Sight, Smell or Name?

[ChipTrippyFox]

^ you living on the east coast? there have been some spectacular outdoor harvests in that area. it's really just a matter of finding passionate dealers with links to growers and avoiding the career dealer types or the kids just in it for the props

Yeah, Ontario specificaly.

Personaly i don't like working with dealers.. it makes me too anxious so I get it through friends who are more comfortable around those kinda of people.

The biggest problem is that I find the people that I get it from are likely just doing it for the money or to help support their own habit (s), and I'm too far down the line to get anything where the grower was only a few hands up. Instead im sure most of the stuff I get is just badly cared for "big yeild" plants.

How might one e able to tell if the marijuana was processed poorly?
I'm fairly confident that the batch I have is fairly bunk, but I'd like to know how others tell if their stuff was grown/cured badly.

 

[Mafioso]

sight and smell. strain(name) can be distracting from the actual quality of the bud. it has doesn't represent how the bud was grown or cared for.

and between sight and smell, smell is a bigger factor it seems to me.

I've never smoked bad weed that looked and smelled good, but have smoked some mediocre weed that looked really good but didn't have much of a smell to it.

 

[DrGreenthumb]

I like smelly weed. Sometimes I might even taste a bit, especially if it seems a bit suspect. I like if it feels a bit sticky from trichomes, but not wet, stems need to snap. Hash needs closer inspection, it needs to melt, with a sweet smelling vapour.

I've smoked great weed that didn't smell of much at all (it looked stunning, very sparkly & was called hashplant), but I still prefer smelly weed. I've smoked some amazing Jack Herer that smelled like old sweaty pants too.

I couldn't care less what it's called. The best weed I've had were local super clones with silly names you wont have heard of. One breeders' "skunk #1" or "orange bud" will be totally different to another's & there is natural variation between different seeds & how well it's been grown too, the names are just marketing hype.

 

[Kl519]

Eh, it's not all marketing hype. I've picked up from both clinics and a lot of connects here in Cali, and the names of strains do make a difference in price and quality. I've never had a weak or bad quality master kush, for example. There are tons of names, and then there are the no names which is simply labeled as "regs" (regular) or "chronic," and then there's the dirt cheap stuff labeled as "shwag." Maybe the system here is just different.

Something like trainwreck, cat piss, skunk, white rhino, etc. aren't as good as say, og kush, God's gift, or afghan kush which is reflected in the price and quality of the bud. This is both through connects and at the clinics, in the latter you'll have cheaper stuff and sales (lol), but you'll rarely see the high quality named ones on sale, and are always more expensive. For example, a strain called Blue Dream is always pretty cheap.

Really good ones tend to look very crystalline and smell danky, and are sticky too. Cheaper ones won't smoke as great (it'll snap and crackle when you smoke it), have seeds, or have lots of stems. I do agree that the same strain can differ in quality, which depends entirely on the grower, but at least here the popular and high quality bud will always have a name associated with it.

Clinics are kind of out of control with their names and crossovers though, but what I found was that the stuff I got through my connects and then saw at the clinics matched up with their names/labels. It seems that it's all relative depending on the location and connections.

 

[Wonde_Alice_rland]

The only thing I use the name for is to identify sativa/indica. Then I look at the bud, in layman's terms, for the orange hair and sparkles. I won't write an essay, but generally the more the better. Then I will smell it to identify age (generally the stronger the smell, the more recently it has been harvested). Finally, if allowed, I'll feel it; again, to identify age and how well it has been kept (if it falls apart its old and has not been kept well).

 

[DrGreenthumb]

Eh, it's not all marketing hype. I've picked up from both clinics and a lot of connects here in Cali, and the names of strains do make a difference in price and quality. I've never had a weak or bad quality master kush, for example. There are tons of names, and then there are the no names which is simply labeled as "regs" (regular) or "chronic," and then there's the dirt cheap stuff labeled as "shwag." Maybe the system here is just different.

Something like trainwreck, cat piss, skunk, white rhino, etc. aren't as good as say, og kush, God's gift, or afghan kush which is reflected in the price and quality of the bud. This is both through connects and at the clinics, in the latter you'll have cheaper stuff and sales (lol), but you'll rarely see the high quality named ones on sale, and are always more expensive. For example, a strain called Blue Dream is always pretty cheap.

Really good ones tend to look very crystalline and smell danky, and are sticky too. Cheaper ones won't smoke as great (it'll snap and crackle when you smoke it), have seeds, or have lots of stems. I do agree that the same strain can differ in quality, which depends entirely on the grower, but at least here the popular and high quality bud will always have a name associated with it.

