Vincent and a Naga pepper from Pakistan to create Smokin Ed’s Carolina Reaper - “a tidal wave of scorching fire,” as the PuckerButt website puts it. He said he tested hundreds of hybrid combinations before finally crossing a “really nastily hot” La Soufriere pepper from the Caribbean island of St. It took 12 years of crossbreeding for Currie to reach the pinnacle of the pepper world. Some products are made from the Reaper, whose off-label uses include “settling old scores,” Currie said. The 8-year-old company sells salsa, hot sauce, chile seeds as well as chile jellies, chocolates, peanut brittle and brownies to customers worldwide.Īmong the more popular sauces: Edible Lava, Ben’s Smokin’ Hot Razz Booty, I Dare You Stupit. Two years ago, he opened a storefront location on Main Street in downtown Fort Mill.Ī year before his pepper set the record, Currie quit his bank job to concentrate full time on PuckerButt, named after his wife’s description of the effects of eating his salsa. She later persuaded him to sell his salsas rather than give them away to a growing number of friends and neighbors.Ĭurrie opened a small booth at a flea market. That helped Currie woo and wed his wife, who loves salsa. At home, he made salsas and hot sauces from peppers he grew in his yard. ![]() In 2001, he moved to South Carolina and began working as a bank trust officer. “I wanted to keep on partying.”Ĭurrie has been clean and sober for nearly 16 years after completing a substance abuse recovery program in Michigan, he said. “I wanted to find out how not to die,” he said. He began crossbreeding peppers after reading scientific papers suggesting that their chemical compounds might reduce the risk of heart attacks and cancer, two diseases that run in his family, Currie said. “All you do is follow the scientific method.” ![]() “Anybody can do it,” he said of crossbreeding plants. While boozing and drugging his way through several colleges, he said, he parlayed his self-taught crossbreeding skills into producing potent marijuana plants. “My interest in chemistry years ago was drug-related, but it led me to peppers,” he said. ![]() He resembles the rumpled character actor Paul Giamatti and could probably play a mad scientist in a movie. He read library books about plants and pored over horticulture magazines ordered by his mother, a master gardener.Ĭurrie, stocky and bearded, is a frenetic talker. Currie, 51, has been fascinated with crossbreeding plants since he was a boy in Michigan.
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