Festive bowl filled with a variety of hot peppers (iStock)
A British farmer says he's grown a chili pepper so insanely hot, one bite could kill you.
Welsh plant grower Mike Smith from St. Asaph, Denbighshire is calling his new creation the "Dragon’s Breath" chili.
Created with help from Nottingham Trent University, the new pepper has a Scoville scale rating of 2.4 million heat units—blasting away the world’s current record holder, the Carolina Reaper, which scores about 1.5 million on the Scoville scale, reports the BBC.
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Smith himself has not actually taken a true bite of the pepper but told the BBC that it "would not be a pleasant sensation," adding that "the heat is beyond.”
The pepper itself is so hot, says the farmer, that it’s not meant for consumption but rather could be used as a natural anesthetic in developing countries where people may not have access to chemical versions. The oil from the pepper is so intensely fiery that it can reportedly numb the skin.
"It’s not been tried orally. I’ve tried it on the tip of my tongue and it just burned and burned. I spat it out in about 10 seconds,” Smith told The Daily Post. “The heat intensity just grows.”
Growing the pepper has been a labor of love, with the Dragon’s Breath taking Smith about eight years of trial and error to develop.
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Smith, who owns local plant shop Tom Smith’s Plants, will exhibit the Dragon’s Breath plant at the Chelsea Flower Show in London next week and says he hopes it will win in the “Plant of the Year” category.
Smith also says he has sent in an official application to Guinness World Records officials and is currently awaiting confirmation that his new pepper is infact the world's hottest.
Ed Currie, a farmer from South Carolina and the owner of The PuckButt Pepper Company, developed the current record holder-- the Smokin' Ed's Carolina Reaper pepper, which measures an average of 1,569,300 Scoville heat units.