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heat Ed Currie's newest hottest pepper
- Thread starter Boris
- Start date
So was it Dragon's Breath or Hot Ones that forced his hand? Either way, hopefully he shuts up about having new peppers in reserve now.
I'm waiting ...........
moruga welder said:
It's like Hot Pepper Gaming but with more sauces on show. It is, at its heart, utter idiocy.
It's a strangely compelling idiocy, though, and it does manage to capture a wide audience. I know my friends in retail have to explain Heatonist's exclusivity deal more often than they'd like now and this is in the UK.
It's a strangely compelling idiocy, though, and it does manage to capture a wide audience. I know my friends in retail have to explain Heatonist's exclusivity deal more often than they'd like now and this is in the UK.
I noticed that on Hot Ones earlier today as well. I'm a big fan of Hot Ones, and props to Ed Curry for doing some cross marketing with them. It is a very savvy business move for him to do this with the imminent release of seeds/sauce/pepppers. He will be getting a lot of exposure to people who aren't keen on on the chile scene for his new hottest pepper, but are fans of whatever big name guest they have on the show.
)A lot of people seem to like this show. And when I hear people talk about it, they inevitably just want the hottest sauces they can find. I understand that's kind of the point of the show...but at the same time, these people are just going to go get extract sauces that are stupid hot and taste awful. When I try to explain that there are hot sauces being made that taste incredible they seem baffled.Thegreenchilemonster said:
But yeah, by doing this Ed will get a huge amount of exposure and $$$
Thegreenchilemonster said:
On that note, I respect this. I do have some concerns, though.
Pepper X is, according to my sources, 3.3 million Scoville. That's 1.5x the Carolina Reaper, which sounds like a lot but let's talk sauces.
The average 50-60% Scorpion or Reaper sauce is on par with or just the tiniest bit above Dave's Insanity. Dave's insanity is stupid hot. Many a casual sauce lover will attest to that. Its rating, though? 180K.
Mega Death, while not Blair's hottest, comes in at 550K.
So, maybe, at a push, we might get about 300K out of a 50-60% Pepper X sauce. Who knows, that might even be enough. I don't know how much liquid the two sauces have to them.
What I can say with a decent amount of certainty, though, is that it won't rate hotter, it won't taste much hotter if it is, and it won't matter anyway.
"The Last Dab" is a Hot Ones branded product. Hot Ones care about flavour and not just that of peppers in their products. I will be shocked if its chilli content is above 35%.
So where is the heat to beat out extracts coming from? Is it coming from more extract per chance? I wouldn't put it past Ed.
His entire "Squeezin's" range is an attempt to pass off extract as nature. I mean, seriously, what idiot thinks a 5 million SHU Reaper sauce counts as natural?
And, yeah, sure, it won't ruin the flavour. He extracts via cold press without chemicals or (non-chilli) heat.
But it won't be a true showcase of the pepper and I sure as hell wouldn't be happy with it.
Boris said:
I don't know why but I seem to see a different crowd. People around me are excited when they see extract ones they know from the show but they rarely actually buy them and have more interest in the (sadly unavailable) things like the blueberry ghost sauce or the own brand chipotle one.
After Carolina Reaper, the media kind of went nuts over "Death Strain". There wasnt much media over Curry and StandandFire teaming up, but we certainly thought Chocolate Bhutlah was next. I was rooting for it cause I like StandandFire. Then after the media went nuts on Dragon's Breath, there was some meme floating around that said Puckerbutt has officially contacted Guinness over another entry. Now, it is Pepper X. Did I miss anyone in there? Oh ye, I think Jigsaw was in there somewhere.
I love peppers. When I combine the business seed collection with my personal seed collection, I feel like my grandpa must have while showing us his stamp collection. Now this is another moruga scorpion kids, but this one is different because it comes from Brazil.
