Tiger Jolokia

Tiger Jolokia is a modern Italian hybrid created by breeder Giancarlo Fadda from a Purple Tiger crossed with a White Bhut Jolokia. The line was made in the 2017 season and first cultivated in 2018, placing it firmly in the recent specialist breeding scene rather than among older heirloom or regional market peppers. In current seed trade it is presented as a dark-foliage superhot with ghost-shaped fruit, combining ornamental anthocyanin-heavy growth with Bhut Jolokia type pod form and heat.

The plant is described as a dark foliage type that can reach about 91.5 cm tall. Its pods are elongated and ghost-shaped, starting almost black or very dark purple, then passing through green and orange before finishing red, with some ripe fruit retaining blackish flushes or striping. That colour progression and the near-black immature stage are central to the pepper’s identity, giving it the dark ornamental look implied by the Tiger name while still finishing as a red superhot.

Its heat is treated in trade as ghost-pepper level, with sellers describing it as similar in heat and flavour to Bhut Jolokia types, and Bhut Jolokia itself is documented at about one million SHU in replicated testing. The line is therefore best understood as a superhot rather than a medium or merely decorative chilli. In flavour and use, it sits within the modern collector category of dark superhots bred as much for visual impact as for pungency, with the foliage, flower and near-black immature pods making it attractive to growers focused on unusual ornamental-edible hybrids.

The breeding history also shows that later generations produced multiple phenotypes. Red Dragon Seeds’ translated description of a later F2-derived branch states that the second generation included both Tiger Jolokia Orange from green-planted material and Tiger Jolokia Red from dark-planted material, along with other divergent forms that were taken into further crossing. That split does not change the core identity of Tiger Jolokia as the original Purple Tiger x White Bhut Jolokia cross, but it does show that the line generated several visibly different offspring in subsequent generations.