New World’s Hottest Pepper: Dragon’s Breath Chili, so hot it can kill you!

I really wish people would stop touting the Dragon Breath as (a) the world’s hottest pepper and (b) “deadly”. Addressing the first claim, it may very well turn out to be the hottest — and there seems to be a good chance that it will — but at the moment the Carolina Reaper is still officially the hottest. More testing and evaluation will need to be done to verify their claim; if these hold up, however, then the Dragon Breath may deservedly thump its chest as King of the Hots.

More disturbing, however, is all the noise and hype about its deadliness, which more or less is a trumped-up myth. Scoville ratings are based on dry weight, not individual peppers. So in this case we are talking about, let’s say, a dried gram of DB vs a gram of CR. Let us leave aside the quality and thoroughness of the testing (I assume the chromatography was properly done at Nottingham Trent University, but it will still need to be verified independently) and the uncertainty of whether the stated value is the average heat or the heat of the hottest pepper tested (1,57 million and 2,2 million, respectively, for the Reaper), which I have not seen stated anywhere yet. If the fruit shown in photographs is the normal size of the DB, there is no way that one individual DB is going to be hotter than one CR, which I would guess is 3 – 7 times larger. So with idiots (or courageous challengers, depending on how you look at it) on YouTube gulping down multiple Reapers (and a recent Guinness record of 20 grams) without hearing Bob Dylan singing “Heaven’s Gate”, there is no way one of these thumbnail-size peppers is going to be a “lethal” dose. Sure, anaphylactic shock is always a danger with the right allergy or sensitivity, but that can happen just as easily with a tomato.

I am also disappointed that the developers shot their collective head out of a hole like a gopher in May, proclaimed “our pepper is the hottest; it will kill you”, and then ducked back down into the hole not to be heard from since. When Ed Currie made his initial claims about the Reaper, he kept himself out there and available for questioning and further explanations. I can’t imagine that chilihead reporters and bloggers have not approached them in order to shed more light on this mysterious newcomer. Why have we not heard more?

As much as I am a Reaper fan, with various amounts of it or Moruga Scorpion going into perhaps 75% of my meals, I am still quite interested to see where things go with the DB; if it in fact tops or is at least close to the Reaper in heat, I shall be one of the first in line to latch on to some seeds, should they become available. Besides, should it indeed dethrone the Carolina Reaper, the Reaper’s developer, Ed Currie, already has the HP56 “Death Strain” in the wings (at the moment he is only making it available for medical research), which has already unofficially been clocked at around 3 million Scoville, waiting to snatch the crown back. Hot times ahead, chiliheads!

I really wish people would stop touting the Dragon Breath as (a) the world’s hottest pepper and (b) “deadly”. Addressing the first claim, it may very well turn out to be the hottest — and there seems to be a good chance that it will — but at the moment the Carolina Reaper is still officially the hottest. More testing and evaluation will need to be done to verify their claim; if these hold up, however, then the Dragon Breath may deservedly thump its chest as King of the Hots.

More disturbing, however, is all the noise and hype about its deadliness, which more or less is a trumped-up myth. Scoville ratings are based on dry weight, not individual peppers. So in this case we are talking about, let’s say, a dried gram of DB vs a gram of CR. Let us leave aside the quality and thoroughness of the testing (I assume the chromatography was properly done at Nottingham Trent University, but it will still need to be verified independently) and the uncertainty of whether the stated value is the average heat or the heat of the hottest pepper tested (1,57 million and 2,2 million, respectively, for the Reaper), which I have not seen stated anywhere yet. If the fruit shown in photographs is the normal size of the DB, there is no way that one individual DB is going to be hotter than one CR, which I would guess is 3 – 7 times larger. So with idiots (or courageous challengers, depending on how you look at it) on YouTube gulping down multiple Reapers (and a recent Guinness record of 20 grams) without hearing Bob Dylan singing “Heaven’s Gate”, there is no way one of these thumbnail-size peppers is going to be a “lethal” dose. Sure, anaphylactic shock is always a danger with the right allergy or sensitivity, but that can happen just as easily with a tomato.

I am also disappointed that the developers shot their collective head out of a hole like a gopher in May, proclaimed “our pepper is the hottest; it will kill you”, and then ducked back down into the hole not to be heard from since. When Ed Currie made his initial claims about the Reaper, he kept himself out there and available for questioning and further explanations. I can’t imagine that chilihead reporters and bloggers have not approached them in order to shed more light on this mysterious newcomer. Why have we not heard more?

As much as I am a Reaper fan, with various amounts of it or Moruga Scorpion going into perhaps 75% of my meals, I am still quite interested to see where things go with the DB; if it in fact tops or is at least close to the Reaper in heat, I shall be one of the first in line to latch on to some seeds, should they become available. Besides, should it indeed dethrone the Carolina Reaper, the Reaper’s developer, Ed Currie, already has the HP56 “Death Strain” in the wings (at the moment he is only making it available for medical research), which has already unofficially been clocked at around 3 million Scoville, waiting to snatch the crown back. Hot times ahead, chiliheads!