But this whole hottest pepper in the world thing has my head spinning. I am really hoping the next Guinness champion is an accidental cross found in some kids garden that was in his Mom's back yard. When asked how he made it, he just shrugs his sounders.
I love peppers. When I combine the business seed collection with my personal seed collection, I feel like my grandpa must have while showing us his stamp collection. Now this is another moruga scorpion kids, but this one is different because it comes from Brazil.
But this whole hottest pepper in the world thing has my head spinning. I am really hoping the next Guinness champion is an accidental cross found in some kids garden that was in his Mom's back yard. When asked how he made it, he just shrugs his sounders.
Jubnat said:
Do you know the story of the Butch T? As I understand it, Mr. Butch Taylor was gifting seeds asking folk to tell him what they thought, is it something special? Hippie Seed folk thought yes it is and had it tested. It took the Guinness title for a bit. Ah but Hippie Seed gave credit where it was due. They gave credit via calling it the Butch T. I think maybe it was Neil at Hippie Seed that did it. I might have the story wrong. Point being, no arguing. Everything casual. Have loved Hippie Seed ever since I read that story.
BTW: I know this guy. He doest make a dime off selling cockroaches. Read his shirt. Ye, my friends tend to be freaks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtXXWz-iKKQ
How about from the horses mouth?> Fire-Eaters - The search for the hottest chiliAJ Drew said:
Butch T, of the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, is Butch Taylor, a plumber in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 2005, Taylor got some Trinidad Scorpion seeds from a guy named Mark in New Jersey, who had got them from a local nursery. Taylor recalled, “When I grew them down here, they just grew unbelievable. I got three plants out of five seeds, and every plant I grew was dedicated to seeds. The first time I tasted it, I just thought, This is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Taylor kept growing the plants, selecting at each generation for the hottest specimens. He gave the seeds away to chiliheads all over the world, sticking a little label that said “Butch T” at the bottom of each packet, so that absent-minded recipients would be able to keep track of where they had come from. Besides that, he didn’t think much of it. “I didn’t have any money to pay for testing—I didn’t even know how to have them tested at the time,” he told me. “And since I was growing the seeds, not selling them, I couldn’t see the purpose of setting the record.” He learned that his namesake chili was the hottest chili in the world, according to Guinness, the day that the record was announced. The Australians who developed Taylor’s strain into a winner had named it after him. “It took me a while to get my head around it, because I’m a little more shy, unless I’ve been drinking or something,” he recalled. “I thought that was very decent of them.”
Butch Taylor is spoken of in reverent tones in the chili community. A human bhut jolokia, he doesn’t travel often to chili conventions, and his Web site is dormant. He can be a little hard to find, but, in recent years, he has maintained a steady presence on Facebook, advising fellow-enthusiasts on how to deal with fire ants or sharing observations about pod phenotypes. In January, he posted his “2013 (incomplete) grow list,” a document that included sixty-one types of chili and was pored over as though it were a Vatican encyclical. Christopher Phillips, another veteran chilihead, wrote, “Congratulations Butch. You have now officially set yourself up for 52,390 seed requests come harvest time? LOL. Nice list!!” Taylor likes blues piano and L.S.U. football. He misses the taste of glue on stamps. He even has his own groupie—a woman who sends him pictures of herself posing next to plants grown from his seeds.
A few years ago, Taylor and his wife, Shirley, whom he met when he was thirteen, were living in a farmhouse that they built with their own hands on some land that Taylor’s family has owned for years. The farm is about an hour north of Baton Rouge, in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. When the economic crisis hit, gas cost too much for them to make the commute every day, so they started spending the week in a travel trailer that they park in the driveway of their daughter’s house. On weekends, they drive out to the country.
One day in September, Butch and Shirley picked me up at the Baton Rouge airport. Taylor did not look exactly like the picture he had sent—it was of Brad Pitt—but he welcomed me warmly. His eyes are bright blue. He was wearing shorts and a blue polo shirt with white stripes. “Hush, baby!” Shirley, who has strawberry-blond hair and a deep, honeyed voice, said to their shih tzu, Laila Habanero, as I climbed into their truck. A chili-pepper ornament dangled from the rearview mirror.
