Heat is measured in Scoville heat units. A sauce made only from peppers can never be hotter than the peppers in it, which is why the two hottest bottles here use extract, concentrated capsaicin that goes far past what any pepper can reach.
Plenty of extract-free sauces claim a million Scoville or more. Those claims usually describe the dried pepper, not the sauce, and vinegar and water dilute it. That's why we had Mount Diablo tested as sold. See our Scoville Scale for what the lab numbers really look like.
Want the burn without the extract? Start with our Carolina Reaper hot sauces and ghost pepper hot sauces, or browse every sauce we rate Extreme. Working up to it? The Hot Sauce Challenge Set runs 10 sauces from mild to extreme, in order.
