Reaper X SRTSL X Purple Reaper

No published tasting notes exist for this specific unstable pheno. Parent lines suggest a sweet-fruity, floral chinense profile — Reaper cherry-fruit, SRTSL floral-sweet, Purple Reaper fruity-peppery or slightly bitter — quickly overtaken by extreme heat.

Reaper X SRTSL X Purple Reaper is a collector three-way hybrid that has not been stabilized. The Texas Hot Peppers pheno shows dark green-to-purple foliage and large-for-a-superhot pods that taper and carry deep ridges. Fruit starts green with purple blush and finishes cherry red; because the line still segregates, shape and color can vary from plant to plant. Heat is described only as extremely hot, consistent with Reaper and Trinidad Scorpion parentage (parent-line estimates fall in the 1–2 million SHU range; this triple has no published lab test). Flavor is expected to follow the parents — fruity and floral under a fast, overwhelming burn — and the pods are used in tiny amounts for sauce, mash, and powder rather than eaten out of hand. Plants behave like other C. chinense superhots: long warm season, full sun, and about 3–4 feet of bushy growth.

This named cross stitches together three well-known chinense lines. Carolina Reaper was bred by Ed Currie in Fort Mill, South Carolina. SRTSL — Sara Ragoonanan Trinidad Scorpion Long — is an early-2000s Trinidad scorpion selection that circulated through online chile forums and later became a common parent for long-tailed hybrids. Purple Reaper is Rafael Kenji’s Brazilian Capiroto × Carolina Reaper selection (also called Kenji Purple), grown for anthocyanin-dark foliage and pods. A two-way Reaper × SRTSL was first made by Paul Willet and further selected for extreme tails by Giancarlo Fadda of Fadda’s Peppers. The third cross onto Purple Reaper is circulated as an unstable open-pollinated offering by Texas Hot Peppers in Texas, with F3 seed also sold by SeedObsession. No individual is publicly credited as the originator of the three-way itself.