2019 Pod reviews

I have 1 SRP with probably 6 nice pods on it. I picked 2 already off another plant just to see if it helped. Nothing ripe yet but very nice looking pods. I would say production is earlier than lemon drop or aji cito but i got a later start than last year. The weather did not cooperate earlier this year. I have 5 SRP total and all but 1 have bloomed really nice. The other is a late start in a hard pot i placed in more shade.
 
These are 5 days ago and they have grown since. IMO the stage is set for some really killer plants.
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I'll take your advice and move the pot of SRPs where there is a bit more shade. Out of all the peppers I've tried this year two varieties struggled a bit. The SRPs and the chocolate habs which was a surprise to me. The difference is the chocolate habs are sprouting new growth to compensate. The habs don't like extreme heat and they don't like cool nights. I mean seriously last night is was still 8c out. This spring has had cold nights for me so I am tempering expectations. When the temps are in a goldilocks zone the habs take off. The SRPs on the other hand haven't grown all that much and are struggling. I'm smack dab in the middle of the prairie. We got wind all the time. Even if the pods get better I can't see myself continuing this variety unless something drastic happens. The plants need to grow and I either I am doing something wrong or the plants just don't want to be here. What I think I will try is to take some of the metal coffee cans I used on the tomatoes and put them on the SRPs. They'll get a little wind protection and a bit more heat from the metal can which will heat up from the sun's rays. Since my scorpions are actually outpacing the SRPs in terms of growth(!) I am not worried about the can restricting root growth. I'll keep you posted. 
 
Update: I ate the first ripe Brown Naglah the other night. I was expecting a true scorcher. I'm not going to lie; it was very very hot, but it didn't live up to my expectations, which came from shit I've read about it online, plus the fact that it looked pretty evil...

Sliced it in half for purposes of sharing, sniffing, and checking for any moldy seeds or other internal nastiness. It was clean as a whistle, glistening with capsaicin, and displaying a decently developed placenta. It smelled like a chocolate Chinense; no surprise there and I love how those things smell, even if I typically don't like how the fresh ones taste. I'm not sure how to describe the brown-ness of their aroma. They do smell like normal chinense, and this one was probably a little more aromatic than average, but there's something in the whole bouquet of a chocolate Chinense that's is simply not present in the other colors. , I feel confident that, if I were blindfolded and allowed to sniff some recent sliced chinense pods, I could pick the chocolate one out of a field of ten with no problem.

Anyway, we had ordered some French Fries bc we were too pussified to even try this thing without something salty and starchy to cut the heat of it got too hectic. When the bartender said the kitchen might be closed, we became terrified, and when she said that the chef, a guy named Denny "Durkee" Mahoney, has left the fryer on and could make us some fries, he became the biggest hero of the night.

As I usually do at this cowardly initial stage, I started with just the tail end of the thing. Part of the idea is to get a real sense of the flavor, bc the tail tends to be less bitter and more scrumptious than the rest of the pod. But it also tends to have far less placenta and, therefore, far less heat. And in June, I'm still plenty gun-shy with these things. Si the tail tasted great, sweeter than I'd expected and I thought even the tail would be hot enough to kill me but it definitely didn't, so we moved on to the main body of the pod. And yes, that part was truly hot.

So, I was splitting this thing with this guy Dave who really likes chiles but just discovered then last year, and he's one of the few ppl I hang out with who actually enjoys a nice SuperHot burn. Dave is some kinda BigShot guitar player who you've n never heard of but apparently he's got a huge following in Japan and Australia or New Zealand or some shit and was karaoke night at the bar but a few of the actual musicians wouldn't stop asking Dave about some custom carbon fiber guitar he'd got s part of a sponsorship deal. It was s little bit hilarious, watching him talk about technical source and how amazing his weekend at the guitar factory was, while he's sweating and crying like a baby and these guys had no idea why.

I really need to start carrying a stop watch si I can time how long it takes the real heat to kick in on these various varieties of peppers, bc I find myself taking about a delay a lot, mostly with chinense, but I can't really say whether or not the delay is unusually long. But, I often feel like the delays are crazy long, and feel compelled to mention it whenever I discuss it. With that being said, the Naglah has enough heat up front where you KNOW you're in for a real ride, but it's totally bearable for what seems like a long time. A minute? Twenty seconds? I'm not sure, which is why I gotta dig my stopwatch out from my coaching supplies box. But after that initial delay, the heat builds rather quickly and steadily. It's definitely a "heat" sensation as if you are something of a very high temperature, not the cutting pure "pain" one gets from something like a Red Brainstrain or even a Fatalii (on a much lower scale)... Those make you feel like you're being punched in the mouth by a Chimpanzee holding a blade, whereas I think the more typical chile burn is more like you gargled some kerosene, waited ten seconds, then lit a match in your mouth.

I'm not sure which I prefer.

