Visitors to our shops ask a lot of questions, but the ones we get most often are about the Scoville Scale used to measure the heat of chili peppers. January 22nd (National Hot Sauce Day) is the birthday of Wilbur Scoville, the American pharmacist who invented the system! As a tribute, we thought we’d take this opportunity to explain how the measurement system works:
- In 1912, Scoville was working for a pharmaceutical company developing a product akin to our modern IcyHot, using chili pepper derived capsaicin for the heat component.
- Scoville needed a way to measure how hot different chilis were as he was working on his formula.
- He devised a method to dilute a chili distillate in water until expert tasters could no longer detect the heat from the chili.
- The number of drops of water needed to dilute one drop of the chili was reported as Scoville Heat Units (SHUs).
- Nowadays heat testing is done in labs with high-performance liquid chromatography measuring the density of molecules and is then equated to a number on the Scoville scale. For this reason lab testing is usually limited to chilis going for the record, and not to hot sauces.
|
Jalapeño |
2,500-8,000 Scoville Heat Units |
|
Chile de Arbol |
10,000-20,000 Scoville Heat Units |
|
Serrano |
10,000-23,000 Scoville Heat Units |
|
Scotch Bonnet |
100,000-350,000 Scoville Heat Units |
|
Habanero |
100,000-577,000 Scoville Heat Units |
|
Ghost Pepper |
855,000-1,041,000 Scoville Heat Units |
| 1,200,000-2,000,000 Scoville Heat Units | |
| 1,400,000-2,200,000 Scoville Heat Units | |
| 2,693,000 Scoville Heat Units (Guinness World Record confirmed) | |
| Scoville Heat Units TBA* |
* Why does The Apollo Pepper show as TBA? Chilis can vary greatly in heat from season to season, plant to plant, and even between peppers on the same plant! In order to ensure accurate results, we test peppers from three consecutive yearly harvests before releasing numbers.
Our Heat Scale
Because SHUs are mostly used for chilis, we use a 1-10 scale for most of our hot sauces, so you can know how spicy they are in relation to each other.
That said, we approximate them for every Hot Ones lineup! Want to see how the Season 23 hot sauce lineup stacks up on the Scoville scale?
Shop The Hot Ones 10 Pack
We add the Scoville estimates next to each sauce included in the Hot Ones 10-Pack! Check out each season's pack for specific Scovilles, choose a lineup and live the tradition.