Currie paid six hundred and fifty dollars to Guinness to “fast-track” the application, but, for one reason or another, the proceedings stalled. Guinness says that it has never received the proper paperwork from Currie. “We keep asking for documentation and he says he’ll send it, but we still haven’t got anything,” Sara Wilcox, a spokesperson for Guinness, told me. Currie argues that Guinness has failed to keep track of the documentation he’s sent—when the person he was originally dealing with left the company, in 2012, he was forced to start afresh—and that Guinness keeps changing the rules for the category.

“I don’t think they want to give the record to an American,” Currie said. “That’s just my personal opinion.”

Given the stalemate with Guinness, Currie decided late last year to declare the chili the world’s hottest on his own authority. First, he changed the HP22B’s name to the Carolina Reaper. “God brought a couple of guys into my life who used to work at Pepsi,” he told me. “They’re all about the corporate marketing thing.”

Currie’s critics question the long-term viability of the Carolina Reaper. Ted Barrus explained, “There’s a lot of controversy over Ed Currie’s chili because in Europe some people got the Reaper, they grew out the seeds, and their chilis don’t look like anybody else’s. They’re saying it’s no longer stable.” Currie acknowledged that some customers had got weird results, but the problem, he said, stemmed from a few contaminated seed packs. (Currie has recently furnished Guinness with a letter from a biology professor at Winthrop attesting that his plants are stable.) Besides, he said, the Carolina Reaper was, at this point, almost an anachronism, and he was persisting in trying to win recognition for it merely as a point of pride. “The Carolina Reaper’s the mildest of the peppers I’ve crossed,” he said, looking me in the eye. He had goosebumps again. “We have one hundred and sixty-two hotter ones yet to come.”

“F or over 1 year now, the Reaper has been so close to getting a record,” Jim Duffy wrote to me recently. “Do you think people in the Industry are tired of hearing about it almost getting it over and over again? Is it the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ and now Industry people are just ignoring it?”

Duffy, of Refining Fire Chiles, in San Diego, is Ed Currie’s arch-frenemy and sometime business partner. They pray together on the phone every day, and tend to preface their criticisms of each other by saying, “He’s a good friend of mine, but . . .” (As hybrids go, the chili world would make an excellent setting for both a Will Ferrell movie and an adaptation of “Julius Caesar.” Among the pejoratives the chiliheads I spoke with used to describe each other were “clown,” “joke,” “Johnny-come-lately,” “whack job,” and “palooka.”) Duffy says that he’s not a record-chaser, but his beef with the Carolina Reaper may owe something to the fact that he gave Paul Bosland and the Chile Pepper Institute the seeds they used to grow the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, which they proclaimed “the hottest pepper on the planet” in February of 2012. Duffy said of it, to the Associated Press, “Like Cabbage Patch dolls right before Christmas or Beanie Babies, it’s, like, the hot item.”

According to C.P.I. data, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion averages only 1.2 million Scoville units, but its heat peaks at more than two million. To assert its primacy, its boosters have devised a novel argument: the chili record should be determined by maximum, rather than mean (the scariest wolf ever, rather than the scariest wolf most of the time). To some chiliheads, this constitutes a curious reversal of methodology—only six years ago, the C.P.I. claimed the Guinness World Record by citing the bhut jolokia’s mean heat.

“It drives me nuts!” Alex de Wit, an Australian grower who is part of the team that holds the current Guinness record for the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, told me. “I think if you want a world record, you have to do it according to the rules.” De Wit e-mailed me later, “If they would beat me and did it exactly as supposed to do, well done and good on them. I am the first to applaud and clap my hands. . . . Anything else is just loose sand to my opinion, and not based upon facts but fiction.” De Wit was equally upset by Ed Currie’s claims about the Carolina Reaper: “I really do not have the time or energy for dicks (excusez le mot).” He closed his e-mail, “I wish you a spicy day.”

Jim Duffy dismissed such criticism. “Does a runner win a race on the average, or does he win it by being the fastest?” he said, when we spoke on the phone, his voice gaining Scovilles by the second. “Is any record won by the fastest, the hottest, the tallest, the biggest, or are records given for the average? Who cares about the average?” He concluded, “Every record in the history of man has been based on the high.”

Duffy and Bosland have yet to secure independent recognition for the Trinidad Moruga. I asked Duffy if the use of maximum numbers amounted to, as some chiliheads had complained, a misleading focus on outliers.

“Well, I’ll tell you, dear, you can come out here to San Diego, and you can walk in my field, and you can bite into a Reaper and you can bite into a Moruga, and we’ll see which one you walk away from,” he said. “My grower Daniel, he’s got Reapers in his dehydrator, and he eats them like potato chips.”

After we got off the phone, Duffy sent me an e-mail that contained a list of ten questions to ponder. The ninth suggested that some of his competitors might be using substances that artificially inflate the capsaicin content of their chilis. “There is no test out there that can detect the use of these nutrients in the pepper,” Duffy wrote. “Yes, Virginia! Peppers can be juiced!”

Butch T, of the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, is Butch Taylor, a plumber in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 2005, Taylor got some Trinidad Scorpion seeds from a guy named Mark in New Jersey, who had got them from a local nursery. Taylor recalled, “When I grew them down here, they just grew unbelievable. I got three plants out of five seeds, and every plant I grew was dedicated to seeds. The first time I tasted it, I just thought, This is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Taylor kept growing the plants, selecting at each generation for the hottest specimens. He gave the seeds away to chiliheads all over the world, sticking a little label that said “Butch T” at the bottom of each packet, so that absent-minded recipients would be able to keep track of where they had come from. Besides that, he didn’t think much of it. “I didn’t have any money to pay for testing—I didn’t even know how to have them tested at the time,” he told me. “And since I was growing the seeds, not selling them, I couldn’t see the purpose of setting the record.” He learned that his namesake chili was the hottest chili in the world, according to Guinness, the day that the record was announced. The Australians who developed Taylor’s strain into a winner had named it after him. “It took me a while to get my head around it, because I’m a little more shy, unless I’ve been drinking or something,” he recalled. “I thought that was very decent of them.”