About this variety
Sea Spring Seeds in West Dorset, the people behind the Dorset Naga, found this growing as a single odd plant in a commercial Bhut Jolokia crop and selected it out from there. Unusually for this end of the heat scale, the number attached to it is real. Sea Spring send dried fruit to Warwick University for HPLC analysis, and this one has tested between 732,000 and 923,000 Scoville units.
What growers actually talk about is the flavour. There is a distinct bubblegum note behind the heat, sweet and faintly artificial in the best way, and it is the reason people come back to this one instead of a Reaper.
Wrinkled pods about 6cm long ripen green to orange to red. The plants run tall and top-heavy and will go over without a cane. This is a greenhouse or polytunnel chilli in Britain, sown in January in a heated propagator, and it sulks on an indoor windowsill where the air is too dry. At nearly a million Scoville, gloves are not optional.