Butch Taylor: Gastromasochist

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The tale of a Baton Rouge plumber who became the Johnny Appleseed of the “super hot” pepper movement.

For the past couple of months, Butch Taylor has been battling the polar vortex one burst pipe at a time. It is hard to imagine the man who is responsible for cultivating one of the hottest peppers on the planet freezing while navigating the icy crawl spaces of houses and apartment buildings.

Taylor’s road from amateur gardener to pepper guru has spanned four decades. Back in the early 1980s, he began growing a little garden of tomatoes and later added peppers. His hobby quickly became an obsession. “I like spicy food, and it was never hot enough for me,” he said. “I kept looking for hotter and hotter peppers.” By the late 1980s, a coworker gave him the life-changing gift of some habanero pepper seeds. “This was when people didn’t know what a habanero was. And I thought, oh my God, these things are great.”

Over the next few years, Taylor began making his own hot sauce and swapping pepper seeds with folks he met on the Internet. He even had a doctor who was returning from some volunteer work in Mexico smuggle peppers across the border in a small plane. Eventually he met a man from New Jersey who sent him Trinidad Scorpion Pepper seeds. The peppers were not suited to the cold climate, and the man hadn’t had much luck growing them. Luckily for Taylor, the Trinidad Scorpion would feel right at home on his farm in Crosby, Mississippi.

Taylor grew a bumper crop of beastly hot peppers. “I shared the seeds of the first crop with anyone who wanted them. Some ended up as far away as Australia,” he said. “This Aussie wanted to make a hot sauce out of them and had them tested. They were the hottest peppers in the world. He even gave me credit.” The pepper was crowned the “Butch T. Trinidad Scorpion Pepper,” and the paperwork was sent to Guinness World Records for authentication.

The spicy heat or pungency of a pepper is measured using the Scoville scale, invented by William Scoville in 1912. Tabasco sauce rates between 2,500–5,000 units on the scale. Red habanero peppers rate about 250,000 units. The Butch T. Trinidad Scorpion rated a record breaking 1,463,700 Scoville units.

Because of their potency, super hot peppers are used primarily in cooking and are not for eating alone. One of the super-hots, the Trinidad 7 Pot, garners its name from the idea that just one of these small peppers packs enough of a wallop to flavor seven pots of chili. Despite the power of these peppers, daredevils often attempt to eat them, documenting their endeavors on YouTube.

“If you eat a Trinidad Scorpion Pepper straight, it burns immediately and keeps getting hotter. You feel it all the way down your throat into your stomach,” Taylor said. “On an empty stomach it might make you puke. After twenty minutes, the heat slowly starts going away.” Taylor equates the high he receives from ingesting a Trinidad Scorpion to climbing a mountain, but the thrill does come with a warning.

“Asthmatics should stay away. It could literally take their breath away,” he said. With the popularity of television shows like Man v. Food, where chili-heads accept insane challenges to eat everything from burritos to chicken wings that have been doused with flaming peppers, the super hot pepper movement has exploded over the past few years. It was only a matter of time before a reporter from The New Yorker found her way to Taylor’s front door. “She wanted to talk to me because when researching her article, my name kept coming up wherever she went,” he said. “I was the man who got the peppers to the people.”

Right now, Taylor is a self-described one-man operation. The South has a long pepper-growing season that lasts from July to September, but Taylor has a greenhouse on his Mississippi farm so he can grow crops year-round. He currently uses his peppers to make hot sauce for friends and family and sometimes sells pepper seeds online to sauce makers, salsa makers, and food manufacturers. Sauce makers are endeared to the Trinidad Scorpion because huge batches can be made with a very small quantity of peppers. It also has a vibrant red color that comes through in the sauce.

Although Taylor’s world record was recently overthrown by the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Pepper and the Carolina Reaper, both of which can measure above two million Scoville units, he isn’t upset: “I am not trying to make a living off growing peppers. I bring the peppers to the masses because pain loves company.” His mission is for the world to love the potent heat of the super hots. When asked which food chain he would like to see use his peppers, he said, “McDonald’s. Not because of the money. It would mean the world would embrace the pepper. They have a habanero burger now. It could happen.”

At present, his biggest critic continues to be his wife: “She doesn’t like peppers, but I slip them into things all the time. She never stops eating.” Taylor intends on passing along his crown to his grandson, who started eating habaneros right off the bush at the age of five. “He will be the next pepper head,” he said.

A recipe for Butch Taylor’s Home-style Chili can be found here.