They had a secret handshake, now they have a cannabis facility

Brian Faye and Art Linares have known each other for a long time.

Faye was the operating partner at Lenny & Joe's Fish Tale, a wellknown New Haven restaurant that fell victim to the pandemic. His business partner in that venture was Linares' father.

“I used to babysit him,” Faye said of Linares.

“I used to call him my best friend and we had a secret handshake,” Linares said.

Both Faye and Linares — a former Connecticut state legislator who is married to Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons — have worked in real estate for most of their careers. The two are now founders and owners of Rodeo Cannabis, which consists of a 250,000-square-foot outdoor cannabis farm and a cannabis production facility.

“A lot of cannabis is real estate, getting the local permits and approvals,” Linares said.

To run the production facility, Faye and Linares turned to Alex Knight-Hernandez. He's now their vice president of operations, but he was kitchen manager at Lenny & Joe's, and was a state Department of Correction employee working at the Bridgeport Correctional Center as a kitchen supervisor doing “a lot of large-scale food production handling.”

“A couple thousand gummies isn't that far off,” he said.

“When we were opening this place, I told Art, ‘I got the perfect guy,'” Faye said. “It took me a while to get him out of corrections.”

The production facility is so new that during a recent tour, employees were churning out the very first vape cartridges and gummies, in the hopes of getting them on shelves by April 20.

Though they do have plans to expand into other methods of production, for now, Rodeo is specializing in what's referred to as “live rosin,” a chemical-free process often considered a superior cannabis product as it uses no solvents in the extraction process.

Linares and Faye said they believe theirs is the only facility dedicated to producing live rosin consistently.

“Right now customers have to drive to Massachusetts to get rosin,” Linares said.

The cannabis is harvested and then flash frozen at their farm and shipped across the state to the Sterling facility in five-pound blocks. They're planting now, and hope to harvest 50,000 pounds of cannabis come harvest time.

The flower, as it's called, is then washed in a near-freezing bath that agitates the plant material so the tiny hairs called trichomes, where the majority of the THC resides, come free.

The washing machine, called the “Hashatron,” turns out a pale, foamy slurry which is freeze dried to become a sand-like substance known as bubble hash. That bubble hash is pressed to exude thick, sticky, pure THC, which is then melted and decarboxylates the hash oil.

“The oil is what then you can infuse into edibles,” Knight-Hernandez. “That's what you're seeing in vape carts. That's your usable intermediary product.”

The hash oil is irradiated to remove any microbes and injected into vape cartridges or mixed into cannabis edibles. For every 5,000 pounds of cannabis biomass, they are able to produce about 3,200 grams of usable oil, a little more than seven pounds.

The vault at Rodeo will slowly get filled, but for now it is largely empty housing only the company's very first products coming off the line. Those first products will be offered to any and all legal dispensaries that wish to carry them.

“The feedback so far has been very positive, especially with the live rosin,” Linares said. “They've all reached out and they're excited to get their hands on the product.”

Rodeo has applied for zoning approval to open a dispensary in Shelton. So far, local zoning officials have been reluctant to move forward on the application, but Linares is confident.

“We've invested $14 million between the sun-grown farm, the $3 million license fee, this lab and all the operating expenditures,” he said. “We expect to do well with this business and when we're able to open up Shelton, it will only improve.”

Connecticut currently has only six licensed cannabis growers actually putting products on shelves, but more are in the pipeline, which means the landscape may change. In Massachusetts, which has no statewide caps on the number of available licenses, the price of cannabis has plummeted.

“We're getting job applications from folks in Massachusetts, because companies either closed or they're not happy there,” Linares said. “In Mass., people are really struggling where we're seeing equipment being fire-sold, and we're seeing people looking to work here.”