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Scoville Testing Explained/Reputable Labs

The Hot Pepper

The Hot Pepper

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Let's start a civil topic on Scoville testing of hot peppers and discuss:

How exactly is this testing done?
How long is this testing done?
What do they measure? Average? Peaks?
How many peppers do they test?
From how many plants do they test?
Is the hottest pepper just that... the hottest one pepper? Or the species? Wouldn't this depend on the above?
What labs do testing, and how do they differ?
Which labs are reliable/unreliable?
Guinness
Etc.
This was just to get it going.
 
Well, I wish i knew more about how the testing is "supposed" to be done, if there is some sort of standard.

At this point I'm thinking all the claims over the past few years are complete bs at best. With no standards there is no "official" anything. It would be nice if the Guinness folks were more transparent about how they adjudicate, as they are currently the only body with any kind of recognizable official status with these kinds of things.
 
As far as I know, they do testing by a process called Liquid chromatography through a major university, usually New Mexico State Universty (but any with the appropriate equipment will do really). Are you familiar with the process by any chance?
 
elcap1999 said:
As far as I know, they do testing by a process called Liquid chromatography through a major university, usually New Mexico State Universty (but any with the appropriate equipment will do really). Are you familiar with the process by any chance?
Click to expand...

Only by description. I know there is some "calibration" that has to take place with the equipment and that can lead to wildly inaccurate readings.
 
Pretty much. They use a baseline chemical to calibrate the machine, like deionized water or something like that, but it someone uses regular water instead (which has disolved minerals in it, etc), it can really screw with the machine.

And as far as the Liquid chromatography itself, the machine works by shooting a laser (pew pew) into a liquified batch of the chemical. The light that the machine gets back is then checked out because every chemical has a unique signature, like a fingerprint, of colors back, and the percentage of the colors it gets back determines how much of the chemical is in the sample. So if the baseline had traces of the minerals in the baseline sample, then it'll screw up the chemical count.
 
You must distinguish between the lab and the customer who wants results.

The Lab

has a HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) system that consists of a computer, high pressure pumps, a stainless steel tube filled with a resin to seperate chemicals and a detector (to explain it simply)
Costs for this equipment are from $20.000 upward to whatever you want.
The HPLC system must be calibrated with a solution of pure Capsaicin, that is called a standard and is supplied by chemical companies specialised in chemical standardisation.

Samples can be everything that contains Capsaicin, like hot peppers, hot pepper powder, oil and all processed food products

The sample is processed by chemical extraction to be suited for injection into the HPLC system.

Once injected with a syringe the machine separates Capsaicin from other components of the sample and the computer gives a result in mg Capsaicin per sample
With a conversion factor this can be converted to Scoville Units (SCU) to fit to the standard of heat interpretation as we do it i.e. here in THP.


The Customer:

provides samples and says what he wants, but nothing more as double or triple estimations of a sample, he pays and gets the results.

Whatever he does with this results is not the job of the lab.

If he wants to have a result of a single pod, he sends a dried single pod.
So it's the job of the customer to decide what testing design he wants.
The more single results the customer has, the more different ways are open to do single values, mean values, standard deviations and so on.


Guiness World Records:

As far as I know what happened in the past, single values of a lab have been accepted and no mean of period of time and different plants and growing periods.
Propably they are getting nervous about the commercial interest in their results and have changed their rules, like confirmation by a different independant lab or other yet unnown things.
But in terms of a World Record, this is a single observation and nobady needs to show it several times to be certified.

It hope this helps and feedback is wellcome
To my reputation, I´ve been working with HPLC as leader of a pharmacytical department for a number of years.

Peter
 
There are several independant labs that can do HPLC SHU testing. I used ABC Research Labs in Florida recently. They requested 2 ounces minimum of sauce to conduct the test. That makes me wonder about testing a single pod. Is it possible? And how accurate would it be, especially if the pod is rehydrated somehow?
 
Primo stated in another post that you would need a gram of powder for a test, as far as hot sauce I have no idea
How much do they charge for a hot sauce test? To test a powder is $46.00 at Southwest Bio-Labs, Inc
 
salsalady said:
There are several independant labs that can do HPLC SHU testing. I used ABC Research Labs in Florida recently. They requested 2 ounces minimum of sauce to conduct the test. That makes me wonder about testing a single pod. Is it possible? And how accurate would it be, especially if the pod is rehydrated somehow?
Click to expand...

