The man that beat the living hell out of the malt challenge at Crown Candy a few days ago is not who he claimed to be. We now are positive the actual record holder is Ben Monson.

Yesterday we reported that the famous Crown Candy malt challenge has its ass handed to it by someone who claimed to be Kevin Ross.

According to reports, a Kevin Ross from San Bernardino, California waltzed in to the popular St. Louis store and proceeded to drain seven malts in six minutes. The “goal” of Crown Candy’s challenge is fivemalts in 30 minutes.

We searched the internet and assumed this Kevin Ross was the same professional gurgitator that competed in the Nathan’s Hot Dog challenge as recently as 2008 and closing by putting out a call to find and talk to Ross to get a quick comment about his amazing malt-drinking feat.

We succeeded…kinda.

Kevin Ross the professional eater did get in contact with us, but he claims that anyone that dropped his name at Crown Candy was a big fat bloated lair. I guess Andy “Candy” Karandzieff, owner of Crown Candy, should hold off on the plaque he promised to honor the malted accomplishment…

I am Kevin Ross, the competitive eater from California quoted in your piece. However, the person who did that malt record is not me. It was another eater who thought it would be funny to use my name instead of theirs.

Why would they do that?

It’s a strange thing, but the professional eating organization doesn’t seem to like it if you do independent eating challenges. So this other person was trying to disguise their identity and possibly cause me stress by using my name instead of theirs…strange but true!

Any idea on who could be dropping your name?

I’m not capable of doing what this person did, so it was clearly a better eater than me! I’m not naming who I think it was because I don’t really yet understand their motivation for using my name. . .but I can definitely say it wasn’t me.

Well that’s freaking weird. We are certainly grateful for Mr. Ross getting in contact with us about this odd development, and frankly this does kinda make sense. For instance, if you gave a fake name and did a challenge, that for some reason is against Pro-Eating rules, you probably wouldn’t want to stay around for a TV interview just like KSDK claimed.

We got in contact with the fine people of Crown Candy about the issue and they quickly replied. When presented with Kevin Ross’ flat denial it was him they said…

He point blank told us his name was Kevin Ross. He also apparently did the pizza challenge at Pointers right before he came in yesterday afternoon. Bummer he lied but quite entertaining to watch. He couldn’t finish malt #8 – started to look a bit queasy!

Karandzieff, tweeted a photo just after contacting Crown Candy yesterday night of who the Crown Candy folks now believe is professional eater Ben Monson (right) and Punching Kitty has been able to confirm that.

A quick search found forum postings from Monson himself about his “ 5 day vacation food challenge ” with photos from many different midwest establishments and a few of them he is wearing the very same jersey as the photo that Karandzieff tweeted:

We have an email in to Kevin Ross to see if Monson was who he thought was using his name and any comments he had on his doppelganger. We’ll let you know when we get a response.

Also no word yet as to why anyone would want to travel around places wearing a jersey from a tattoo shop…maybe that’s why he gave a fake name.

[Editor’s Note: Hey John Pertzborn, what do you think about all of this?

_He appears to be as confused as we are.]_