A couple of hours later, Taylor was standing in the kitchen of the farmhouse, softening shallots in butter for a crawfish étouffée. “I’ve cooked since the time I could lift a skillet,” he said. Taylor had his first chili by accident. “I ate a tepín that I found growing in a flower bed when I was eleven,” he said. “It burnt me up.” As an adult, he started growing tomatoes; chilis followed. “This is based on an old recipe I came across in a preserving book from the eighteen-hundreds,” Taylor said, picking up a jar of pepper brandy that was sitting on the counter. Chilis take on a metaphysical dimension in Taylor’s telling. “I don’t find peppers,” he said. “Peppers find me.”
The following morning, Taylor put on his boots and went outside. Next door, his mother’s chickens were clucking in a pen. Hummingbirds darted past a pecan tree. Taylor unplugged a homemade electrical fence and stepped into his chili field. “This used to be a dog yard,” he said. “My stepfather ran the hounds at Angola State Penitentiary. He used to feed them deer carcasses. The grass grew so thick that you could barely run a motor over it, so I thought it would be a good place to put a garden.”
Taylor walked through rows of plants, gathering ripe pods in a wooden basket. His plants hadn’t done particularly well this season—they were smaller than usual, and their leaves were a sickly yellow. (He thought he had got a bad batch of fertilizer.) Still, even in early fall, they were yielding chilis galore: chilis in the shape of bugles; chilis that glowed like Chinese lanterns; chilis that, Taylor pointed out, resembled pit bulls’ teeth. When I asked him the big question, he hedged. “What I believe is the hottest pepper? I don’t know,” he said.
Still, he couldn’t resist a tiny dig. “This is a Trinidad Scorpion from Australia,” he said, fingering a bumpy bright-red pod. He handed it to me. “Notice a resemblance to Ed’s?”
Taylor allowed that chiliheads were a competitive bunch. “Of course, I have an unfair advantage,” he said, indicating the sun beating down overhead. “It’s kind of like bringing a Ferrari to a Volkswagen race.”
Taylor led me to a white outbuilding that serves as a dedicated hot-sauce kitchen: eight-gallon pots, nitrile gloves, face mask, radio, a de-seeding stool embellished, like a hot rod, with flames. Every year, he makes a few sauces, which he sells mostly to his plumbing buddies. “I’ve been trying to convince myself that I have to sell more stuff to pay for all the different stuff I want to do,” he said. “I just can’t get into it.” Taylor has a theory about the economics of chilis: like hemlines, they rise when times are tough. “The deal with the hot sauce is that nobody has the money to eat out, so they stay home and start cooking again. After a while, you think, Well, there’s got to be something different I can do with this.” The only problem, Taylor said, is that nobody ever buys a bottle of superhot sauce twice.
Eventually, we walked back to the house.
“How were they lookin’, baby?” Shirley asked.
“I’ve got a lot of peppers out there to pick this weekend,” Butch replied.
He had brought a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T in from the field. The pod had a bulbous cap and a tapering tail that recalled the stinger of a wasp. Its skin was pebbly, like the nose of a drinker. It looked as though it had been made of melted wax from the candles at an Italian restaurant.
Taylor took a knife and whittled off a flake no larger than a clove. I put it in my mouth and chewed. The capsaicin hit loud and fast, a cymbal clang of heat. My face flushed. My eyes glassed over and I started pacing the kitchen, as though I could walk off the burn. It took twenty minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to banish the sensation of having a sort of tinnitus of the mouth.
