Carolina Reaper, Chocolate

Description

Carolina Reaper, Chocolate (C. chinense) is the brown-podded member of the Reaper family, and it is worth being straight about what that means: the Reaper’s own breeder has never produced a chocolate form. This line circulates through independent seed houses and growers rather than from PuckerButt, and its origins are genuinely undocumented — the earliest public trace is a grower posting photographs of a chocolate pod that turned up in a Reaper planting, explicitly saying he was not claiming to have bred anything.

The pods are 4–5 cm long and about 3 cm wide, carrying the full Reaper look: gnarled, bumpy, deeply folded skin and a stinger tail. They ripen dark green straight to a rich chocolate brown with no stage in between. One detail experienced growers use as a field tell: chocolate reapers tend to carry fewer tails than the red, and pods with pronounced tails and rounded lobes are usually a Brown Moruga sold under the wrong name.

The heat is Reaper class, and here honesty serves you better than a number: no laboratory has ever tested the chocolate form. Seed sellers quote anything from one million to over two million SHU, which tells you they are estimating. The measured benchmark belongs to the red Carolina Reaper: 1,641,183 SHU average, tested at Winthrop University. Treat this one with the same respect and you will not be disappointed.

Flavour is fruity with cocoa and earthy undertones — the brown-pod character rather than anything smoky. It belongs in hot sauce, in chili salt and in powder, and a very little goes a very long way.

This line is not fully stabilised. Expect variation between plants, including the occasional red pod, and isolate if you plan to save seed. The plants are dense and bushy, around 70 cm in a pot and over a metre in open ground, and they are late — reckon on 110–120 days or more to ripe pods. Germinate warm, 26–30 °C, and start early.

Categories: C. chinense , Super hot , Easy to grow