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March’s Best Bud of the Month

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Sloane Burdick
Manufacturing Lead (Supreme Commander of Hash)

About your Best Bud:

Sloane is the funny one. Or maybe Sloane is the artsy one, or the wild one, the fun one. Or maybe Sloane is the cool one, the one who’s real, albeit a little unfettered. Or maybe Sloane can’t really be classified as “this” or “that” one, like most people walking the streets. Know what I mean?

Picture all your friends standing in a field. Now pick out “the dumb one.” How long did that take you? A millisecond? It was easy for you because people like to pigeonhole other people. That’s what we do; we’re natural-born categorizers.

But Sloane doesn’t really fit into any of those pigeonholes. She takes up four or five of them with her complexity, with the depth of her personality, and to interview her was a delight:

Q. When did you start working for The Greenery?
Sloane. “November of 2015.”

Q. What’s your favorite way to enjoy marijuana?
Sloane. “I love Strawberry Cough in the bong. I love the glass and the cold water, and the way it makes the smoke cleaner.”

Q. What’s your favorite outdoor activity?
Sloane. “Taking pictures when I’m in my car or when I’m hiking. Or riding my cruiser ‘Pinkie Tuscadero.’ You know, like the character from Happy Days. It’s got hot-pink wheels and grips.”

Q. Tell us about your pet.
Sloane. “I have an evil kitty named Betty Beans, aka ‘B.B. McFuzz Pants,’ because who doesn’t give their animals multiple names?”

Q. Which station do you stream while you’re working at The Greenery?
Sloane. “We use YouTube for music. And really, I should be honest: mostly, I listen to Sturgill Simpson. It’s a problem.”

Q. What do you like most about working at The Greenery?
Sloane. “I love normalizing the world of cannabis. I’m a single mom in my forties, and I make hash for a living. I’m making this life normal, just as it should be.”

These interviews always get awkward right at the end. It’s important to include a story about the interviewee, something anecdotal that’ll help you get to know a team member here at The Greenery. But it’s a difficult question to answer when you’re on the spot:

Q. Would you share with us a story that’ll forever immortalize you on the internet? Something interesting that’ll pretty much define you as a human being? Something that’ll be read by all your coworkers and friends and the government, because you know they’re watching, right?
Sloane. “Um… there are lots of stories,” her laugh sounded like experience, “but one time, the school bus stopped to pick me up when I was almost forty. I told the guy I was on my way to work, but he thought I was a teen. He drove away, and I could see all the kids through their windows. They were laughing and watching me as their heads turned while the bus drove away.”

Most of us know for a fact that the school-bus story doesn’t define Sloane (there’re much better ones, like the one with the Scottish people or the one that ends with a lot of laughs, like most of them do), but the fact she chose this particular story says a lot. It’s a slice, a little snippet of Sloane’s hilarity that says something about her rather than about what happened to her, and that’s just cool.

***

To the people who don’t work in this Durango dispensary, Sloane is the woman who makes Moroccan Hash for The Greenery Hash Factory, along with a whole slue of other exotic concentrates. But to us, she’s part of this company, part of it’s soul, and even though Sloane doesn’t fit into a pigeonhole, she fits in here. And that’s why Sloane Burdick is your Durango dispensary Best Bud of the Month for March; congratulations Sloane!

Make sure to check out Sloane’s artwork HERE!

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Rosin in Durango

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There are two types of people in this world: people who love Bon Jovi, and people who pretend like they don’t. I’ve done research, and this fact is all-the-way true. And when you think about it, humans are split down the middle when it comes to just about everything—some people like going out, some people like staying in; some people prefer skis, some people prefer boards; some people like mustard, and some people have really bad taste. Know what I mean? And it’s no different when it comes to marijuana concentrates: people either smoke solventless concentrates like Rosin, or people smoke solvent-extracted concentrates, like wax or shatter.

rosin, durango, the greenery hash factory, dispensaries, concentrates According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, the definition for “solvent” is “a thing that dissolves another thing” (I don’t own a dictionary). But when it comes to concentrate extraction in the cannabis industry, a solvent is usually a gas (like CO2 or butane) that’s pumped through a pressurized chamber to chemically strip the cannabinoids from flower. I know that sounds newfangled, but solvent-extracted concentrates have been around forever. If you soak marijuana in an alcohol bath, it’ll strip all the stuff that gets you high from the flower, and then if you let the alcohol evaporate, it’ll leave behind a wonderful gooey mess that you can smoke. This extract is a solvent-extracted concentrate because alcohol is a “thing that dissolves another thing.” Get it? I overheard my parents talking about this thirty years ago, and the practice is still going strong today, because alcohol-extracted THC is used to make plenty of the marijuana edibles on the market, like the Mountain High Suckers we sell in our shop.