That was a very long post, but here's the summary: the Brown Naglah was surprisingly tasty. Not sure if it's bc it's only the 7th pepper I've sampled this year and I'm easily impressed at this point, but I enjoyed the flavor far more than I have chocolate Supers in the past. And it was really really hot, but not nearly so hot as some of the most brutal I've had. In fact, the NagaBrain that I had a few Sundays back, which humbled like five of us eating small bits, was far and away hotter than this Naglah. Dave was there on both occasions, and agreed with me. Of course, these are early pods and it's totally possible that my Naglahs in August will be little napalm bombs that I can't handle. This is just the first impression.

Body count thus far:
1. Sugar Rush Peach (whp)
2. NagaBrains NOT Yellow (it was Red)***hottest so far (whp)
3. Lemon Drop (WHP, might've been Juanito's..my memory sucks)
4. Bhut Assam Yellow (WHP)
5. Brown Naglah (whp)

I also ate a totally unripe Zapotec Jalapeño and a partially ripe off-pheno Red Brainstrain, both of which I inadvertently knocked off while hamfistedly gardening. I didn't review then bc I tend to want to review fully type, properly developed pods. Plus, I had the Brain in an omelet and the Jalapeño sliced up to garnish a cheesesteak... So not proper pod tests anyway.

Link to a few pics of the Naglah:

http://imgur.com/a/nZxBXrH
 
I got 1 Naglah Brown seed to germinate from 2-3yr old MWCH seed stock. The plant is finally starting to pack on the foliage after a painfully slow start. Ive got some brown bhuts from Trent going too but they have not kicked in gear yet. This will be my first year trying chocolate/brown chinenses.
 
I pretty much always sample the tip of a pod first. Less heat and less bitterness. When it comes to lemon drops i find the difference to be quite large vs the stem end.
 
I sampled the first tiny ripe Juanito's JPGS pod. Bit off about 1/3rd from the bloom end. Man that thing is hot. Instant burn in the throat that builds on the tongue and roof of the mouth. Slight citrus, slight sweetness and mildish on the floral. Hard to say for a early pod but atm i liked the flavor of a regular bhut better. Not exactly sure why. Heat is pretty similar to a typical ghost i got last year.
 
Well, I have since sampled several pods, both in terms of regular bouts of just eating raw pods straight up, alone or with friends, and in terms cooking with them. . . But I've failed to keep up with this thread, which sucks but just looking at the millions of unripe pods in my beds and thinking about how I have at least fifty varieties going, I guess this was doomed to fall apart from the start.

... plus i'm hoping more of y'all will chime in with your own recent raw pod experiences. And that will no doubt contribute to the thread's disintegration, but I think that's a good thing. We'll achieve some happy entropy, that way. I'm a pretty nice guy, but I'm boring as shit when I'm all on my own.

But yeah, like I said, I have been crushing some pods. In addition to the steady supply of SRPs and Lemon Drops, I've also eaten what was supposed to be a Chocolate Scotch Bonnet that turned out red, a runty 7Pot Cinder with literally no seeds in it that ended up being way hotter than last year's Cinders, a Red 7Pot Barrackpore, another non-Brainstrain Red Brainstrain, two of these BOCs that grew out red pods that look like a regular ghost but the burn profile is way off, and probably a few others that I'm forgetting for now.

Anyway, to bounce off of SMDSauce's account of his JPGS experience, we were on a ride the other day and I had some peppers with me, like always. This one brewery out by me has a few brews with chiles in the grist. One of them is a stout with Serranos, I had some other stout with all sorts of fufu shit in our plus Thai Peppers, and everybody in my cabal has been loving this rauchbier with longhots that they call "Summer Long Hots," which is an unimaginative name for an incendiary warm-weather brew. So, I ended up giving the head brewer a Lemon Drop bc I figured he's a real ChileHead who might appreciate it. And he did, he was fascinated by the flavors, but I was surprised when he remarked on how very hot the thing was...bc that was by far the least powerful pod in my homeless-guy style plastic bag that day. I just figured that one could probably brew a killer cream ale or Cali Common or some such, if they added some of these Lemon Drop peppers...

But I guess that kicked off the theme for that ride, bc I was giving out pods to strangers. I always share with my friends/family, but not often with ordinary civilians...

Which leads me to the part with the JPGS. We got to our third destination, a pub called Hot Shots that we call Hawt Schittz. On Sundays, they have a Grateful Dead tribute band that plays every week, and they often have metal bands open up for them. (Yeah, this happened on Sunday, and today's Saturday, so it took me a week to get around to this thread. I suck.) But last week, the guitarist who really runs the whole show got sick and music was cancelled which was hugely disappointing. But we stuck around to order some food and eat some chiles.

Now, we tend to eat the chiles raw but we like to have French Fries on hand as chasers, to take the edge of if the burn goes too hard. So, this small yet milf-y bartender who works every Sunday, she's asking what peppers we brought and I show her and she immediately fixates on this big, ugly JPGS, like "what's that? Is it hot? It looks hot."

So, in accordance with her request, that's the one we ate, much to the chagrin of my British buddy, Padge, who insists we at least wait until the fries are served. I agree, but I start choppin the thing up, letting the barkeep smell it, etc and she's the loud type, so by now other patrons are aware of our shenanigans, much more so than is normally the case.