Clinics are kind of out of control with their names and crossovers though, but what I found was that the stuff I got through my connects and then saw at the clinics matched up with their names/labels. It seems that it's all relative depending on the location and connections.

You can get top quality skunk & white rhino, they're seed based strains & there's natural variation in them. If a grower grows a huge amount of seeds & picks the best to clone, or strikes lucky then it's possible to find something amazing out of nearly any seed strain. The variation in one strain can be as much as the variation between that & a totally different strain. Add to that the fact there are a lot of commercial seed breeders all producing their own version of each of these popular/old strains & there's a huge amount of variation in what's called "skunk". I heard the uk clone "cheese" was just a lucky find from a bag of skunk #1 seeds, but who knows if that rumour is true, it's a fantastic smoke anyway. Usually kush is no stronger than skunk or most other strains, it's a pretty looking, nice tasting, nice smelling & nice high, but average strength high yielder. Maybe there's some super kush clone that's much better than other kushes, but the kush I had was nothing that amazing.

A good "white" strain should be white with trichomes & very light green bud underneath, they were all like that back in the 90s when it was real white widow & crosses, white widow, white rhino & white russian were some of the top bud around in Amsterdam, but they've been bred into totally different plants now, there's a huge variation & a lot of them suck. One of those where you need to get a good clone of it, which I'm not sure exist now. It's a good example of big names that were once amazing now being meaningless hype. One White Rhino can be twice the strength of another White Rhino easily, there's a wide variation in thc test results, similar for Skunk & other strains grown from seeds.

How it has been grown & cured after harvest can make a big difference too.

Name & price should be the last things to consider when choosing weed.

 

[Kl519]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I remember bubba kush not being so great but strawberry cough being a lot better than a lot of other kush strains. I'm pretty sure that one is a sativa too, and usually I prefer indicas. I think I mentioned it depends on the grower, which a lot of your post covers. A grower can easily botch up a high rated strain or cultivate a lower rated strain to its full potential. In my experience, whenever a particular strain is more expensive than the others, they are of high quality and grown with obvious care. Or else you'll have people complaining, not buying, etc. That's probably the reason why particular strains are consistently good when I get them. But any one person isn't going to be able to try every top notch harvest per strain, so the point is kind of moot.

They really do too many crossovers nowadays, you'll see an "x" between strain names and they tend to not be that good, which is why I avoid them. If they're made into hash[ish], I don't care what their names are either. They'll be strong no matter what, heh.

 

[DrGreenthumb]

It still makes a difference for hash, different strains can produce different amounts of different hash, it can be very different depending on strain (and individual plants/clones), even using the same technique (mainly bubble/ice hash when i did it).

If you're growing then it's best to use proven clones if you have access to them, it cuts the variation out from the seeds & saves you a job selecting the best one(s) to keep. Better to have a clone that you know is good than a pack of seeds with a fancy name. For a lot of the named strains they started off as elite clones & those were awesome, but they've had varying success trying to produce a good stable seed line from those clones, they're never the same. F1 hybrids are usually the best seeds, where it's two well stabilised & unrelated strains crossed, but you never know if they're really true F1 "x" seeds or if the seed vendor has been breeding it further down the line. A good 50/50 F1 hybrid can be as good as anything, even something as simple as NL x Haze. Black Domina x Haze was some of the best weed I ever smoked, skunk x kush is really nice, super skunk is a classic. Can't really go wrong with an old relatively stable sativa dominant strain like Haze or Skunk x any stable indica. I worked for a seed vendor for a while & it's a very seedy business to say the least, a lot of the names are pure hype & most of the prices are just to trick the gullible. You can often find individual plants from the cheapest seeds that rival those 10x their price. Usually when buying bud better weed costs more, but not always & it's only true up to a certain point. There are a lot of different weeds that can be in the 20-30% thc range, some that are less potent can be a nice smoke too.

If it's two random or related newer strains crossed then it's really pot luck what you'll get, probably a bunch of weak runts. It's better if they're unrelated stable strains "x".

Most strains are indica/sativa hybrid, or pure indica. Pure sativas take too long to flower, they get really big & the buds are thin, they're only really suitable for outdoor grows in tropical regions. Any Afghan, Pakistani, north Indian, Kush is a pure indica, but it has often been crossed with others that have some sativa genetics.

