How to Avoid Spooky Boofy Strains

Every year around this time we get excited about the prospect of what the harvest will bring as warehouses now sit packed across America with cannabis coming to a perfect cure. Some will win accolades, but amongst the pack, there is also something more sinister. That nightmare is cannabis so boofy it has to be considered spooky.

We can’t all grow amazing pot and as more and more chads enter the marketplace that statement seems to ring a bit truer each year. That isn’t to knock the chads that are purchasing quality-grown cannabis from good farms that didn’t want to do the whole “branding” thing so they could just focus on growing the flame, hell one could even argue that relationship is symbiotic for everyone.

But those other chads… the ones that would try and convince you the term master grower is a PR buzz word in the same conversation as describing their recent grad farm manager from some midwest state school agriculture program as one. Those chads, are certainly a problem.

And we promise they are going to have a lot of pot to get rid of this year. So in light of this, we felt it was time to give a rundown of the pro tips we use to do things like call winning strains at the Emerald Cup. Keep an eye out for the Harvest Hype list in a couple weeks.

Nevertheless, one of the best ways to figure out what you’re dealing with is to create a checklist of what good pot looks like. We’ve offered some tips to follow.

Spine-Chilling Sights

First off, is the cannabis even dried right? Extra moisture being left in cannabis is a proven sign it didn’t get the love it deserves after the harvest. The best way to check? Snap the stem. You should be able to hear the audible snap. If you’re really lucky they stopped the drying process immediately as those stems at the base of the nugs started to get that snap.

Hopefully, that perfect timing preserved the glorious resin and terpenes in all their glory.

It’s important to note there is a lot of great pot that gets ruined in post-production. Much of the time in an industrial setting, the farmer who supervised the summer is likely watching the harvest progress for weeks and can only keep so close an eye on his work. Then some dude who can’t read the temperature and humidity off of the wall screws it up.

Lots of times when you mess up the curing process up, that grassy smell you’re trying to get rid of is stuck with the buds. Sure you may get elements of the plant’s terpene profile in the aroma, but it will never be what it could have been!

Another problem in the age of legal cannabis is packaging meant to prevent you from actually seeing what’s inside. There are basically two reasons one might do that. It might just be biophotonic glass meant to preserve the plant’s essential oils, but most of the time it’s just people trying to hide their gross weed to the best of their ability.

When you pick the jar up at the counter flip it over and see how the bud looks when possible.

You may be greeted by the “brown frown” or stemmy nugs that aren’t all that appealing. You wouldn’t have picked up on that problem through the opaque lid and sides on the case. Also, take notice of how much kief the bottom of the case or jar has, as this may reveal how stable the trichomes were. More trichomes on the bottom of the jar means less on the buds and can also be a sign of overdrying.

In the end, only you can protect yourself from spooky boof this harvest season. They’re going to try and pile it on us, be the discerning consumer, let the marketplace tell these people that the quality of the cannabis they produced was not acceptable by forcing them to go into their trust funds to back next year’s crop.

TELL US, what’s the scariest marijuana you’ve encountered?