But when it comes to one side or the other, I prefer solventless concentrates because they’ve been around much longer. These are the ones that are made the way they’ve always been made, and I’m talking about eons. I’m talking about the Berbers in Morocco who’ve been making hash for generations; I’m talking about the Lebanese tribes that’ve been pressing kief into blonde bricks throughout recorded history. I know it’ll sound pompous, but I like hashes with a story, and at The Greenery, that’s our specialty.

If you’re under thirty, don’t freak out—at The Greenery, we sell all the modern concentrates like wax and distillate, and I’m pretty sure we’re the only dispensary in town selling crystalline (which I’ll tell you about next week), so we have you hipsters covered. But I’m telling you, solventless concentrates are sublime. They have a flavor that evokes all sorts of tranquil thoughts (the kind that pair well with deep couches and maudlin music), and they’re nearly as potent as their solvent-extracted cousins. We have some Chemmy Jones Moroccan Hash in our arsenal right now that packs a 70% THC punch, and we’ve pressed some Rosin that broke the 90% barrier. I put some of the latter in my Cloud Mini and smoked it right before writing this, in case you can’t tell, and it made me realize that I’ve never told you about our Rosin, which is a travesty. So, here you go:

rosin, durango, colorado, the greenery, dispensary, hash, hash factory, solventless extractsRosin is made with nothing more than heat and pressure. Usually, flower is pressed pneumatically between two heated metal plates. The heat gets the cannabis oil flowing, and the pressure squeezes it out onto some parchment. Once the goo cools, it’s called “rosin” because it looks like the rosin violinists rub on their horsehair violin strings. If you were paying attention, you just learned two things. Sorry. Off track.

But at The Greenery Hash Factory, we do things a little differently. Instead of pressing flower, we press kief, which is all the dry-sieved trichomes that live on the flower’s surface. This stuff is potent and flavorful, and I’m pretty sure it’s the stuff Tinkerbelle kept in her bag. When we press kief to make our Dry-Sift Rosin, the goo that comes out looks decadent. It’s dark. When you smoke it, the taste is floral and deep, like the soil we use to grow our flower. It’s best in small doses, like the one that brought me here, and it’s flawless for the times when you need a little inspiration. Rosin is perfect for dabbing in Durango because it’s inline with our natural, earth-loving culture, and if you haven’t tried it, you should come see us. We’ll help you go down in a blaze of glory (we just came full-circle) with some of the most potent Rosin in town, because We’re Your Best Buds!

Mixing Marijuana

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When it came to buying pot yesteryear, you got what you got. The man would give you a bag full of unnamed weed, and you’d smoke it, not really knowing what was coming down the pipe—that bag didn’t come with a potency profile or a strain name, but that didn’t matter because nothing else was available. Those were dark days.

Seriously, can you imagine what it’d be like if all recreational drugs were sold like that? For instance, if you were in the mood for an indulgent red wine to pair with a ribeye, but booze was only sold out of a van behind Walmart, you might end up with some lukewarm Miller instead of a nice bottle of merlot… there’d be riots in the streets. And by way of analogy, the same rings true when it comes to marijuana, because different types of pot are better for different types of things: some strains work well for relaxation, which is perfect for the dark of night but not-so-perfect when you’re looking for a touch of inspiration, and some strains pick you up and get the thoughts flowing, which is perfect for daytime creativity, but ill-fitting for the moments when you simply want to pass out. Yes, most of these differences stem from the difference between Indica and Sativa, but it’s not always so straight-forward. And in that vein, if you come into our dispensary and tell one of our budtenders exactly what type of high you’re going for, they can point you in the right direction (seriously, our budtenders are like pot sommeliers).

