Mostly the same here except I stop maybe a step short of Habanero (like a Thai chili or Cayenne).
Just to speak to these elements in a touch more detail. Like any agricultural product, there is plenty of variation in capsicums. And that’s without, as some of our gardeners put, their incredible promiscuity. You grow them close to each other, and who knows what sort of hybrids or weirdness you’ll end up with.
I buy a LOT of them, and it’s always rolling the dice at the Kroger. I’ve had delicious, fruity jalapenos, and ones that are just as bitter as a green bell pepper. I’ve had ones that bely the traditional mild heat and go straight to Serrano levels of heat, and others that again, might as well be bell peppers.
I tend to see somewhat less variety in my habaneros, but I never trust a jalapeno.
An overall observation is that the fad for eating super-hot peppers is a demonstration of the old adage:
The dose makes the poison.
Setting aside the non-heat flavor elements and the mouth-perceived heat level, all the severe GI symptoms of super-hot peppers are simply a drug overdose of the active ingredient capsaicin. Whereas a person could not eat enough e.g. Bell peppers to get a capsaicin overdose; nobody could hold the requisite 1,000 lbs of Bells to get enough capsaicin in one place at one time.
We grow our own peppers as well and my wife likes habaneros so always has 1-2 plants (that gives you enough peppers for a small village). I’ll look for something like this. Like I said, I love Marie Sharp’s which is habanero based, but it’s blended with carrots so maybe that tempers the chemical taste, or they use a “good” variety of the peppers.
Traumatic Brain Injury and Volatile Organic Compounds. The last one should be VOC but I dropped that letter. I learned this one from doing a lot of home renovation work and dealing with smelly stains and finishes. You don’t know of all the fumes until you get a raging headache and have killed off a lot of brain cells. Now I know to warn when she shouldn’t be in the garage.
How many decades does something have to last before it’s no longer a fad?
Hard to say. You’re right that the pepper arms race has been going on a long time. Longer than a typical fad.
At the same time, young men have been saying the equivalent of “Here, hold my beer. Hey y’all: watch this!!” for longer than beer has been invented. And there’s a new crop of e.g. 17yos every single year. Some of whom demand to learn by doing, not by listening. So folks gonna keep eating silly stuff, although silly peppers may eventually become passé.
I have to suspect there’s an upper limit to the cultivar arms race though. Somebody will eventually breed one so full of capsaicin that the LD50 is less than one fruit. Finally, a Pepper of Doom that lives up to its name. That might break the arms race fever. Might.
There are two aspects of the heat race. The pepper itself and the sauces. The market for the raw pepper is small. Very few people are going to buy them raw for a challenge. Putting the pepper in a sauce is where the money is. With sauce you can cheat by using extracts and concentrates. Theoretically you can make the sauce much hotter than the raw pepper.
Not even theoretically. I don’t know what the hottest hot sauces now are, but twenty years ago Wanza’s advertised a hot sauce of 2 million Scoville that was hotter than any pepper then. They make and sell this stuff in practice, not just theory.
Theoretically as in they can do it. I just don’t think there is one out there hotter than Pepper X right now. I think heatonist is the only company that makes a pepper X sauce and that’s just basically the pepper mashed up with some vinegar. It’s not hotter than the pepper. They are interested in the flavor and not just heat.
OK, so I’m home and have time to look this up. Not counting Pure Evil 13 Million drops (which are pure capcaisin and 13 million Scoville), there’s:
ETA: Actually, aside from the extracts, there does appear to be a bit of puffery in the actual sauces, so it’s hard to tell which are actually at that Scoville rating in the finished product, and which just contain extract rated at that Scoville rating.
ETA2: This one seems to be 5-6 milliion, but it’s hard to find independent testing of these things:
I love habs, but it’s 60/40 flavor/heat. They are just in the range that I can add enough to taste the difference without scorching my taste buds so that I can’t taste the difference.
Hard Pass on anything used in dick-measuring contests.
This one seems to be 12 million scoville (so they claim):
Well, if you look at the ingredients, it mentions all the way at the end that it uses 12 million Scoville Extract, so who knows exactly what the final product clocks in at. It’ll have to be less than 12 million Scoville, I would imagine. IT also doesn’t claim to be 12 millions Scoville, just that the extreme heat comes “courtesy of” the 12 million Scoville extract.
That burn seems even worse than ingesting orally!
Why would you use a pepper to measure that? Use a ruler, like a normal person.
Most rulers are 12" long. Most e.g. jalapenos are ~3" long. QED. 
Didn’t some kid die from eating that chip?
Yeah, it’s mentioned and linked-to in post #52. Whether he died from eating the chip is hard to say exactly, but he certainly died not long after eating that chip. I don’t think there’s any conclusive statement as to whether it was the sole cause or partial cause of his death.
How could anyone possibly eat one and not be seriously injured? Peppers that hot are normally used as additives only for that reason. I imagine you would have to handle the pepper with gloves because, even if you wash your hands, there is a trace of resin on the fingers that handled the pepper. If your eye itched, you would probably injure it if you rubbed it.
So, NO. LOL
Maybe some teenagers drunk at a frat party might do it on a dare. I’d be fascinated to see what would happen.
I just watched an interesting little video by an online chili grower and “chilihead” named ChiliChump. Apparently there hasn’t yet been an outside review of Pepper X’s spiciness, and warns that there may be a flood of fake Pepper X seeds since the creator will not be sharing them.
It won’t let me add the Youtube video for some reason-I’ll see what’s going on then try to add it.
