A Beginner's Guide to Not Buying Shitty Weed

Don't buy this. I think it's rosemary. Judita Juknele / EyeEm

Have you ever walked out of a pot shop with a fresh gram of weed, only to be overcome with disappointment as soon as you open the bag and realize you bought a dud?

Accidentally buying shitty weed is an unfortunately common experience in Washington, where there’s thousands of pounds of amazing, world-class legal pot, but also a decent amount of garbage weed mixed in. So, what do you do when you’re presented with a hundred different choices and an unhelpful budtender?

The best tool in your arsenal is your nose: The difference between good and bad weed is often a matter of what aromatic compounds, called terpenes, are present in that piece of cannabis flower, and your olfactory senses are surprisingly good at sniffing out the terpenes you individually like and dislike.

Unfortunately, legalizing weed has put a hermetically sealed barrier between our noses and our weed. Washington state law requires all pot to be sold in sealed packages (if you want a true pot shopping experience go to Oregon where this law doesn’t exist), meaning gone are the days of a dealer opening up a couple jars of pot and letting your nose guide you to your favorite strain.

That’s unfortunate because there’s no single visual clue that can guarantee the pot inside the bag is dank, according to Jackson Holder, a cannabis expert and product buyer for Dockside Cannabis in SoDo.

“It’s definitely a kind of tricky thing because there are very few visual indicators that are going to tell you that this [flower] is for sure aromatic, in fact, I would say there aren’t any,” Holder said.

Holder said the best way to find great weed is to rely on the advice of a budtender. I agree. Try to find a store and a budtender you trust and then keep giving them your business, just like you would with a black market dealer that consistently supplies fantastic pot.

But sometimes you are inevitably left with a shitty budtender who doesn’t care and a menu of pot that is ten pages too long. So what’s a stoner to do? I've asked Seattle's foremost pot experts and found a few visual clues that can help guide you away from the shwag and towards the premium sticky icky, icky.

Crystals

Big trichomes on House of Cultivar’s Chem Mint Cookies. House of Cultivar

Great pot is almost always covered with white, salt-like, crystals. These white dots are little glands in the pot plant that produce the oils called cannabinoids that get us high.

“If you find a saltier looking plant then you have found a winner. Those guys are going to have a lot more cannabinoids," said Ali Khan, a manager at Hashtag Recreational Cannabis in Fremont and Redmond.

These cannabinoids, of which THC is just one, develop into big bubbles at the ends of these glands, and the bigger the bubbles the more likely the pot is potent. Try to look closely at those white crystals—do they look like full balls of oil or more just like little white dots? Bigger balls mean more oil and a stronger high.

“It’s very possible to grow cannabis that is super frosty with trichomes all over it but it’s possible those trichomes never got filled,” Holder said. “I want to see if it's not just frosty, but when I look down I want to see trichomes that are bursting with oil.”

Some shops provide handy magnifying glasses for checking out flower in closer detail—grab one of these and hold your pot up to it. Don’t feel bad taking your time and using all of the tools in front of you, a good budtender will never rush you into making a decision.

Color

Make sure to look at your weed before buying it. Mike Force

A specific color will never determine great pot. There are thousands of different unique cannabis strains and each one has its own natural hues, some are bright green, some are dark purple, and some are even gold. But sometimes discoloring can be a sign of bad weed.

The biggest warning sign to look for is a bleached bud that has been discolored because of prolonged exposure to light. This isn’t necessarily just a lighter shade of weed—remember lighter shades can just mean a different strain—bleaching usually shows itself as an irregular discoloring. Instead of the entire bud being a light color, only one section of the nug, the part that was exposed to light, becomes bleached and light, while the rest of the weed remains its natural hue.

“If you have a product that has been bleached, by the time that happens the relevant aromatics are going to go away,” Holder said.

