotta start all over again
and it's a very time-consuming, very long process.
- [Narrator] Currie grew up gardening,
so this level of botanical knowledge
is second nature to him.
- My mother was a master gardener
and she taught me how to breed plants
and irises, lilies, you know,
different things up in Michigan
so that's where I literally got that
and I took it to the dope level.
I started trying to crossbreed pot when I was younger
and it was dangerous [laughs].
- [Narrator] So he decided to grow something else
and landed on super hot peppers,
like the Carolina reaper.
- I was on a search for hotter things than I could get
and this was a Vietnamese restaurant
that specialized in spicy food
and I asked them to make it the hottest they could
and they said no, no, no,
and I said yeah, yeah, yeah,
and when I ate it, I got a rush.
I literally got a rush like I was taking some dope.
- [Narrator] Currie has been sober for over 20 years now
but he says that a natural high has kept him going,
producing and eating hotter and hotter peppers.
- When I first ate the reaper, it knocked me to my knees.
I was like three years clean.
I hadn't felt that feeling in a long time.
I knew that was hot.
You get this euphoric feeling
and that's your body trying to overtake the pain
that the chemical reaction is giving
and eventually, the endorphin rush overtakes the pain
and when you get into the higher pain,
you get the more pleasure so it's just choosing the dragon.
- [Narrator] As Currie's tolerance grew and grew,
his pepper-growing hobby ballooned
into a full-on all-encompassing lifestyle.
- When I met my wife,
she wouldn't have anything to do with me.
She called me a funny little man.
When I asked for her number, she said not a chance in hell,
but I heard she liked salsa
and I was growing tomatoes and peppers and stuff
so I whipped up some peach mango salsa
and she talked to me.
We got married nine months later.
So I put like 1,400 plants in her backyard
and we were making hot sauce and salsa
with what we weren't using in breeding.
- [Narrator] And that salsa won her over.
She convinced him to start selling his sauces
instead of giving them away
so he started Pucker Butt Pepper Company
and in 2012, he quit his high-paying job in banking
to dive head first into spicy peppers.
- Approximately 4:00 a.m. every morning,
I start sorting through those peppers
to sort for grade, to sort for color,
and I separate them into the mash peppers,
the seeding peppers, the ones I wanna eat
and the ones we're gonna dry.
- [Narrator] Currie grows peppers.
He makes hot sauce, he makes salsa.
He makes mash and mustard.
He dries the whole fruit and makes beef jerky.
He even saves the seeds.
- Last count, I think there was 3,800 seeds in my office,
different types,
and we got more stashed all over the place.
I think we're around 7,000 seeds.
Different types of seeds.
Some of those are gonna be for sale to the public.
Some of them will never be on sale to the public.
Some go to the medical community.
And some are just 'cause I'm an addict
and I can't stop, you know,
I can't stop collecting 'em.
- [Narrator] The capsaicin is a strong, strong irritant
to our skin, eyes and lungs,
and there's so much of it in reapers
that caution is needed while handling them.
- When people are seeding, they wear double gloves
because the oil inside the peppers
will actually eat through nitro gloves
but that's not because they're protecting their hands.
My hands are on fire all the time.
That's 'cause they're protecting
the soft parts of their body.
They take the gloves off before they go to the bathroom.
See, where I was touching those peppers earlier
is on fire right now.
The air is actually spicy.
- [Narrator] For more than 100 years,
peppers have been measured using the scoville scale.
It was started by Wilbur Scoville in 1912.
Originally, the level of spice
was determined by five individual taste testers,
but today, the level of heat is measured in a lab
and so Currie knows exactly how dangerous his pappers are.
- It was subjective then, now it's analytial.
Everybody uses the same process.
No one's tastes are involved.
If you put my wife and had her eat a reaper,
she would tell you it's 10 million scoville.
If you have me eat it, I'd say, eh, it's 100,000.
You know, that's subjective.
The machine doesn't lie.
It measures everything in the same way.
- [Narrator] Curries works with a local chemist
to find out exactly how much capsaicin
is packed into his peppers.
- We grind those peppers and emulsify them
and then we pump them through a machine
called an HPLC or high performance liquid chromatograph
and that measures the different properties
that are in a pepper.
You can go for the tannins, the capsinoids,
flavanoidS, coloring agents,
whatever you wanna do.
We analyze all of it.
There's a very specific math equation
that put the area of the peaks in
to come up with the scoville heat units.
- [Narrator] All this obsession with heat
might seem crazy, but it couldn't come at a better time.
America's appetite for spice
is getting bigger and bigger every year.
US hot sauce industry saw 150% growth from 2000 to 2014
with steady increases since then.
Today, it's a $1.5 billion industry in the United States.
- I believe it's because
of the changing demographic of America.
They brought with them food that we never had before.
I mean, when I was growing up,
there were no Thai restaurants.
There were no African restaurants, Caribbean restaurants,
Indian restaurants.
But as the demographic of America changed,
they brought in their food cultures
and we got exposed to that.
- [Narrator] And then there's the internet
where people post painful videos
of themselves eating peppers constantly.
- Hot sauce is now a mainstream thing.
People are always doing some crazy stunt with it.
This didn't happen 10 years ago.
- For those of you out there
that want to eat a whole Carolina reaper,
I highly recommend that you do not do it.
- [Narrator] Despite these warnings, business is good,
and Currie gets to spend most of his days
surrounded by what he loves the most.
- I get out of bed at 3:30 in the morning
just to go and play with peppers
and I stay in there all day long,
on fire eating them all day long.
This is my happy place.
[light music]