A list of the hottest peppers in the world, ranked by Scoville Heat Units

If you have been familiar with hot sauces and peppers, then you’ll probably have an idea of which ones are the really hot peppers and which ones are mild. Maybe you even know the names of those peppers and know how hot they are exactly. That heat is measured in Scoville Heat Units (SHU), which makes it even easier to compare them. And that’s exactly what they did in this overview, where all the peppers in the world are ranked by Scoville Heat Units.

The hottest peppers in the world

From the sweet bell to the Pepper X, every pepper is listed in this image. Pepper X is the latest creation of Smokin’ Ed Currie and according to the (unofficial) measurements it is the new king of peppers, which means it dethroned the Carolina Reaper (also a Smokin’ Ed creation). Still, according to official records the Carolina Reaper is still the hottest pepper in the world. The Pepper X hasn’t had enough testing and isn’t stable enough in terms of heat. The Dragon’s Breath also claims to be hotter than the Reaper, but hasn’t been officially tested.

Anyways, down below you will find the full and very well illustrated overview. If the text on your screen is too small, you can click on it and zoom in.

Interesting right? It’s cool to see how many different peppers there are in the world. So many even that you probably have never seen most of these peppers in a hot sauce. In our pages with all hot sauces you can filter the sauces based on the peppers used.