Just in time for Cinco de Mayo comes this article from the Lake Oswego Review which re-hashes the subject of chile pepper hotness. A review for most chileheads, but informational nonetheless:

How hot is that red-hot chile pepper anyway?

By Barb Randall

Ole! Cinco de Mayo fiestas will be happening this week, with prodigue el banquete (lavish banquets) filled with zippy salsas, rich moles and the vibrant flavors common to Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisines. We can credit at least some of the cuisines flavors to chiles.

Most of us have a tale or two about unexpected encounters with chiles. Stories about dishes so hot they caused tears to roll down cheeks, smoke to billow out of ears and flames to erupt from mouths. The images are comical, but frankly, except by tasting, how can you tell how hot a chili might be?

Pharmacologist Wilber Scoville was intrigued by that very question and in 1912, he set out to determine the different heat levels of a wide variety of chiles. His experimentation led to the invention of the Scoville Organoleptic Test, the first systematic laboratory approach for measuring a chile’s pungency or heat.

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