The fries come out, and I offer the stinger piece to my buddy Harry who is older than us and not as hardened to the rigors of eating SuperHots. I'm buzzing pretty good and miscalculate the rest of the cutting; I cut the now-stingerless JPGS into four quarters when there is really just three of us left, after Harry got the stinger. But, before I even realise or announce my mistake, some dude across the bar is asking the bartender what we're eating and she's hyping it to him and so I ask if he wanted to try, and he said he did.

So, I immediately inform him in the super-legally binding jargon of a tipsy cyclist, that he cannot try to sue me if he can't hang, and the bartender piggybacks off of that and includes the bar, too. The guy smirks in such a way that says "I'd never dream of it," which seemed legally-binding as well, so I cut the extra quarter in half and put the ⅛JPGS pod on a cocktail napkin, which the bartender delivered to him.

(Continued)
 
(continued)

So this random bar patron, he's a thoroughly mensch-y kinda dude, with the t shirt that signifies his association with the local firehouse and he's the type of dude who accepts SuperHot chiles from strangers in pubs, which is cool. And I'm not trying to say that my bike club isn't made up of manly types, but we weren't at our manliest that day. Attendance was as low as it has ever been on a Sunday ride. I mean, Harry is a naval veteran and he basically IS the dwarf from Golden Axe, so that's pretty macho. And I guess I'm as masculine as a fat guy with huge tits can be, but my buddy Dave is an artsy-fartsy internationally renowned musician, and Padge, well... His name is Padge and he's from England. And I wouldn't want to tie masculinity with national origin, ever, but let's just say that Padge is more "Mr Bean" than he is "Lemmy," so dude is probably thinking, "if guys like that can eat these peppers, than surely i can eat them easily, too."

And, basically, he did. He wolfed his bit of JPGS down, didn't carry on at all, just sipped his Yeungling and said "where the fuck does a pepper like that come from?"

A valid question, and the bartender chimes in, pointing at me, saying "he made it!" I proceeded to explain that only Gawd can "make" a pepper, but I did, in fact, grow it. I was about to explain the Pennsylvanian Mennonite origins of the JPGS, but the stranger interrupted with another question: "why?"

I told him I didn't really have an answer, but that it probably has to do with the fact that I'm a little crazy. He laughed it off, took the whole thing in stride. He was still there, drinking, when he headed out to the next stop. It was there, at my local, that I gave an SRP to the chef, an affable guy named Denny, and suggested he ought to build an omelet around it for his breakfast on Monday. Continuing that whole Jonny Pepperseed theme of distributing chiles throughout the land.

But, as I type this, I think about the Stranger at Hawt Schittz and his question. Why DO we grow these SuperHot chiles? What's the actual purpose. I know I do it bc it makes me happy, but I don't really understand how or why it makes me happy to grow these little bags of napalm. I am convinced that chiles are magic, if magic exists at all, and maybe that explains my fascination....

To those of you still reading after the above novel, why do YOU grow SuperHots? And, if you don't grow SuperHots, can you explain why not?
 
Most of my stuff tops out below a million scovilles just because of more challenging growing conditions. Still if my response qualifies as to why I grow hot at all than we can chalk it up to an ongoing medical problem. 
 
Due to a health problem that is causing inflammation in the body affecting both the joints and the organs, I find the capsaican to be of medical value. Or to put it simply, I don't do weed but I will do hot peppers which helps with the endorphins and with the morning attacks of osteoarthritis which is a by-product of the inflammation.
 
Given that and I inherited a green thumb from my mother growing seemed like the logical step forward.  
 
MBGardener said:
I like to grow superhots because my tolerance keeps going up and they look supercool. Then again one does not simply snack with hot peppers, they are a way of life!
I hear you on the tolerance thing, although I like I start over every season, not exactly at the beginning, but every November, I'm an iron warrior, forged in fire. But come the following June, when I'm getting my first fresh SuperHot Pods of the season, I'm back to being a lowly squire. I definitely cook with dry, powdered, and some frozen chiles during the off season, and the guys at the Korean BBQ are doing their part with extra hot Dolsot, but nothing build tolerance like putting an entire 7Pot in your mouth and toughing it out.

I hear you regarding the cool looks, too... And I think that plenty of chiles look rad, at all heat levels... But nothing beats the warty, bumpy skin of a good SuperHot pod, especially if they got the lobes and overhang of, like, a perfect-pheno Brainstrain. And few objects on Earth look as badass as a nice, cherry-red 7Pot Primo.
 
Indeed they are an experience aren't they!? I so relate to the part about seasonal supplies from the garden. I rarely have had a year where I haven't seen my supply run out. Recent seasons have been a little better with setting out more transplants to start with for a larger harvest. I still have some of my 2017 fatalii harvest in the freezer, just now about to finish of the last of those fresh peppers I froze. That along with some Chocolate Scorpions I froze last year is how I been keeping my tolerance up. Just remember to wash your hands after touching those peppers so you don't light up the next itch you scratch.
 
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