Two decades ago the Red Savina Habanero, then the world’s hottest pepper, only topped out at around half a million Scoville heat units. Many thought that that was as hot as peppers would ever get.

Then the Indian Bhut Jolokia, the first superhot pepper, was discovered by researchers in the West. Better known in the West as the Ghost Pepper, the Bhut Jolokia more than doubled the Red Savina’s Scoville rating.

The Ghost Pepper was crowned in 2007, but after the Butch T won in 2011, the title had changed hands three times in a little more than a year. Since then the title has remained static.

Many think that Guinness simply can’t keep up with the number of applicants, or is unwilling to crown a new champion because having so many changes so rapidly dilutes the value of the prize. With no other official source willing to evaluate the explosion of superhots, the last few years have turned into a free-for-all.

Compared to England and Australia, two other chilihead hot beds, there is a lot of negativity and fighting among American growers, says Barrus.

More and more small growers are vying for the title of hottest pepper, often without any evidence to support their claims, says Jim Duffy, a prominent chili grower from Southern California.

“(There are) lots of upstarts who are claiming they have the hottest and are getting people to buy their seeds without having any proof. So hobbyist growers are getting cheated out of 30 bucks or so when the seeds they bought don’t come out how they were supposed to.”

Duffy has good reason to be upset, as a big name in superhots. The Chile Pepper Institute, a non-profit educational outreach and research center located at New Mexico State University, used his seeds for all the peppers in a comparative study of heat levels for several different strains of superhots. It was during that study that a Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pod unexpectedly broke two million Scoville heat units, the highest Scoville level currently on record.

It was into this fray that Currie and his Carolina Reaper entered unaware, and he immediately made enemies including, at first, Jim Duffy.

Currie was not part of the chilihead community, and he certainly didn’t hang out on the community’s message boards. He just ran a small seed shop and grew peppers mostly for use in cancer research. So it came as a shock when he received a call from Barrus, whom he didn’t know, telling him that people were attacking him and his pepper on the Internet. Barrus told him he needed to defend himself.

Currie’s family has a history of heart disease and cancer. In college he decided he needed to figure out a way to avoid that fate and began researching which populations had the lowest rates of those diseases. He found they had several things in common, but what stuck him was that they all ate hot chilis with every meal. That is when he started growing peppers.