If you've got a wide choice at some legal dispensary or coffee shop or whatever, ask them what they recommend, have a look at a few different ones, they might have some slightly cheaper strains with less fancy names that you prefer to the most expensive ones. Judge it more on look & smell, you can usually at least get a good idea of the taste from the smell of it. Usually if there are a lot of big fat crystals covering it, it's going to be strong stuff, although the crystals themselves can vary in potency & the balance of cannabinoids in them, sometimes they can be less obvious & really strong too.

It's best to keep changing strains too, I get more of a tolerance if I'm always smoking the same weed, variation is good. I think some strains are particularly bad for tolerance, or just aren't as strong as they look/smell, AK47 always looks & smells really appealing, never gets me stoned.

A lot of the best weed I've had have just been from local/uk/euro clones with dumb names like cheese, livers, crackweed, criss cross, just lucky clones. There were good super skunk, orange bud, blueberry, chronic & big bud clones here too. I think livers & crackweed disappeared, they were too local & secret, but the greatest weed I've ever had, wish I could find it now. Just a gram of livers would stink out a full house, no matter what it was wrapped in, really strong sweet & sour smell.

You can easily tell if there have been common problems in the growing & curing from the smell too, if it has a mouldy smell it's easier to tell than by looking for tiny bits of mould. If it smells of ammonia then it was probably overfed or might be even more mouldy. Need to learn to avoid bad smelling weed, weed that smells of nothing is better than some overfed mouldy damp mess.

If you suspect some weed or hash has been adulterated then putting a very small amount in your mouth to taste can be good too. Sometimes it'll be sprayed with salt or sugar to add weight, or there's the notorious "gritweed" & "soapbar" that has a distinctive taste & texture in the mouth.

 

[ChipTrippyFox]

If you suspect some weed or hash has been adulterated then putting a very small amount in your mouth to taste can be good too. Sometimes it'll be sprayed with salt or sugar to add weight,

REALLY?!
That's really ghetto.
The spraying to add weight part I mean

 

[Kl519]

It still makes a difference for hash, different strains can produce different amounts of different hash, it can be very different depending on strain, even using the same technique (mainly bubble/ice hash when i did it).

If you're growing then it's best to use proven clones if you have access to them, it cuts the variation out from the seeds & saves you a job selecting the best one(s) to keep. Better to have a clone that you know is good than a pack of seeds with a fancy name. For a lot of the named strains they started off as elite clones & those were awesome, but they've had varying success trying to produce a good stable seed line from those clones, they're never the same. F1 hybrids are usually the best seeds, where it's two well stabilised & unrelated strains crossed, but you never know if they're really true F1 "x" seeds or if the seed vendor has been breeding it further down the line. I worked for a seed vendor for a while & it's a very seedy business to say the least, a lot of the names are pure hype & most of the prices are just to trick the gullible.

Most strains are indica/sativa hybrid, or pure indica. Pure sativas take too long to flower, they get really big & the buds are thin, they're only really suitable for outdoor grows in tropical regions. Any Afghan, Pakistani, north Indian, Kush is a pure indica, but it has often been crossed with others that have some sativa genetics.

If you've got a choice at some legal dispensary or coffee shop or whatever, ask them what they recommend, have a look at a few different ones, they might have some slightly cheaper strains with less fancy names that you prefer to the most expensive ones. Judge it more on look & smell, you can usually at least get a good idea of the taste from the smell of it. Usually if there are a lot of big fat crystals covering it, it's going to be strong stuff, although the crystals themselves can vary in potency & the balance of cannabinoids in them, sometimes they can be less obvious & really strong too.

It's best to keep changing strains too, I get more of a tolerance if I'm always smoking the same weed, variation is good. I think some strains are particularly bad for tolerance, or just aren't as strong as they look/smell, AK47 always looks & smells really appealing, never gets me stoned.

You can easily tell if there have been common problems in the growing & curing from the smell too, if it has a mouldy smell it's easier to tell than by looking for tiny bits of mould. If it smells of ammonia then it was probably overfed or might be even more mouldy. Need to learn to avoid bad smelling weed, weed that smells of nothing is better than some overfed mouldy damp mess.

If you suspect some weed or hash has been adulterated then putting a very small amount in your mouth to taste can be good too. Sometimes it'll be sprayed with salt or sugar to add weight, or there's the notorious "gritweed" & "soapbar" that has a distinctive taste & texture in the mouth.

Haha, that's seriously what they do sometimes. I've had some before where the herb had a soapy smell to it. You could taste it, especially if you smoke it from a dry piece. This was from a clinic that had gotten shut down, as this seems to happen a lot around here.

