1 of 3
Bringing the heat
From his small commercial kitchen and storefront in downtown Fort Mill, “Smokin’” Ed Currie oversees a hot sauce empire built on the runaway success of his Carolina Reaper—the world’s hottest pepper.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
2 of 3
Fire bomb
Big things come in small packages. A ripe Carolina Reaper is about the size of a golf ball and packed with capsaicin, the compound that gives hot peppers their burn. Testing at Winthrop University shows the Carolina Reaper clocks in at 1.5 million Scoville heat units, the highest ever recorded for a pepper. To put that in perspective, jalapeno peppers average around 3,000 units.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
3 of 3
Grown in Carolina
Heidi Cratty, Ed Currie’s personal assistant, tends to pepper plants in a greenhouse. The PuckerButt growing operation now requires more than 27 acres to keep up with demand for the Carolina Reaper.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
It’s mid-November 2019, and employees of PuckerButt Pepper Company in downtown Fort Mill are finally enjoying a moment of downtime. An insufferably hot summer resulted in a later harvest, which just ended earlier in the month. While they aren’t up hours before dawn picking peppers, work remains: making hot sauce, packing, shipping and preparing for next season.
Company founder “Smokin’” Ed Currie, creator of the menacing Carolina Reaper—officially the hottest pepper on the planet—sits on a wheeled office chair surrounded by stacked boxes filled with hot sauces. He quietly oversees the confusion of activity swirling around him. Shipments go in and out; sauce bottles need to be filled, sealed and labeled; payroll is due today; and a swarm of ladybugs is scheduled to be released into the greenhouse to organically deal with an aphid infestation.
Currie looks comfortable, if not slightly disheveled, with an unkempt beard, ball cap, baggy hoodie and jeans. Still, an aura surrounds him, a Yoda-like wisdom of the ways of capsaicin, the compound that gives peppers their heat.
Today he’s developing a batch of special holiday sauce, and employees periodically approach him with plastic sample spoons containing a warm, orange liquid for him to taste. It’s a milder sauce, and actually doesn’t contain any of the famous Reaper, but instead, one of the many other varieties of peppers Currie grows on more than 42 acres of land he oversees in the area.
“I’m tasting cinnamon. I taste a lot of apple,” he says, savoring the blend. “I don’t get any heat though.”
The air in the production building is saturated with the aroma of cooking peppers. For the uninitiated, it’s like breathing magma, particularly in the kitchen where sauces and “pepper mash” are prepared. The men and women who work here have largely become immune to the effects of the fiery air, and what they consider hot is much different from the average consumer’s perception. Several second-guess the composition of the holiday hot sauce; Currie isn’t quite satisfied with it either.
“You don’t think it needs some Reaper?” he asks.
Planting the seeds
Sauce is just one facet of PuckerButt Pepper Company. After earning the Guinness World Record for hottest pepper seven years ago and holding the record ever since, Currie began building his empire by selling products at local farmers’ markets. Today, he’s supplying many of the world’s hot sauce companies with the raw material to add heat to their products. Largely a business-to-business operation, Currie also maintains a store on Main Street in downtown Fort Mill. The storefront, combined with a lucrative online business, earned the company more than $2 million in 2018 “without even trying,” Currie says.
The increase in business, a record harvest in 2019 and a planned expansion into more acreage all add up to the company being on track to have its largest year of production “by far,” according to Brett Rogers, chief of operations and a longtime friend of Currie. He estimates they processed more than 200,000 pounds of peppers .
“Before we might have made a pallet of mash a day. This year we were making three to four pallets a day,” Rogers says, noting a single pallet contains around 1,700 pounds of product.
Pepper mash—essentially finely chopped peppers and vinegar—is the base for making hot sauce. It’s the main product produced by PuckerButt. “If you see hot in the grocery store, chances are it came from here,” Currie says.
And if you see anything bearing the name “Carolina Reaper,” it will have definitely been made with peppers from here in South Carolina, assuming it actually is a Reaper-based product. Currie estimates up to 10% of the products claiming to use Carolina Reapers are not genuine.
Counterfeit hot sauce? Since hot sauce reportedly took over as the most popular condiment in America more than a decade ago, the industry has become competitive and there is “jealousy,” Currie says, specifically toward him holding the official Guinness World Record for the hottest pepper.
