Chocolate Naglah Beast Pepper Review
In planning out the seeds I was going to grow for the 2019 pepper season, it never dawned on me that I had only one chocolate variety selected. It wasn’t until well into the second or third harvest this past Summer that a fellow grower happened to mention it in passing. Luckily, the one chocolate pepper I grew this year was the Chocolate Naglah Beast – a new variety to me and one that proved a solid selection.
This pepper is the chocolate variant of the Naglah Beast, a cross between a Bhut Jolokia and the 7 Pot Douglah, but with a more squat, MA Wartryx appearance. At least, that’s what the Interwebs tells me. The short, mushroom shaped pods are wrinkled and pretty well blistered. The majority of the fruit I picked throughout the growing season were roughly an inch in length and width. They’re not a big pepper, but they certainly look mean.
Inside, the small fruit are just about fully packed with placenta and a good amount of seeds. Drops of oil form along the thin walls. Almost immediately upon cutting the pepper open a waft of grassy, earthy aromas fill the nose as a light floral trait lingers. It pretty much smells like your prototypical chocolate superhot pepper.
The flavor is floral, grassy and earthy with a soft fruitiness and brief perfuminess in the mix. The heat is instant and stinging – there is no build up with this one. It attacked the tongue first, chilling there for a good long while, burning a hole in one spot before slowly transitioning down the throat, leaving a molten trail along the roof of the mouth. The heat lasts a decent while, leaving a clean exit.
I was mentally preparing to have my ass handed to me with the Chocolate Naglah Beast. And while it is pretty damned fiery and stinging, the pepper wasn’t too bad. It’s a mean little pepper that I have used successfully in a couple of different sauces. The season is only a couple of months past and I’m just about out of the harvested fruit that I collected – I’ve enjoyed it that much.