7 Pot Primo vs Carolina Reaper

Both peppers are American-bred C. chinense with a red, wrinkled pod and a long tail, and each has a breeder who tells the story his own way. Troy Primeaux says on his own site that he developed the 7 Pot Primo in 2005 while working in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's horticulture department, crossing a Trinidad 7 Pot with a Naga Morich and selecting for the tail. Primo is his nickname. His page calls it arguably, and controversially, the hottest pepper in the world. Ed Currie's Carolina Reaper came out of PuckerButt in South Carolina. Guinness World Records, certifying it on November 19, 2013, described it as a cross between a sweet habanero and a Naga Viper that took ten years to stabilize. It went by the plot code HP22B before it had a name.

For years growers have compared the two pods and asked whether the Reaper owes something to the Primo. What is on the record is each breeder's own account.

The 7 Pot name is grower talk for a pepper hot enough to season seven pots of soup.

In use the two are interchangeable. Both go into extract-style sauces, dried powders and eating contests. PuckerButt describes the Reaper as painfully hot with sweet, fruity undertones and hints of cinnamon and chocolate. The Primo's tail is the tell in a lineup. It can run more than an inch, giving the pod an almost alien look, while the Reaper's tail is shorter and curved like a sickle, which is where the name came from. If you are buying seed, buy from the breeder, because look-alike pods are the whole reason this argument exists.