The Redemptive Story of an Ex-Addict-Turned Creator of World’s Hottest Pepper (Carolina Reaper & Pepper X)

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And to get our podcasts, and I urge you to do so and subscribe, go to Apple, Spotify, or iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our next storyteller is an American chili pepper breeder who’s the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company. And by the way, you’ve probably seen him on Hot Ones, on cable, Hulu, or wherever you get your television. Let’s take a listen to Ed Curry.

00:00:45
Speaker 2: All right, I’m smoking, Ed Curry. I’m the president, owner, mad scientist, and chef at the Pucker Butt Pepper Company. And I’m known for making hot sauce and known for breeding peppers. I’ve read the Pepper X, which is the current world record, and I’d read the Carolina Reaper, which was the world record for thirteen years. Those are the peppers people know about. But there’s a whole lot more common now. You know, people often ask how did I get into doing plans? And, you know, that’s, that’s really a story that goes all the way back to my childhood. I grew up in New York, and we were fortunate enough to be one of the houses on the block that had a yard. And my mother made beautiful gardens, and that was rare for New York City, and, you know, we would go out as little kids and help her in the garden. It wasn’t really anything of interest. It was more of, “Hey, let’s hang out with Mom.” And then we moved to Valley Forts, Pennsylvania. And when we moved there, we had a very big glte. I mean, it was huge, and the gardens got bigger and bigger, and got, I got more interest in it. And one of the things my mother started showing me how to do. She would get different colors from flowers by crossing tubers or by adding nutrients into the ground that caused the flowers to come out not what they did the year before. So that really, I was a smart kid, and that kind of piqued my interest into, “Oh, this looks kind of cool.” Maybe I can do this, you know. And then we moved to Michigan. But by that time, essentially, I was a full-blown attic. I had been drinking through my childhood. I got a lot of trouble in elementary school and junior high drinking and doing drugs and smoking when you’re not supposed to be. So that got me interested in, well, if I can breed, you know, flowers, if I can do stuff with that, what can I do with pot? You know, at the time, the only real source for any knowledge on pot was a magazine called High Times. And, you know, I tried crossing different screens of pot that came in, but those were high school attempts. Those were kid attempts, not really science attempts. Even though I knew what I was doing, I really didn’t know what I was doing, if that makes any sense. My parents got me off of college at a very young age because, as I said, I was a smart kid, you know, so I was ahead of grade of everybody else. I went to college on my, I think it was my seventeenth birthday. It was kind of funny because my dad gave me a case of Heineken Dark, a case of Heineken Light, and told me, “If I wanted to continue living the lifestyle I was living, I better find something to cure heart disease or cancer, because that kills our fami, lady, and you’re going to die pretty young,” you know. And, you know, I took that to heart because I wanted to keep on partying. That’s plain and simple. So I went to a place called the library, trying to research who didn’t have heart disease or cancer. I found a study that showed that people up in the equatorial band, whether they’re Westernized or not, had very, very low heart indices of heart disease or cancer. I mean, almost is ill. At the time, there were five indices I could find that were common in all those different cultures, and the one that I could standardize in a lab was capsaicin. So that really piqued my interest in peppers. I always liked hot stuff, you know. Growing up in New York in a half-Italian family, I was exposed to pepper flakes and pepperccini and cherry peppers and things like that, but nothing really hot. So during one of my trips back home, I went to a place called The West East, which was a restaurant that was run by a Vietnamese family, and I told them I wanted the hottest thing they had. They said, “No, no, no, no,” you know. I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, let me try.” And when I ate that, it threw me for a loop. Okay, but it also made me feel really good. It kind of got me high, you know. And I kept on eating, and I kept on drinking those Thai coffees, and I kept on eating, sweating, and snodding. I asked them where I could get those peppers, and they gave me a bag full of peppers, but they also gave me a little pepper plant. It was a Vietnamese bird pepper, and that was my first exposure to what I thought was a hot pepper, which now I would say is a mile pa. I’d pop them like candy, you know. But the very first thing I did was go back to my dorm room and I fed them to other people I knew, just to watch their reactions. But, you know, again, the addiction was taking a toll on my life, and I kind of, you know, I saw an angel, I thought, you know. Looking back on it, I hadn’t decided that I didn’t want to live anymore, but I really, you know, I, I, I still didn’t want to kill myself, if that makes any sense.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company, and that said Curry, and he’s telling a heck of his story about his early life and the problems he had with alcohol and drugs, but also the curiosity had and the affection he had for this thing called peppers. He had discovered and learned to love peppers from his Italian side of his family, but not hot peppers. I’m half-Italian, and we love peppers. We put peppers in everything, but not the kind that he’s talking about. That had to happen when he walked into a Vietnamese restaurant and discovered the true nature of hot. And, of course, he was also descending into a dark place, and he was thinking of ending his own life, but not actually thinking about going through with it. When we come back, more of the story of Ed Curry here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we return to Our American Stories. Let’s return to Ed Curry, and he is the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company.

