Will that be Black Widow CBD, Super Skunk or Skywalker Kush No. 1?

The names of the pot products on offer after recreational cannabis becomes legal across Canada on Oct. 17 will be as intriguing as they are inscrutable.

And with sparse packaging information and little producer advertising to guide you — the legislation restricts them both severely — how’s the newbie Dude supposed to know which to choose?

Welcome to the world of online “trip advisers.”

Yes, as with seemingly any perplexity out there, the internet will provide a wealth of combustibles advice for baffled consumers, on websites that employ connoisseur expertise and crowdsourced consensus to help guide you to your desired high.

“The trip adviser is our core asset. Consumers can read about every product and every producer, and educate themselves about the category … through consumer-driven reviews,” said Matei Olaru, CEO of Toronto-based Lift & Co., which offers one of the two main online guides Canadian cannabis buyers can access.

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The trip guide will be available in a free smartphone format, which consumers can open as they browse retail locations or place orders online come Oct. 17.

The guide will also help consumers navigate a market that has climbed to some 800 products under the existing medical regime and could climb past 1,000 in the first year after the recreational business opens.

Lift has also helped create a retail training program for store employees that, so far, Nova Scotia has adopted for its cannabis operations, and with talks underway with other provincial cannabis vendors across the country.

The other major trip adviser site will be provided by the cannabis resource gadfly Leafly, which expanded its U.S. operations to Canada last year in anticipation of legalization and to serve the many Canadians who currently use its media products and guides.

Olaru says that, like the original TripAdvisor web service — which bills itself as the world’s largest source of travel information — the Lift.co cannabis guide will help bridge the gap between a consumer’s desires and the otherwise hidden products that would satisfy them.

“You go to a new country and you want to find a good restaurant but you don’t know how to find that good restaurant because you don’t know what’s going on in that market,” he said.

“In Canada, cannabis producers can’t talk about their product’s effect. They’ll soon have to rely on plain packaging. There’s no metric of quality they can communicate. So our ‘trip adviser’ platform … will help empower consumers with the information they need.”

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The answers to these questions will be nowhere near apparent as consumers shop online or browse in stores — where all goods will be displayed in plain black or white packages that bear a product’s brand name and logo, levels of the active cannabinoid ingredients THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol), a warning label and little else.

The questions, however, have all been considered and answered by people who have used the products before, whether as legal medicinals or otherwise. And some 65,000 of them have shared their experiences with the Lift platform to form a data set that includes millions of information points and covers more than 800 products.

“They talk about how long the product lasts, the top effects that they felt, whether it was relaxation or euphoria, let’s say, (and) perhaps how it rates on a five-star system,” Olaru said.

“Everything you take for granted, let’s say in an Amazon review or a TripAdvisor review, we do for the cannabis industry.”

The Lift guide covers up to 24 elements — including things like taste, aroma, appearance and potency — in each product review.

And aside from reviews, the company’s adviser will offer an algorithm that can match consumers with products they are likely to prefer given their answers to some personal questions, Olaru says.

“It’s a … recommendation engine that gets to know you,” he said of the program, which will launch on legalization day.

“You’ll go to our platform and say you’re 25 years old, you’re new to cannabis, you don’t want to feel like this, you want to feel like that, and we’ll recommend (or) suggest products you can try. And as you try more products, we’ll get smarter.”

To monetize the site, Lift will take on advertising and shop the market intelligence information it gains to producers, governments, retailers and other industry players.

The Leafly platform can also be accessed on smartphones while shopping.

“We’ve helped millions of people navigate their journey in cannabis, whatever that might be,” said Jo Vos, managing director of Leafly Canada.

“Governments are being cautious (with cannabis information) and rightly so, but consumers are and will continue to look for more contextual information more so than what they will experience in those retail environments,” Vos said.

Vos likens cannabis selection to shopping for fresh produce and says her site will provide the sensory details bland government packaging withholds.

Vos said her site will provide information on the type of high a product is likely to elicit.

The site also provides a “Cannabis 101” segment that tutors users on such things as consumption alternatives, constituent chemicals like the buzz-inducing THC and the medicinal CBD, how to come down off a bad high and “five ways to help your budtender help you.”

Like the Lift adviser, the free Leafly program will rely on crowdsourced reviews — the company says it has millions — to evaluate products.

Vos says its appraisals are also based on the opinions of a connoisseur staff it employs in its Seattle offices.

These are people like Will Hyde, a cannabis “sommelier” who’s been involved in almost every aspect of the industry — and been on both ends of a joint — since before it was legalized in Washington state six years ago.

“I got my start in the cannabis industry like most people as a consumer, long before it was even an established industry,” said Hyde, a senior subject matter expert at Leafly. “And since that time I’ve just followed my passions, which has led me to Leafly.”

In between sparking up and settling down at his current job, Hyde said he’s grown pot at personal and medicinal supply levels, and worked with small-scale THC extractors and in large commercial laboratories.

He’s also been a pot dispensary “budtender” — a job which, like its bartender equivalent, requires an expertise in the intoxicating products practitioners serve to their customers across the counter.

