Being dedicated to the art of sizzle, we at Original Juan Specialty Foods and Pain Is Good get more precise than just hot and hotter. Our guide is the famous Scoville unit. Dedicated chile-heads and hot-sauce aficionados live by it.
Way back in 1912, a hothead named Wilbur Scoville came up with a way to measure the heat of chile peppers in the most straightforward way imagineable: he ground up chiles, diluted different quantities of the powder in sugar water, fed the dilutions to people and tested their reactions. (Wouldn't you have liked to be there for that?)
Capsaicins, which give hot peppers their hotness, are so potent in pure form that old Scoville had to break out the zeros: One part capsaicin per million rates 15 Scoville units. Once he had that starting point, Scoville wrote up a 1-10 scale of capsaicin concentrations, in multiples of one hundred, starting at 0 and topping off at a blistering 350,000. That's 35 percent capsaicin and 65 percent sugar water. (Some milk over here, please!)
Today, the Scoville scale is still good, with one exception: Original Juan hot sauces busted the charts. The top of the scale, 10, goes to 350,000 Scoville units. Thing is, pure capsaicin rates at 16,000,000 Scoville units, and there's plenty of room between 350,000 and 16 million. (Room for pepper spray and serious hot sauce.)
Original Juan created the world’s hottest hot sauce — The Source — measuring an alarming 7.1 million Scoville units. If you’re still worried about trying the Pain Is Good line, don’t let the numbers scare you because they were created with good pain management in mind. Most of the The Pain Is Good line measures between 5,000 and 350,000 Scoville units.