Before we came inside, Taylor had shown me his greenhouse, where he tends his most precious plants. A single bush dominated the small hut. Hanging from its branches were an assortment of pods, some of them deep red and some of them a faint green. The plant, which was not yet stable, was the third generation of an accidental cross of a 7-Pot Jonah and, most likely, a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T. Taylor was calling it the WAL—the Wicked-Ass Little 7-Pot. He shook a branch, unleashing a swarm of flies, and picked a pod from the stem. “Just off the top of my head, the first one I tasted, I’d say two million Scovilles,” he said. “But it may just be a freak of nature. You get those now and then.”
The Mark from NJ noted above posted this on another forum:
Hey Folks,
I'm the Mark from NJ who sent Butch the seeds. I was contacted by someone over the GardenWeb forum back in 2004 who wanted to set up a seed trade. My memory may not serve me correctly but I think that he was interested in a strain of chocolate (congo black) habanero that I had. We set up a trade and he enthusiastically ensured me that he had a contender for the world's hottest pepper, which I was skeptical about. He sent me a pod or two for my seed trade with him and I opted to isolate and save seed and not taste the pod. I know that the pods came from a nursery in Maryland called 'Valley View Nurseries' in thingyeysville (editor is not letting me write the correct name of the town). The following year I tasted it and I thought that it was going to kill me. I actually wrote a review of that year's growing season and it's on there:
Review of Peppers Grown-2005 Season (See #12)
I was very excited about it and distributed a large number of seeds to the Coast to Coast Pepper Company, in the spirit of sharing and hoping that it would perpetuate the seed to chileheads who would enjoy it. I was, and still am, a little bit sad that Butch never shared this history when the Trinidad Scorpion became famous. I met Butch at OF back in 2007, and I know that he remembers me. I remember him as being a decent guy.
Anyway, the true original source of the Trinidad Scorpion was Valley View Nurseries. I wish I remembered the name of the person who I did the trade with, as he is a crucial piece between Valley View and the C2C. In sharing the seeds with others, I was hoping that it would bring a lot of happiness to chileheads. Scotch Bonnet Steve, who sadly passed away several years ago, even wrote a poem about them, and I am happy that they brought a smile to his face.
"I don't like those Scorpions,
they've treated me so bad!
Eating one fresh was quite literally the,
worst burn I ever had!
I know they came to me from you in Jersey,
and it kind of makes me sad!
Please pack their fiery asses up,
and ship them back to Trinidad!
They scorched me once, they scorched me twice,
And in grinding some today they've scorched me thrice!
I wish the burn would go away,
and though I know in time it will,
there's no longer any room for them
inside my pepper mill!
So I'm sending the rest of what I have,
smoke dried to Georgia,
with them I'm absolutely through,
So Habanero Eddie can learn to hate them too!"
I hope you all have a terrific growing season!
Mark in NJ
And a closing note from the third paragraph about the Aussies that developed it:
As far as I know it was the de Wit family in AU that Butch mentions in the article, He learned that his namesake chili was the hottest chili in the world, according to Guinness, the day that the record was announced. The Australians who developed Taylor’s strain into a winner had named it after him. “It took me a while to get my head around it, because I’m a little more shy, unless I’ve been drinking or something,” he recalled. “I thought that was very decent of them.”http://thechillifactory.com/hottest>The Chilli Factory:
The Trinidad Scorpion grown with Worm Juice:
The Trinidad Scorpion Butch T cultivar: (Taylor).
The Trinidad scorpion is morphologically similar to Capsicum chinense cultivars although nil genetic analysis has been undertaken to confirm this. The plant produces a heavy crop of large, pointed, wrinkled fruit that turn from green to a rich red.
There are a number of cultivars of this variety including the Marouga, Chocolate, Orange and the recently discovered Numex scorpion.
Many of the scorpion cultivars have previously been subjected to “heat” analysis with reported measurements reaching as high as 1,300,000 Scoville units.
The “Butch T” Scorpion grown in optimal growth conditions in Australia has recently been measured at 1,463,700 Scoville units.
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