San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Explained:
For the cannabis connoisseur, designer strains offer superior smell, taste and appearance — plus prices to match.
Designer cannabis is like designer jeans: Nothing comes between connoisseurs and quality, not even premium prices for meticulously sourced, carefully cultivated exotic strains that elicit sticker shock in average consumers.
There is no Calvin Klein of cannabis; yet designer cannabis is fashionable, rivaling fetishes for cult wines and rare heirloom produce. Designer cannabis is bred for aromatic and flavorful terpenes, compounds found in the plant’s essential oils — whether it’s the scent of cheese, gasoline, citrus or pine. The plants are carefully tended. You’re getting the best-looking buds on the market, free of chemical pesticides.
The strains are generally highly potent (often above 20 percent THC) but are no more potent than counterparts with similar lab reports. Think of them as the Frog Hollow peaches of pot — bred for smell, taste, beauty and pleasure.
Peach Rings, Banana Fig and Purple Punch from producers Alien Labs, Fig Farms and the Village fetch $75 (tax included) or more per eighth ounce, topping competitors by $20. Many leading cannabis stores stock designer strains, but supplies are often fleeting.
Why is it so expensive and elusive? Designer cannabis cultivators grow plants from seeds, not clone cuttings. They discover and nurture specific qualities from soughtafter strains. Yields are typically far below commodity cannabis marketed as top shelf.
“It takes a long time to find the best, and we’re always looking for the best,” said Gilbert Milam Jr., a.k.a. Berner, the San Francisco rapper who pushed the Cookies strain to popularity. “We pheno-hunt 3,000 seeds for each strain, and we’re not too concerned about the yield. We grow for the taste, for the smell, for the bag appeal, for the high — for the connoisseur.”
Berner’s Cookies strain and Connected Cannabis’ Gelato 41 are fluffy and mottled with orange and purple highlights. A budtender at South Sacramento Care Center unscrewed the Village’s prized jars and unleashed their more subtle aromas (Mimosa’s tangerine, cheese and fruit punch notes; Banana Punch’s tropical candy aroma) and odiferous assaults (Garlic Cookies’ mothballs and body odor, Wedding Crasher No. 18’s gassy funk).
“It takes a long time to find the best, and we’re always looking for the best.”
Gilbert Milam Jr., a.k.a. Berner
Alien Labs’ Sunset No. 3 smelled and tasted like spicy wet hay.
Smoke it however you like — joint, pipe or bong — although at designer prices, don’t discount the savings vaporizers offer, even if vaping dilutes aromas and flavors.
A new sub-market of designer cannabis has emerged: live resin designer cannabis — concentrates that capture the fullest expressions of aromas and flavors in a process that includes freezing freshly cut plants before extracting cannabinoids and terpenes. The Village has partnered with Moxie, a multistate extractor of premium concentrates. A recently released vape oil cartridge is made from the Village’s Mimosa, a tangerineforward strain with a restrained buzz.
Friendly Farms, an awardwinning live resin vape oil manufacturer in the Central Valley, teamed with Connected Cannabis on a line of cartridge concentrates made from Connected’s Cookie Fam strains. Priced twice as high as many vape cartridges, designer cannabis vape cartridges pack loads of terpenes, smelling, tasting and feeling more like the fresh flowers they’re concentrated from than lesser-quality vapes.