Chili Pepper News — Wilbur Scoville

If you’ve ever wondered just how hot a hot chili pepper can really get, enter the Scoville Scale. That’s the scale that helps measure the heat of hot chili peppers. The scale gets its name from none other than Wilbur Scoville. He was an American pharmacist who came up with something in the early 1900s called the Scoville organoleptic test. That test estimated the Scoville Heat Units, or SHU, with each type of pepper.

While the Carolina Reaper is smoking hot, the lowly bell pepper sits at the very bottom of the scale. Does the thought of eating a jalapeno make your skin sweat?

If you’ve ever wandered through the grocery store considering the different chilies or hot sauces, you’ve likely noticed designations along the lines of mild, medium, or hot. (That is until you get to the super hot sauces which are more likely to carry warnings of “too damned hot for you” or “you’ll die if you try.”) But what on earth does mild, medium, or hot really mean? What are you supposed to tell the server when they enquire whether you want your curry mild, medium, or hot? Surely all that practice you have consuming chilies Stateside means you can handle...

Thinking about the first tests to determine the heat of chili peppers, it’s far too easy to think of Wilbur Scoville as a little bit out of his mind. After all, humans are terrible at gauging… well, anything. Given a crime scene, every witness will see something different. And, it’s damned difficult to agree on specific color – so much so that there are color reference guides printed to assist designers and the like.