However, here’s a secret: marijuana strain selection can be taken a step further if you dabble in mixing marijuana. As an example, I love the potency of Chemmy Jones, but the taste is a little over the top (as is the manic high that comes after only a few hits). So, whenever I end up with a little Chemmy, I grind it up and mix it with a fruitier strain like Blueberry. And yes, Chemmy is a Sativa and Blueberry is an Indica, so when you mix the two strains together, they meet in the middle and sing “Kumbaya” in your head (or at least that’s what it feels like because the high is so perfect). Anyway, my point in all this is that since we no longer have to buy pot out of a van—now that it’s possible to come into The Greenery and smell the weed before you buy it from a pot expert—mixing marijuana to find the perfect flavor and high is a possibility. These are bright days.

But wait, there’s more (did I just sound like a used car salesman?).  Now that we’ve opened The Greenery Hash Factory, you’re no longer limited to just mixing pot with pot: thanks to the bowl topper, the combinations are nearly limitless. As a quick aside, a “bowl topper” is any sort of concentrated marijuana product you sprinkle on top of the pot in your pipe to kick thigs up a bit. I apologize for relying so heavily on the cliché “pot and alcohol” type of comparison, but adding a bowl topper to your marijuana is like adding a shot of whisky to your beer, but without the shameful hangover. Anyway, back on track…

At The Greenery, we make and sell three different types of bowl-topping hashes that I would strongly recommend trying. We have Kief Brick, which is the most flavorful bowl topper because it’s compressed trichomes, we have Bubble Hash, which is the easiest to use because its powdery consistency is perfect for sprinkling, and we have Moroccan Hash, which is by far the coolest because it invokes all sorts of nostalgia stemming from the old-school way of concentrating marijuana. I won’t get any deeper into the differences between these hashes because I wrote about this subject in a different blog (which you can read HERE), and this week, I just wanted expand your high-horizons by letting you know that it’s perfectly okay to smoke two different strains of marijuana at once. Exciting, right? And just to get you going in the right direction, here’re three bowl-topped combinations that’re exceptional:

  • Bio Chem Flower topped with Purple Diesel Bubble Hash: this combo gives you the multiplied energy of two sativa-dominant products, and the rush is insane. If you’re looking for an intense head-high, you won’t find anything better. This flower comes from our own living-soil grow, and the hash comes from our factory, so I can tell you honestly that these products have been cultivated with precision.
  • Gorilla Glue #4 flower topped with Indica Blend Moroccan Hash. This combo is the polar opposite of number one: you’re gunna get a deep body high that’ll lock you in your couch and bring a good end to any bad day.
  • Deathstar Flower topped with Sativa Blend Kief Brick. This combination is all about meeting in the middle for the most complex high possible. Deathstar flower is as close as they come to a true Indica, so the body high is all-encompassing, but the Sativa kief brings with it giddiness and bright flavor.

As I’m typing this, all three of the combinations I just listed are available in our dispensary, but things sell out quickly, and our specific stains rotate almost daily so we can keep things fresh and interesting for you. So, if one of these combos isn’t available, just come in and talk with one of our knowledgeable budtenders. He or she will let you know what mixes best with what, and we’ll send you on your way with something new to try, because We’re your Best Buds, and your high matters to us.

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December’s Best Bud of the Month

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Chris “they call me Chitty” Chitwood
Manufacturing Facility Manager

About your Best Bud:

Chitty is the coolest person to ever come out of Arkansas. Seriously. From the narwhal tattoo on his calf to the astronaut helmet he wore at our last company party, Chitty is as rad as they come. And he’s the only person alive who can come across as professional in purple pants; that’s exactly what he did during this interview. But he can be serious too, because that’s what it takes to end up where Chitty has landed: in two years’ time, he has climbed from budtender to grow assistant to Manufacturing Facility Manager, and at twenty-four years’ of age, he’s now the man responsible for running The Greenery Hash Factory. If you’ve ever enjoyed any of the Moroccan Hash, Bubble Hash, Kief Brick, Rosin, or Caviar we sell in our dispensary, you did so thanks to Chitty’s hard work. And this month, we thought you should meet him:

Q. When did you start working for The Greenery?
Chris. “September of 2015.”

Q. What’s your favorite way to enjoy marijuana?
Chris. “I love our Kief Brick. It’s got all the flavors and terpenes from the original flower because it’s as close to unadulterated as it gets when it comes to concentrates, and it makes a perfect bowl-topper because it kicks you hard. It’ll also make a bowl usually big enough for only three people big enough for six, and that’s awesome.”

Q. What’s your favorite outdoor activity?
Chris. “I love skiing in the winter and I’m trying to get into snowshoeing, but I need some snow first. And I love rock climbing in the summer. I’m all about that dirt-bag life.”

