Inside San Francisco’s Best Head Stash

When Harry Resin cracks open the industrial-sized storage cabinet packed with “flavors” it’s somewhat akin to the heavens opening and spreading a wide full rainbow across the sky, breathtaking in its expanse and sheer brilliance. In the rooms below, the longtime Amsterdam cannabis breeder has zipped through a tour of his San Francisco grow. The moment is ablur with the scientific knowledge that he has been dropping like breadcrumbs to better ganja.

As my full face dips back and forth from jars to bags filled with a remarkable array of incredibly rare cannabis varieties, I’m convinced he’s found the fantastical pot of gold. And in this case it’s quite literally pot, in the form of an exceptionally unique Cambodian landrance strain.

“This is proper weed,” Resin remarks as we later puff on a joint of the Cambodian alongside a lineup of three other specialty delights, each marked with notations on the crutch so we don’t lose track.

The Cambodian landrace arrives with a full layering of fresh scents, similar to walking into a juice bar, and is a shade of fern green interspersed with small hints of purple and long auburn hairs. It’s a soft smoke with a sort of lip numbing effect that comes from a cool minty, rather than acidic, undertone. This strain, much like a fine perfume or wine, has three or four notes and smoking it is like enjoying the flavors and spices of a full meal.

While Resin had to live in relative anonymity for two decades growing and breeding marijuana in Amsterdam, in California he’s able to be more open. His passion for the plant, coupled with an intense drive for knowledge, is undeniably infectious.

“Look at how thin these leaves are, look at this canopy, have you ever seen a sativa leaf this thin?” Resin says as he descends from standing on the planters holding the Cambodian to estimate that the lean plants are standing at about 5 and half feet tall.

This strain, acquired via seeds brought back from Sihanoukville, Cambodia by Resin’s former seedbank partner at Delta 9 Labs, towers over the others in the room that are in the 3-4 foot range. It’s a modest grow in terms of scale, there’s three rooms of cannabis in flower, one room in “veg,” two rooms for mother plants and their clones and a room for drying. Despite the unassertive space, the types of cannabis housed within are extraordinary.

An A5 Haze phenotype, Resin’s own cross of an A5 Haze and a Pure Haze, is featured in an area he calls his “specialty table,” and this plant, with curling almost vine-like branches and loose swirling leaves, does appear to be pretty special. Resin explains that this late flowering sativa has a high ratio of CBGA, a cannabinoid known for its healing neurogenerative properties. A few plants down is a strain Resin’s calling A5 A, the fruiter of the two phenotypes he kept.

“You can smell that it’s in the same family, but it’s definitely hazier and super sticky,” he says.

The room, equipped 15 with dual-ended Gavita lights and 16-18 plants per light, holds about 10 unique strains. Resin explains that because his delivery service, URB, is a vertically integrated business he, as breeder who creates new types of cannabis, is able to provide medical marijuana patients with a huge variety of chronnoisseur-caliber indoor buds.

As a part of our four joint afternoon, Resin selects a sample of Soma Skunk V. He acquired the seeds for this strain when he first moved to Amsterdam and worked under the breeder Soma in 1999, long enough ago that this cannabis has gone through a name change and is now called Reclining Buddha.

“This is what Amsterdam smelled like in the late ’90s, super skunky,” he says, while adding his personal relationship to cannabis is so deep it resembles that of a parent or sibling. “That’s how much the plant is in my sphere of vision.”

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Photos Gracie Malley for Cannabis Now