The hot sauce world is a rich panoply of options. But while many are great for the average guy, there are a substantial number that could eat the rust off a battleship. If your insides are not yet accustomed to fire in a bottle, these ones are best seen and not touched.
Housed in a skull-shaped bottle, it should be left as a display piece to scare off vandals. Three million Scoville Heat Units (SCUs) is a heat impossible to imagine — and just as impossible to forget.
Like a cartoon, Dawson’s has crammed 36 ghost peppers into each bottle for a toxic mix that is just waiting to burn through your stomach lining. Luckily, the burn comes on slowly, so you can savor the flavor before you have a meltdown.
All your nightmares are here: Carolina Reaper, Scorpion, and Ghost Peppers, spiked with something called “No. 9 Plutonium Pepper.” It’s surprising that this Frankenstein can legally be shipped through the mail.
From the internet series famous for making celebrities cry on camera, this sauce distills the Pepper X, which holds the Guinness World Record at over three million SCUs. We wouldn’t be surprised if the factory employees wore HazMat suits.
Combining the Trinidad Scorpion pepper with the Carolina Reaper, this sauce is so potent it has a range, with the coolest (laughable) at 800,000 SCUs and extending up to 1,600,000. Lord help you if you end up with a hot batch.
Featuring a hybrid cross of Carolina Reaper and Pepper X, the surface of the sun might actually be a relief. Unable to be tested, possibly because it lit the receiving laboratory on fire.
Admittedly an intimidating name, this 800K SCU sauce was part of the original arms race in the early Aughts as peppers approached nuclear levels. The OG is still as ferocious as it was two decades ago.
Housed in its own idol, this blistering 7.1-million SCU sauce comes with a liability waiver and likely runs afoul of the Geneva Convention, as its use can be considered cruel and unusual punishment.