Q. Tell us about your pet.
Chris. “I have no pets at the moment, unfortunately.”

Q. Which station do you stream while you’re working at The Greenery?
Chris. “I love crunchy jams and serious funk. Word.”

Q. What do you like most about working at The Greenery?
Chris. “I love the people, because we all get along and communicate. And I love the job itself, because it’s chill but challenging.”

The simple fact is that Chris Chitwood will be with The Greenery for quite some time because he’s one of the lucky young professionals who found his niche early in life right here in the marijuana industry. He’s a pleasure to work with because he doles out high-fives generously, and his easy-going manner makes the day fly by (not to mention that he brings value to this company by consistently pumping out the best hash this side of Amsterdam). Mr. Chitwood, we’re in your debt, and because of that, you’re December’s Best Bud!

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Dabbing Marijuana

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This newest generation seems to think they came up with “dabbing,” but maybe that’s just the way it’s always been—maybe the youth has always sapped credit from the people who came before thanks to short memories. After all, “Flatliners” is in the theaters again, with a new cast of pretty millennials acting out a carbon-copy plot from the eighties movie I remember, and Disney just announced that they’re remaking “Flight of the Navigator,” which is simply sacrilegious, if you ask me. Actually, “The Magnificent Seven” just came out for the third time, if you’re keeping track, and something was stolen from my father’s generation that they stole from the generation before. Everything old is being made anew, and it’s no different when it comes to smoking pot.

I’ll take a step back and explain: “dabbing” is the newest term for smoking full-burn marijuana concentrates. And I know this subject can get a little convoluted, so I’m going to walk through it step by step just in case you’re a complete newbie. A “full-burn” concentrate is something like rosin, shatter, wax, or live-resin. I’m not going to get into the specific differences between these four concentrates because that’s a subject deserving a separate blog, but basically, these concentrates are made by extracting the cannabinoids (the stuff that gets you high) from all the green plant matter you think of when you picture marijuana. When you smoke a full-burn concentrate, all of it evaporates and nothing is left behind, ergo, “full-burn.”

But you can’t smoke a full-burn concentrate conventionally because it’ll just melt—if you try to smoke something like wax with a pipe and lighter, it’ll just turn into liquid and pool in the bottom of your pipe, which is nothing more than a messy waste of money. So, you need to “dab” it. And this is where we get back on track: my generation called dabbing “knife hits.” We’d take two butter knives and get them red-hot over the stove, and then we’d press them together with some hash in between. The hot knives would vaporize the hash and we’d breathe in the smoke. And yes, we even knew how to make full-burn hash with an iron and wax paper, so you whippersnappers didn’t come up with that, either.

Anyway, a decade or so after knife-hits faded in popularity, the Atlanta hip-hop scene started to mature. A new dance came out in 2012 called “dabbing,” wherein you’d duck your forehead into the crook of your arm while sticking your other arm straight out to the side; Cam Newton made the move famous because he did it every time he scored a touchdown for the Carolina Panthers. But the “dab” didn’t come from sports or hip-hop, because the gesture is meant to look like what someone does after taking a huge concentrate hit: you turn your head into your elbow and cough like the world is ending, and you hold the other arm out as if to say, “dear god, keep that stuff away from me” (or at least, that’s where most people on the internet think it comes from). “Dabbing” was associated with smoking marijuana long before the dance came out (regardless of what the dance’s inventor, “Skippa Da Flippa,” might have to say about it), and the move is just another dance in a long line of dances meant to emulate everyday motions, like the “running man,” the “lawnmower,” or the timeless “bump-and-grind.” And it’s not even the first marijuana-related motion dance to pop up because people have been “passing it to the left” ever since that reggae song came out in the eighties.

However, when it comes to dabbing marijuana, I must admit that this newest generation has taken something we invented and made it much, much better. Now, instead of knives and a cooktop, we use a dab rig. Basically, these rigs have a “nail” that you heat up with a small blowtorch (these nails can be made from glass, ceramics, or metals like titanium). And then you “dab” a little of your concentrate onto the nail (which sits where the bowl of a pipe or bong used to be) and inhale the smoke. It’s easy and clean and ridiculously potent. Since all of the plant matter has been taken out of the equation, a few of the concentrates currently on the market come close to 99% per THC content, and that’s insane. The high is mind-bendingly intense and it hits you quick and pure, like only a concentrate can. At the Greenery, we have basic dab rigs that start around fifteen bucks and a complete line of full-burn concentrates. If you come in, we’ll show you how to put the two together.

