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Scoville Rating, How Hot is That Hot Sauce

People ask us all the time, "Is this brand X hot sauce hot?" Well, everything we sell has some heat to it, but as most people know, some peppers and sauces are hotter than others. So in order to measure how hot something is, Wilbur Scoville developed the Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) rating in 1912 to measure different levels of heat of peppers, sauces, etc so they could be ranked to each other. So lets do some comparisons. A sweet bell pepper that has no heat at all would be 0 Scoville, a common pepperoncini found on most salad bars is anywhere from 100-500 Scoville, and the jalapeno, which most non-pepper heads think is hot, is anywhere from 2500-5000 Scoville.

For many years the Guinness Worlds Record for the hottest chili pepper was the Red Savina with a Scoville rating of anywhere from 350,000-580,000, significantly hotter than the grocery store jalapeno. In 2007 it was replaced by the Naga Jolokia (aka Bhut Jolokia, Dorset Naga, Ghost Chile, Ghost Pepper, Naga Morich, or King Cobra Chile) with over a Scoville rating over 855,000 and since then some peppers have been measured as high as 1,041,427, that's double the previous record holder!

Think you're ready to run with the big dogs? Try any of the sauces below, these are not your run of the mill grocery store hot sauces. Most are over 500,000 Scoville and some are over a million!