00:08:19
Speaker 2: So I had decided one night in a blizzard to open up all the doors and windows, and I put a massive amount of drugs and alcohol in front of me. I was ready to, you know, just put myself to sleep, essentially. And I saw an angel. It was an angel, okay. And I know that because I went looked for footprints, and there were no footprints in the snow, all right. And that angel told me to go to a place called Brighton Hospital. And I knew where Brighton, Michigan, was. So I loaded up my te top Camaro and drove out in a blizzard looking for this place. But when I got there, it was a rehab hospital. And I told him I didn’t need to stay there, you know. They talked me into staying. Oh, sorry, I gotta try something hot. We’re cooking a project here. I think it’s good. Whoo! I think it’s real good. Whoa! Uh. So I wound up staying thirty-three days at that hospital. Funny sidebar about this. When I was about seventeen years old, I went to my neighbor’s house, but his mom and dad had gotten divorced, and his mom worked really far away. So we go down and sit around his kitchen table and do bong hits and drink whatever was in the liquor cabinet and just have fun. And she walked in on us, and she said, “One day, you guys are all going to wind up where I work.” She turned out to be the director of the hospital I went at, and she, she was a counselor there when she told us that. And she told me, she said, “I told you back in nineteen seventy-nine you were going to wind up here, and you did, you know?” So I’m starting to study peppers in college, and we’re coming up on first semester finals. Now I got a bunch of people in my room with a keg of Lowenbrau Dark, and we’re doing bondheads and other various things. I think, well, I think a few of us popped some mushrooms. And one of the girls who was in the room for part of her final, she had to ask people what they wanted to achieve in life. And she went around the room, and someone said they were going to be a doctor, or someone said they were going to be a lawyer. He did turn out to be a lawyer, you know. There were like twelve of us in there, and this was the week before Thanksgiving, so it was like the Tuesday or Monday before Thanksgiving of nineteen eighty-one, and I said, “I am going to make the hottest pepper in the world.” She wrote that down, “All right, Ed Curry, hottest pepper in the world.” We fast-forward to two thousand and seven, we had remained friends. I called her up, and I talked to her into moving down to South Carolina and helping me run this blooming business. And about two weeks later, she produced the notes from nineteen eighty-one showing that I was going to make the hottest pepper in the world. And I had already given Winthrop University what became the Reaper to test, and at the time it rated the hottest that was ever measured at one point two seven five million Scoville units. Let me explain what a Scoville heat unit is for you, and that’s the measurement we use to see how hot a pepper is. In the early nineteen hundreds, a guy named Wilbur Scoville came up with this scale, and it was a very subjective scale. It was how much of a liquid it took to dilute a pepper until you couldn’t feel any of the heat. But see, for me, I don’t feel any of the heat from ailipino, so that would be zero to me, whereas you might be five thousand ounces to not feel any of the heat. So that was the Scoville heat scale for a long time. But then science caught up with the needs of like the medical community, you know, because like capsaicin is, capsinoids are used in a lot of things medicinally and have been since their early nineteen hundreds: sports creams, you know, Bengay, that kind of thing. So to standardize it, they came up with a machine called an HPLC, a high performance liquid chromatic RAP. But that’s where the science comes around. So anyway, getting back to, I got clean, okay, and I couldn’t go anywhere. I was in some legal trouble, and I needed something to do with my day because essentially I had to go to a bunch of meetings, a bunch of rehab, a bunch of everything. So I started messing around with peppers, but again, really just to hurt people who I knew from rehabing in meetings. It was fun, you know. And then like my sponsor at the time, he was like, “Hey, you’re getting high off of these things.” And there’s some fact to that. When you eat capsaicin in any form—hot, sauce, whatever, peppers—there’s a nerve receptor that only mammals have, TRVP one, that reacts with the capsaicin to send a chemical signal to your brain saying, “You’re on fire.” Don’t eat this, but if you put it on your skin, you get the same reaction. But it’s just a brain trick. There’s no actual heating peppers, but because your brain thinks you’re on fire, it also releases a huge amount of don’t mean an endorphin into your system, kind of like a runner’s high. So you either get a fight or a flight response. Some people don’t like what’s going on, so they’re the ones who run around chugging milk, you know, throwing up, crying, or are you going to fight response? You know, and you kind of like what’s going on? You do it again. You know, there’s nothing you can stop for the physiological. Like, I just ate some hot; my saliva is running, my nose is running, my eyes are watering, my skin kind of flushed. You know, that’s just physiological reactions from the base brain. Nothing you can do about that. But I’m an addict in recovery. Okay, my body kind of likes that feeling, so my body goes to the fight response. So I kind of noticed early on that even though a lot of people had reaction to eating peppers, those in the recovery community went back for seconds. Now, through the late eighties, early nineties, I had moved back and forth between Michigan and Carolina half a dozen dozen times, trying to change my circumstance. But wherever I went, I was there. So the same thing happened no matter what. But I loved South Carolina, and I loved the dirt in South Carolina, and I loved the history of South Carolina. And I kept on going back.

