Mount Diablo: The Hottest Extract-Free Sauce In The World?

Mount Diablo is our newest release! While our first 9 sauces were focused on flavor over heat, we decided it was time to kick it up a notch and create a truly extreme sauce that doesn't resort to bad-tasting pepper extract. In the process, we learned a lot about the Scoville scale and why it has been so misrepresented. Based on our extensive testing, we believe Mount Diablo is the single hottest extract-free sauce out there. 

It started with a video

In 2024, the video team Howtown lab-tested the Hot Ones lineup and found that most of the sauces came in far below the Scoville numbers shown on screen. The piqued our curiosity, so over the past year we've been sending many of the hottest sauces we carry to the same lab, Southwest Bio-Labs in New Mexico. Most of the extract-free superhot sauces we tested came in under 100,000 Scoville.

Why the numbers come in low

The short answer is water. When a sauce advertises millions of Scoville heat units, that number is usually the rating of the dried pepper, not the sauce. A fresh pepper is about 90 percent water, and so the SHU is 90% lower when it's fresh. The other issue with common Scoville scale lists is that they tend to use peak numbers rather than average. So while Carolina Reapers can reach 2 million SHU, usually dried ones are closer to 1 million, meaning fresh ones are closer to 100k. To help clarify this, we've pulled together academic research to create a Scoville Scale that shows both dried and fresh numbers.

So we built one on dried pepper

Mount Diablo is made with dried 7 Pot Primo instead of fresh peppers, and the simple ingredients let the pepper flavor shine through. We believe it's the hottest extract-free sauce in the world. Of course, we haven't tested every sauce out there, but it's the hottest we've ever tested, and we can't find a lab report for a hotter one anywhere. If you make a sauce you think measures up, have it tested and publish the result. If one beats it, we'll say so.

Why we named it Mount Diablo

Mount Diablo is the mountain in our backyard, looming over the East Bay. We're big hikers, so we carried the bottle to the summit for its photos. The side panel of the label has some fun with the mountain's history. UC paleontologists dug more than 3,400 fossils from a quarry on its lower slopes, including four-tusked elephant relatives and a saber-toothed predator. And legend has it you can see more of the earth from its summit than from anywhere but Kilimanjaro. (KQED's Bay Curious looked into that one. It doesn't hold up.)

The original painting for the Mount Diablo label, by Anaïs Gia Reiss.

Where to find it

Mount Diablo is available now in a 5 oz bottle. It's also the last and hottest step in our Hot Sauce Challenge Set: 10 Sauces, Mild to Extreme, a climb from mild to extreme.

Meet the Artist

The painting on the Mount Diablo label is by Anaïs Gia Reiss.

Anaïs Gia Reiss
Graphic designer and illustrator
anaisreiss.com · Instagram @star_anais_

Anaïs Gia Reiss is a French-Korean-American graphic designer and illustrator from the San Francisco Bay Area. A recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), her work explores playful combinations of typography, color, and illustration, with a particular interest in branding, editorial, and packaging design. She is currently based in Lyon, France, where she is pursuing opportunities in graphic design and illustration.