‘A gift from God’
That success didn’t come easy, or overnight. Long before the Carolina Reaper and “Smokin’” Ed Currie, there was Ed Currie, the addict. He learned to grow peppers as a hobby during recovery and became interested in their medicinal properties in the early 1980s. But he knew the medical community wouldn’t take him seriously until he cleaned up his life. Eventually he landed in the banking industry but continued growing peppers and making salsas and sauces as a hobby.
His breakthrough moment arrived in 2004. That was when he joined a Naga Viper pepper from Pakistan with a La Soufriere from the volcanic Caribbean island of St. Vincent. It yielded a pepper so hot it was “making people sick,” and he knew he was onto something.
The pepper, labeled “HP220B,” was, of course, an early version of the Carolina Reaper. It’s designation “HP” stands for “higher power” and both refers to the strength of the pepper and to God.
“It was a gift from God,” Currie says. “It put me back on track.”
But he had no idea just how hot HP220B was. For that he needed scientific testing, and nearby Winthrop University had a lab on-site that could test for Scoville heat units, a scale based on the concentration of capsaicin in a product. Testing was led by Dr. Cliff Calloway, a professor of chemistry, who turned it into a popular project for his students.
“Students were clamoring at my door, asking ‘Can I work with peppers?’” Calloway says.
Currie’s hybrid HP220B clocked in at a whopping 1.5 million Scoville heat units, the highest ever recorded for a pepper. To put the Reaper’s 1.5 million SHU into perspective, the jalapeno pepper averages around 3,000 units.
“It’s like comparing a roller skate to the space shuttle,” Currie says. “There is no comparison.”
Pepper X
Currie officially earned the Guinness World Record in 2013, and he has held it ever since. That notoriety led to appearances on national television shows such as 60 Minutes and Good Morning America, and Currie became an internet sensation almost overnight, as viral videos of people eating the Carolina Reaper made waves.
The pepper’s extreme nature is part of the allure. Currie says three types of people enjoy super hots like the Reaper: thrill-seekers (“people who climb mountains with their fingertips”), millennials and hipsters (who want to be part of the “cool scene”) and addicts (“for the endorphin rush”).
Eating one is a stupid thing, Currie warns. “It’s brutal and it’s not for the faint of heart. Most people who try a whole pepper end up throwing up and there is no remedy.”
Currie says he has since bred a “Pepper X” that reportedly clocks in at more than 3 million Scoville heat units, which would make it by far the hottest pepper on the planet, and if certified, would result in a record that “ain’t never getting broken.”
Grown in Carolina
The fame of the Carolina Reaper has certainly been good for business, and Currie and his team have worked long hours to meet the demand. Peppers begin their lifecycle in the winter in greenhouses on-site, as they are accustomed to warmer climes. They are eventually transplanted into the fields.
Reapers are small, gnarly and oddly shaped, and a mature, ripe pepper is about the size of a golf ball. A plant can yield up to four pounds of peppers a season. Currie employs up to 20 farm workers who pick the peppers by hand and bring them to the processing facility, where they are sorted, stemmed and chopped before being turned into the concentrated pepper mash. During the harvest, Currie starts his day at 2 a.m., and the facility doesn’t stop working until 4 or 5 p.m.
As the popularity of hot sauces continues to rise, so does the pressure for Currie to grow his business. But like building up a tolerance for heat, business growth should be gradual, he says.
Currie is looking to farm on approximately 20 additional acres, but he knows the dangers of expanding too quickly. It’s also important to him to have a balance between his work and life at home with his wife, Linda, and their two young children, Kathryn, 8, and Eddie, 6.
He also values his “pepper family” more than the business itself.
“I’ve built a family,” he says, “that’s come together to do good work.”
___
Get More
For more on PuckerButt Pepper Company and its products, see puckerbuttpeppercompany.com, call (803) 802-9593, or visit the company’s store at 237 Main Street in Fort Mill.
___
Related stories
Man on fire—Meet the self-described “mad scientist” behind the world’s hottest chili pepper.
Made in S.C.—Chances are, you’ve already heard a thing or two about Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper, the world’s hottest chili pepper. But did you know South Carolina is also home to a unique class of sailboat, the world’s fastest golf cart and a spicy soft drink once sold as a health tonic?