00:16:15
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Ed Curry, and he’s the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company. And, my goodness, what a complicated life he’s leading. There’s a blizzard one night, he’s in college, and there he is, well, he’s just downing a massive amount of pills and drugs. And in the end, as he put it, he was just trying to go to sleep permanently, and it didn’t happen. As he put it, he saw an angel, and he said it was a snowy day and there were no footprints, and that angel told him to go to a rehab his friend’s mother had told him he’d end up in many years before. And for those of you who think, “Oh, an angel, you know what? A load of you know what?” Well, there are people who believe it, and don’t tell Ed Curry he didn’t see an angel.

00:17:02
Speaker 2: And then, of course.

00:17:02
Speaker 1: There he is with that pepper obsession, and for some reason, well, he just likes hot and really hot. And hearing about the psychological effects and the physiological effects is remarkable, and how some personalities deal with heat and another doesn’t, and how the body produces, well, chemicals.

00:17:21
Speaker 2: In response to that heat.

00:17:23
Speaker 1: It’s fascinating, and, of course, it fascinated Ed Curry and saved Ed Curry. It’s very clear that this obsession saved him from narcotics and alcohol and drugs. When we come back, more of the story of Ed Curry, the founder and president of Pucker Butt Pepper Company, here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories, and we’re listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company, sharing his story. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:22
Speaker 2: So the very first thing I did when they told me I could leave the state of Michigan was I called my parents. I had to humble myself. I’m a thirty-seven, thirty-eight year old man. I had to humble myself and say, “Mom and Dad, can I come and live with you?” And to my surprise, they said, “Yes,” right now. I didn’t realize there were going to be a ton of roles I really didn’t like when I got there. They didn’t trust me at all, and they had every right not to trust me. But I called a buddy of mine who had been one of my best friends since I was fourteen. He immediately packed his family and his two small children—you know, his wife and two small children—up, came down, and packed me up and moved me down to South Carolina. I was gotten within forty-eight hours of the court setting me free. When I got here, it was November, so there really wasn’t much I could do as far as planting or anything. Like that. But the one thing that did happen was I met a young lady, okay, and I asked her fridge for her name, and she was like, “Who wants to know?” looking straight at me, and I asked her for her phone number, and she was like, “Not a chance in hell.” She, like, in front of me, she called me a funny little man. And she was rude to me, seriously rude to me. But in one of the events for the group that I met her in, I heard her say, “I wish someone would make so and,” and I got together all the stuff to make some salsa, and I made peach mango salsa, and she asked who made the salsa, and I was in. Okay, she doesn’t like me saying this because she’s a Christian Southern woman. But in the springtime, she moved me into her house. Okay. I had officially asked her to marry me already. But we were walking in the beach in Hilton Head, and I took all the silver out of the inside of the pack of a cigarettes—all the silver—and while we were walking, I formed a ring out of it. And I got down on my knee on the beach in Hilton Head, and I said, “Linda, would you form a limited liability corporation with me?” And she said, “What?” I said, “Will you form it now? I’ll see with me.” And she was like, “What are you trying to say? Are you trying to tell me to get married?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And she wore that band of cigarette wrapper for the rest of the weekend. You know, it was really, really cool. But she moved me in in the springtime, and she went away for some conference, and I went to Home Depot and bought five-gallon buckets in bulk, and I bought a ton of dirt. And when she came home, every square inch of her yard was filled with peppers and peppers and tomatoes. And she was like, “What are you doing, you know?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to build a greenhouse back here.” She was like, “Why?” And I told her, “God has put in on my heart that I need to do peppers. I’ve been doing stuff with peppers since eighty-one. I’m going to make the hottest pepper in the world. I’m going to cure cancer. I’m going to cure heart dise.” And she’s like, “Well, if that’s what you want to do, that’s what you do.” She had no idea how much fruit would come off of all those plants. So she’s like, “What are we going to do with this?” And I said, “We’ll make hot sauce and salta and give it to our friends, you know, make Christmas presents and stuff.” And we started giving that stuff away. And the next year after we got married, we were giving a lot of stuff away, okay, and she said, “People will buy this,” and I said, “No, they won’t,” and she proved me wrong. We went to a local farmer’s market and we sold a lot of hot sauce and a l