But quite a few people are put-off by the idea of using a blowtorch to smoke pot—to them, it feels a little superfluous and strange, a little over-the-top. And because of this, I’ve noticed that most dabbers over thirty prefer a handheld vaporizer like the Cloud V that we sell in our store for around sixty bucks. Frankly, I’m one of these “people over thirty,” and I doubt that I’d dab if I had to use a blowtorch. I prefer discretion: the Cloud V is battery-operated and it fits in your pocket. It has a little ceramic bowl and a heating element; all you do is load it and push a button and inhale. It couldn’t be simpler.

But just like with everything else pot-related, it’s what you put in your pipe that matters, not the pipe itself. You’ll hear me talk about this quite a bit from now on, but recently, our company expanded to include The Greenery Hash Factory, and we’ve started making our own concentrates. And just like the flower that comes out of our grow, our concentrates are the best on the market. But we’re doing it the old fashion way—without the use of caustic solvents that’re inimical to flavor—so only one of our concentrates is full-burn: our Rosin.

We make our Rosin with nothing more than heat and extreme pressure: premium flower is squeezed with a heated pneumatic press (it’s an amped-up version of the iron and wax paper I told you about previously) and the thick, gooey goodness called Rosin seeps out of the flower. We sell it for $60 a gram before tax, and it’s worth every penny. The batch I have loaded in my Cloud V right now comes from Chemmy Jones flower, and it comes in at 75.9% THC, which is incredible because we didn’t use the chemicals commonly associated with high-THC concentrates. But it is what it is, and at close to seventy-six percent THC, just a little dab will do ya’ when you’re smoking our Rosin (and yes, I know I just stole an advertising slogan from my parents’ generation, but whatever).

Our Rosin really is worth trying if you’ve never “dabbed” as the millennials are calling it these days, because the flavor, convenience, and potency surpass old-school hash by a country mile, regardless of who thought of it first. So please, come in and let us show you what you’ve just read about—let us introduce you to something new, something better than what you’re used to. We’re Your Best Buds, and when it comes to dabbing, that’s what we do.

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Caviar Marijuana

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People get pretty pretentious when it comes to fish eggs. Think about it: the only true “caviar” comes from the critically endangered beluga sturgeon—a monstrous fish that swam alongside dinosaurs—and it sells for $290 an ounce. It’s salty and black and usually enjoyed by people who wear suits and snobby expressions, like James Bond. I’ve only eaten it a couple times, and I didn’t understand the hype; it didn’t taste any better than the fish eggs you get at sushi restaurants for a fraction of the price. But that sushi stuff is just called “roe,” and to some people, that matters, I guess. And to these people, it’s annoying when the rest of us refer to garden-variety roe as “caviar,” but really, we only do so because it’s a crap-ton easier than saying “salt-cured fish eggs that come from a species outside the acipenseridae family of fish.” Know what I mean?

And in a way, it’s ironic, because just as “caviar” has become a blanket-term for fish eggs, so too has it become a blanket-term for infused cannabis flower. But then again, people get pretty pretentious when it comes to pot as well. Technically, the only true caviar marijuana is made by soaking a bud of Grape God in Grape Rhino hash oil, and then coating it with Grape Rhino kief. If a different flower, oil, or kief is used, the end product is just an unnamed variety of “infused flower.” But the confusion doesn’t stop there: instead of “caviar,” some people (usually from the west coast) use the term “moon rocks,” or they think that moon rocks are buds coated with cannabis wax. But that’s not accurate either—true moon rocks are made by soaking buds of Girl Scout Cookies in an oil made from the same strain, before coating it in more GSC kief. So, thanks to all the vagaries and confusion, the three terms have become somewhat synonymous, and frankly, here at The Greenery, we don’t have a problem with that: “moon rocks” is just the Californian way of saying “caviar,” which is just the Coloradan way of saying “infused flower.” At the end of the day, none of it matters because caviar marijuana is ludicrously awesome and it gets you high as hell, so who cares what it’s called?