“I’ve sort of run the gamut of the cannabis supply chain and that really just started from my own personal connection with cannabis and wanting to educate myself further,” he said.

As a sommelier will do for wine, Hyde says he can “recommend cannabis strains and products and consumption methods, and (give) people sort of a lay of the land on how they can incorporate cannabis into their lifestyle.”

Hyde said his expertise allows him to evaluate important traits like the smells, colours and shapes that signal the quality of different marijuana strains.

“You’re looking at everything from the colours that it’s showing, to the structure of the bud, to the density of the bud, to the amount of resin that’s available to the naked eye … and sort of how frosty it looks,” he says.

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“And then when you dive a little deeper and obviously you open the jar up …the first thing that’s going to hit you is the smell, the aroma of the cannabis, and we look for a number of different things.”

Cannabis smells — which are harbingers of taste — have a musical element, Hyde said, with some strains producing single-note aromas while others have “bitonal” olfactory effects.

“A good example of that would be a strain like strawberry-banana … (which has) those competing flavours of strawberry and banana sort of battling together to create one complex mix of flavour,” he said.

“And then we see another level of that, which is anything that is deeply complex, meaning it’s showing more than two or three flavours … and just like musicians playing together, one can sort of take the lead at times depending on what those aromas are and whether you’re smoking them (or) vaporizing them.”

Hyde says the THC and CBD profiles of cannabis products on offer in Canada will be part of Leafly’s trip adviser format and can generally give users a hint of what to expect from their highs.

That being said, Hyde stresses the feelings any strain of pot will produce can change from person to person based on their metabolism, body chemistry and prior cannabis experience.

“We can sort of paint a picture of what the road you’re about to walk down might look like,” he said. “But we can’t tell you the exact address of the house you’re going to pass.”

Lift, which runs North America’s largest cannabis expo, has partnered with MADD Canada to create a retail training program to educate store employees, Olaru said.

Lasting two to five days, the online program will educate point-of-sale workers about product specifications and spotting customers who should not be purchasing pot because of age or intoxication.

The LCBO was slated to run Ontario’s cannabis retail operations, but reports last week suggested the province was instead going to let private operators run stores. The LCBO had said little about its plans for the shops.

But Beverley Ware, a spokesperson for the Nova Scotia Liquor Corp., says her agency has adopted the program, which will help train some 200 employees beginning in August.

“The important aspect for us is that our employees have a very good understanding of the products,” said Ware, whose agency will open 12 cannabis outlets on Oct. 17, most of them within existing liquor stores. “We want them to be able to educate and inform customers so that they can make the right choice of the right product for the experience they’re looking for.”

Pot picks that pack a punch

Will Hyde has a refined palate for pot.

And as the country gets set for the drug’s legalization Oct. 17, Hyde’s sommelier grasp of cannabis arcana will help thousands of Canadians select from the dizzying menu of marijuana selections that will be on offer.

The Seattle-based cannabis expert is part of a team at Leafly Canada building a “trip adviser” guide that will let pot shoppers here know what tastes, smells and punch various products will pack.

Here are Hyde’s assessments of a few he says are bound to be popular come October.

Blue Dream

“Blue Dream is a combination of haze genetics, which (have) very uplifting, cerebral ... energetic (and) mind-focused cannabis effects crossed with blueberry, which is traditionally a more even, or even heavier sort of sedating body high.

“Blue dream will actually present a very balanced effect that is felt in both the mind and the body and (it) is a good sort of baseline strain. If you figure out ... what aspects of blue dream people enjoy you can get a sense for what direction they might like to go (with other products).”

OG Kush

“OG Kush is very unique and very popular in Canada and around the world in general. (It’s) a complex hybrid that has been known to show sort of both sides of the cannabis spectrum.” It can sometimes have “very sedating, heavier, deeply relaxing body effects, or it can be very uplifting and cerebral,” he says.

“And OG Kush has a very, very recognizable aroma and flavour profile. If you have a true, authentic OG Kush you will know sort of the gassy, piney complex profile that you have in front of you almost immediately.”

Pink Kush

“Pink Kush is an OG Kush derivative ... and it’s got sort of this sweet vanilla and candylike scent to it. It’s very flowery as well, but it also has a sort of danker, deeper earthiness to it that OG Kush is known for.

“It’s very invigorating pine that is very sharp and what I generally attribute to most Kush varieties ... and that has more of a relaxed effect, because while it is a hybrid it’s an Indica-dominant hybrid. It does lean towards the heavier side of cannabis effects. At the same time it’s not so relaxing that it’s non-functional or anything because it’s very happy with a little bit of energy and upliftedness in the effects profile as well.”

Sour Diesel

“Sour diesel ... has a little bit of genetic mystery to it just because it comes from the black market days of growers protecting their genetics as their intellectual property.

“But it is very popular and as the name would suggest it has a very sour and dieselly, gassy aroma to it. It’s very sharp and pungent, almost the same way a very sharp cheese will capture your nose’s attention, sour diesel will do the same, but it is not quite as cheesy or sort of funky.

“The general effects are very much uplifting, energetic, euphoric, creative and focused or sometimes even unfocused due to maybe a little bit of over consumption because it will really get your mind going and to some people that can be very distracting.”