Other than those signs of bleaching, color isn’t a very good indicator of quality. A deep and dark green hue can indicate a grower cut corners on their curing process, but it could also just indicate a particularly green nug that was carefully cured immediately after harvest.

A faded gold or light white color may indicate that the pot you are looking at is old and stale, but it also could just be a particularly light-colored strain. Proper Acapulco Gold hardly looks green at all, but it’s still a highly prized heirloom strain.

In short, watch out for irregular bleaching of your pot leaves, but otherwise different colors don’t necessarily mean good or bad weed.

Size

Towering Colas at CannaSol pot farm in Eastern Washington. Lester Black

The size of the pot nugs in question can help tell part of its story. Pot plants put more energy into their flowers that are higher up on the plant or on its outer edges, making these nugs larger and more potent. That doesn’t mean there’s something inherently wrong with small nugs – often called “popcorn nugs” in the industry – but picking larger flowers over smaller flower tends to be a good way to hedge your bets.

“If I was given the option to get one three-gram nug or three single-gram nugs, from a quality perspective I would choose the single larger nug every single time,” Jackson said.

Growers call the biggest buds on a plant the “colas,” and they can tower over the rest of the plant. Farms tend to save these big colas for larger quantity sales, like eighths and quarters, which is one reason to avoid buying single grams, according to Bill Eddy, a cannabis expert and manager at Ruckus Recreational on Capitol Hill.

“When you buy a gram you are getting the lower buds off the plant,” Eddy said. “Black market growers keep the colas to themselves, so that’s saying something.”

Shape

Some hand trimmed pot from Seattle Green Buds. Lester Black

Paying attention to the shape of the nug itself is also a good way to find quality pot. Growers must trim leaves off the pot flower before it is sold – the leaves don’t contain those oily glands that get you high – and some farms use automated machines instead of hand trimming their pot. These machines can damage the flower and shake off those precious trichomes. Machine trimmed pot tends to have uniform edges, whereas hand-trimmed pot tends to look asymmetrical.

“Irregular edges mean they are hand cut, it means they’re carefully trimming and taking care of their pot,” Eddy said.

Another thing to look for is what kind of debris is at the bottom of the container. Is there a bunch of little leaves and a lot of trichome crystals sitting at the bottom of the jar? That’s a sign that this flower was poorly handled during processing and shipping. Even the dankest weed, the most sugary, crystal-covered flower, will not drop a pile of its trichomes if it's properly handled.

“A pile of crystals at the bottom of the jar is because they’re banging on the fucking jar,” Eddy said.

Hairs



Some hairy Gelato grown by Canna Organix Canna Organix

If you’re buying your pot at a legal weed shop you shouldn’t concern yourself too much with the little hairs that you sometimes see on strains. They can be white or orange or even brown and have an aesthetic appeal, but they have more to do with the genetics of the plant than its quality. Some strains just naturally grow more hairs than others.

A hairy nug once indicated something special during the black market days, when lower quality dealers would smash a bunch of weed into a brick and ship it, damaging any hairs in the process.

“Hair is often a big indicator in a black market that isn’t served by craft cannabis,” Holder said. “If the hair is making it to your pipe [in the black market] it is likely that the product was taken care of.”

So, don’t worry about the hairs.

Test Results

Washington, like every legal state, requires farms to test their flower and label each product with its cannabinoid percentage. You should pay attention to these labels as one signal in your hunt for good weed, but if you buy flower solely based on its cannabinoid percentage you will frequently be disappointed.

The difference between mediocre and amazing weed is almost always a question of the terpenes, those aromatic compounds, not the amount of THC in a plant. I am frequently blown away by flower that tests at just 11 or 12 percent THC, but has a rich and dynamic profile of terpenes. And I’ve bought flower labeled as 26 percent THC that gave me a mediocre high.

There’s also still a lot of problems with the testing industry in Washington, growers will shop around to find whoever will give them their highest THC percentages, so relying soley on these numbers is a fool’s game.