Extracting a Capsaicin fraction from a sauce to make it suitable for injection into the machine is not as easy as extracting powder. Propably this is the reason why they requested such a large amount.
All pods are dried before extracting. In order to get comparable results the water content of all samples should be the same. A important thing and as far as I red all published reports, nothing was said about water content of the samples.
Chemical bound water that cannot be removed by simple drying below 100°C is about 5-6% of weight !! A badly dried sample may have water around 10% of weight of the sample or more.

Peter
 
I have found some scoville unit reports for certain peppers to be confusing or misleading because it is commonly expressed as a simple number. However, the Scoville unit rating could be a mean, median or mode average of the peppers tested, it could be the measure of the hottest pepper in the pile, or (worst of all) it could be a reading from one pepper that may not be representative of the group. For example, what if five pods each of two peppers were tested and came back with scoville ratings as follows:

Pepper 1: 950,000; 1,100,000, 950,000, 950,000, 1,300,000
Pepper 2: 1,100,000; 1,100,000; 950,000; 1,000,000; 900,000

In this example Pepper 1 would have a median and mode average of 950,000, and the mean average is 1,050,000. The hottest pepper in the pile is 1,300,000. Which of these three numbers should be reported?
In this example Pepper 2 would have a median of 1,000,000, a mode of 1,100,000, and a mean average of 1.010,000. The hottest pepper in the pile is 1,100,000. Which of these four numbers should be reported as the scoville figure?

This gets more confusing when you try to figure our which pepper is hotter. Pepper 1 produced the hottest pepper in the bunch, but pepper 2 had more pods over a million scovilles and had a better mode average. If only a single pepper was tested, you may end up with pepper 1 reading as hotter (e.g. pod 5 of pepper 1 versus pod 1 of pepper 2), pepper 2 reading as hotter (e.g. pod 1 of pepper 1 versus pod 1 of pepper 2), or about the same (e.g. pod 2 of pepper 1 versus pod 2 of pepper 2) depending purely on which peppers were selected.

Another point that was already touched on but needs to be highlighted again is that the number of peppers tested is extremely important, because that plays a role in calculating the standard deviation (SD) and the margin of error (MOE) in the sample. Without knowing the SD and MOE the number you get is pretty abstract and only meaningful in the most general "hot" - "really hot" - "sounds nasty" sort of way. The rub is that in order to get an accurate reading you need to test a large number of peppers: even in the largest gardens about a hundred randomly selected peppers would get you a MOE of just under 10%, while 300 would get you closer to 5%.

Of course no one would bother with testing a large number of peppers because it would really only represent that particular crop. Peppers are notorius for having variable heat depending on factors such as watering, soil conditions, etc etc etc. My hottest bhut may have less capsicum than your coolest one.
 
Best to grow and test different varieties grown side by side in the same environment/conditions. This may not give you the highest one off result but at least you can compare varieties and heat levels
When it comes to hottest pepper, it has always been the highest one time result. Those who are trying to change this to highest mean are going to have a very difficult time because neither Guinness or the general public accept this as world's hottest. Creating your own new rules/standards and calling your pepper the world's hottest is just false advertising in my opinion
Any science needs a theory to be proved and then verified by at least one other source. We've seen all the past errors with HPLC testing so to me it seems very important to have results re-tested and verified by a qualified lab, preferably one who is known for testing capsaicin
 
The way we did it at school was the following: It may notbe precise but I think the general concept was there:
 
Juice was extracted from the pepper --in our case a datil---it was then somehow combined in some proportion with grain alcohol and thoroughly mixed up.
 
Then we added drops of water until it totally diluted any sense of heat...at tha point the number of drops were counted and that was the determining factor of the scoville heat units The facts about drops in a gallon: 120 drops = 5mL; 1 gallon = 3785 mL. There are 90840 drops in 1 gallon..I am not sure of the conversion of drops to scoville units but that is the general testing method as I understand it. Now how many tests must be performed on different test samples, I have no idea but I would assume that the sample would be fairly large because of differentials in vorious soils and fertilizers vary the heat intensity. Thats why they generally give you a range ie....trinidad scorpian 1,400,000 to 2 million +........hope this  helps
 
Hi StAugie,
the process you describe replicates the original way Wilbur Scoville tested chiles and developed the heat index/scale for the hotness of peppers. It's subjective as it relies on human taste buds to determine when it's no longer "hot". Currently, labs use the HPLC method, but recently I've read some things that even question that method, allegations that there is no accurate way to test a sauce by HPLC and labs are only doing the test to make money.

"I read it on the internet, so it has to be true. You know they can't put anything on the internet if it isn't true."

Anyway, I just read this and have no further information whether an accurate SHU can be assertained by HPLC or not.
 
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