The TABASCO® Scoville Scale: How Hot Is Every Sauce?
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How hot is TABASCO® sauce? That depends which bottle you pick, and the gap is bigger than most people expect. The mildest sauce in the range sits around 500 Scoville units. The Scorpion Sauce reaches 33,000.
This page lists every sauce we stock with its Scoville rating, so you can check the heat before you buy rather than after.
What the Scoville scale actually measures
The Scoville scale measures capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers feel hot. The unit is the Scoville Heat Unit, usually shortened to SHU. A sweet bell pepper is 0 SHU. A jalapeño is roughly 2,500 to 8,000. A habanero pepper can pass 100,000.
One thing worth knowing before you read the table: a finished sauce always measures far lower than the raw pepper in it, because the pepper is cut with vinegar, water and salt. That is why a sauce built on a million-SHU pepper can still be manageable. The numbers below are the published figures for each sauce. Treat them as a guide, because heat tolerance varies a lot between people.
Every TABASCO® sauce, ranked by heat
| Sauce | Scoville (SHU) | What it tastes like |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet & Spicy Sauce | ~500 | Sweet, closer to a chili dipping sauce |
| Buffalo Style Sauce | ~500 | Tangy and garlicky, made for wings |
| Raspberry Chipotle Sauce | ~500 | Fruity, with a little smoke behind it |
| Green Jalapeño Sauce | 600-1,200 | Bright and tangy. The easy everyday one |
| Chipotle Sauce | 1,500-2,500 | Smoked red jalapeño. Medium heat |
| Sriracha Sauce | ~2,000 | Sweet red jalapeño with garlic |
| Original Red Sauce | 2,500-5,000 | The classic. Vinegary and sharp |
| Family Reserve Sauce | ~4,500 | Aged up to 8 years. Rounder, deeper |
| Habanero Sauce | 7,000-9,000 | Fruity, and properly hot |
| Scorpion Sauce | 23,000-33,000 | The hottest one we sell |
Under 1,000 SHU
Flavor without much burn. The Sweet & Spicy Sauce is more sweet than hot and works as a dipping sauce. Buffalo Style is about tang and garlic rather than heat. The Green Jalapeño Sauce is the one we point beginners at most often: bright, a bit acidic, good on eggs and tacos without frightening anyone.
1,500 to 5,000 SHU
The middle of the range, and where most of the cooking happens. Chipotle is smoky because the jalapeños are smoked over pecan wood before they go in. Sriracha leans sweet and garlicky. The Original Red is the sharp, vinegary one everyone recognizes, and it is still the most useful bottle in the cupboard. Family Reserve is the same idea aged for up to eight years, which rounds off the edges.
7,000 SHU and up
Habanero is where the heat gets serious, though the mango and papaya in it keep things fruity. Then there is the Scorpion Sauce at 23,000 to 33,000 SHU, which is roughly ten times the Original Red. We wrote about why the Scorpion is the hottest TABASCO® sauce separately, because it needs more explaining than a row in a table.
Not officially rated
A few flavors have no published SHU figure, all of them mild to medium: Cayenne Garlic (garlic first, gentle heat, very good on pizza), Roasted Pepper (smoky and soft), Salsa Picante (thicker, Mexican style) and the limited-edition Gochujang Sauce.
So which one should you buy?
- If you have never really used hot sauce, start with the Green Jalapeño.
- If you want the bottle that goes with everything, buy the Original Red.
- If you like smoke more than heat, Chipotle or Roasted Pepper.
- If you are actually chasing the burn, Habanero first, then Scorpion.
- If you cannot decide, a gift set of miniatures lets you work through several without committing to full bottles.
You can see everything in one place in the full range, or in the hard-to-find flavors that do not make it into most supermarkets.