About the hash, I'm not that adept in telling the difference. The few times I've gotten some, they've all been strong. The places I've picked up from usually carry the same strains over and over, but I find that connections will have a bigger variety over time. It beats finding a clinic and then driving far to a ghetto locale, unless it's the only option at the time when connections aren't available.

Most clinics I've been to are pretty strict, but they do let you open up the med bottles and smell/look at them. I've never had the pleasure of going behind the scenes or to their growing facility. I usually get consistency with connections because they know a lot more about herb than I do, like you. What I can tell is the quality of the herb and the high, but that's about it. At dispensaries, sometimes I ask them about the different stuff that they have, but usually they just try to push what they want or say all of them are good. I've only been to maybe one or two where they're real nice and genuine, but even that depends on who's working there at the time. It's a shady business indeed. So I like to stay with strains I'm familiar with, or whatever connections have, because the quality has been consistent that way for me.

Heh, thanks for the info. Now I know why some of the herb I've gotten before tasted like soap.

 

[VitamaN]

^ you living on the east coast? there have been some spectacular outdoor harvests in that area. it's really just a matter of finding passionate dealers with links to growers and avoiding the career dealer types or the kids just in it for the props

Indeed. I'm from MA (currently in Dallas but from MA) and the soil was so rich we grew apples,blueberries,pears,asparagus,strawberries,blackberries and lots more green stuff with absolutely zero maintenance on our part. The stuff just thrived. Weeds no different. It's like my dad said, it's that organic soil and the conditions are just perfect @ certain times of the year. Id grow outdoors every year if I moved back

 

[Jibult]

Name & price should be the last things to consider when choosing weed.

LOL! Name? I agree, but only if you've got an untrustworthy supplier.

Price? Hahahahahaha... if price wasn't a factor I'd be homeless in Suitland with a qutie on me at all times. Some of us don't have unlimited disposable income and still like to get their smoke on, Doc.

 

[VitamaN]

The only thing I use the name for is to identify sativa/indica. Then I look at the bud, in layman's terms, for the orange hair and sparkles. I won't write an essay, but generally the more the better. Then I will smell it to identify age (generally the stronger the smell, the more recently it has been harvested). Finally, if allowed, I'll feel it; again, to identify age and how well it has been kept (if it falls apart its old and has not been kept well).

UGH crumbly nugs suck. I got some local hydro that was that way and the shitiness of it made my lungs choke. Gross. Man...freshness counts for sure.

 

[w01fg4ng]

Really good stuff everyone!

This topic has me re-evaluating the way I make my purchases. I have realized how difficult it is for me to turn down a strain name I like that looks killer, even if the smell is not on par with what I'm used to...it's a trick of the brain, like I've wired myself to not trust my nose as much as my eyes and likeness for a "name".

I'm learning to trust my nose more.

 

[Jibult]

This topic has me re-evaluating the way I make my purchases. I have realized how difficult it is for me to turn down a strain name I like that looks killer, even if the smell is not on par with what I'm used to...it's a trick of the brain, like I've wired myself to not trust my nose as much as my eyes and likeness for a "name".

Sometimes it's hard not to give a crazy strain name a shot.

That's how it was for me and Purple Monkey Balls. I thought my dude was joking when he called his nugs that, man, lol.

 

[Tryptamino]

My general rule is that if it's a Jack herer strain it's probably good.

 

[4meSM]

Sight of course, you can't spot a well cured and full of trichomes nug just by smelling it, i also like smelling it cause the smell of weed it's pretty good. Names are usually bullshit unless you know the grower or are in a medical/recreational place.

 

[Jibult]

Names are usually bullshit unless you know the grower or are in a medical/recreational place.

I feel like if you don't know at least one grower you need to step up your networking game, or become the grower that your closest friends know.

 

[421]

Name. Not like "that's a cool name" but it's a way to identify a the strain/cultivar and if it's something I've liked in the past or has been recommended to me I'll go for it. Smell and looks are a way to verify if it actually is that strain - and obviously a way to see that it's not moldy anything like that too. So all three are important.

Nothing beats a tester smoke though.

 

[VitamaN]

Ideally of course, the bud has all three things nailed. Great smell, white and crystally appearance and a strain name you love!

yaa agreed. If lemon kush wasn't named lemon kush I wouldnt be as in love with it. But man its a beautiful bright nug and the smell reminds me of lemon skittles .