Anyway, at The Greenery, we’ve always sold caviar, and our customers love it so much that we’ve started making it ourselves. For our first batch, we used Dark Star flower from our own grow, but instead of dipping it in hash oil that’d been thinned with alcohol like most places use, we painstakingly painted each bud (yes, with an actual paintbrush) with pure hash oil that’s just as thick and golden as the gooey-goodness in Winnie the Pooh’s honeypot. And then we battered each sticky bud in our own kief, just like fried chicken, before letting it dry. The result was wonderful: our caviar came in at over 55% THC, which is mind-blowing, but the best part was the texture. Most caviar is oversaturated with oil, and when you try to grind it, it clogs up your grinder and makes a hot mess. But our caviar crumbles perfectly and it’s easy to handle or roll into joints: it’s the perfect trifecta of potency, and just a little bit goes a long way. The high is quick and potent, the flavor is rich and decadent, and the best part is that you don’t need to be James Bond to afford it: before tax, our caviar sells for only $25 per gram, or $20 for a one-gram, pre-rolled joint, and we always have plenty in stock.

So please, come into our dispensary at 208 Parker Avenue and come see this stuff. Come ask one of our budtenders to show you a sample or let you smell it, and we swear that you’ll understand the hype (unlike with those snobby fish eggs), because We’re Your Best Buds!

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Best Bud of the Month

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Savanna Bristol
Assistant Compliance Manager & Flower Purchaser

About your Best Bud:

Savanna Bristol is a wee bit clumsy; running into things is a hobby of hers. Actually, I’ve seen her come close to death three times in a single shift. And she definitely needs to stay away from sharp objects. The last time we worked together, she got a metal splinter stuck in her finger (you know, “somehow”), and then when she walked by the couch, it “bit her leg” and she started bleeding. And her affliction goes beyond the workplace as well: this one time, Savanna decided to stand on top of Baker’s Bridge, and it didn’t go too well. Her friend didn’t want to jump, so Savanna may, or may not, have pushed him off. And then when she jumped after, she landed in a sitting position, and it broke her back—two of her vertebrae went “poof,” as she says it, but Savanna still looks back with a laugh when she tells the story.

However, her clumsiness doesn’t matter because Savanna has brains—she’s our assistant compliance manager, and it’s her job to steer our dispensary through all the weird, esoteric little regulations the state throws at us. She checks potency profiles and child-resistant packaging and font sizes, and she dedicates 100% of her attention to making sure we’re compliant (maybe that’s why she’s so clumsy). But here’s the rest of her story:

Q: When did you start working for The Greenery?
Savanna: “March of 2016.”

Q: What’s your favorite way to enjoy marijuana?
Savanna: “I love dabbing—it’s one hit, one high. And right now, I love the rosin we’re making. Seriously. The flavor is awesome, and the high is perfect!”

Q: What’s your favorite outdoor activity?
Savanna: “I love tubing the river or paddle-boarding the lake with my dog.”

Q: Tell us about your pet.
Savanna: “Nala is a seventy-five-pound Pitbull, but she’s a baby. She just has too much love to give.”

Q: Which station do you stream while you’re working at The Greenery?
Savanna: “Whichever one suits my mood, but it’s usually Die Antwoord or Disney music… I love Disney music.”

Q: What do you like most about working at The Greenery?
Savanna: “I love my coworkers and my customers. It doesn’t matter who you are; when you come into The Greenery, you’re in a good mood.”

Well, that’s Savanna. In a way, she’s our dispensary diva. She likes things her way, and if she doesn’t get it, she’s likely to throw a big bag of pot at your face (and fall down in the process). But frankly, there’s nothing wrong with her way, because she knows this industry inside and out, and it’s due to her efforts that we run a completely compliant dispensary. And she has good taste in pot, which is important—Savanna’s second duty is to order all the flower on our menu, and thanks to her, we’re able to offer ten premium strains of boutique flower to Durango each and every day. For her steadfast dedication to compliance, and for keeping our shelves stocked, The Greenery is in Savanna’s debt, and because of that, she is Your Best Bud for October! Thank you, Savanna!

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Kief Brick

Kief Brick, The Greenery Hash Factory, Durango, Colorado,

Thirty years ago, my father had a poster hanging on the inside of his closet door: it said, “a puff of kief in the morning makes a man as strong as a hundred camels in the courtyard.” The poster was warped and creased with age, the font was straight out of the sixties, and a tall hookah was pictured on the left with smoke wafting from the bowl at its crown. And as a child, I had no idea what it meant. I assumed it had something to do with drugs, because those are the things you “puff,” but I ruled that out quickly because my father didn’t do drugs; he loved his polo shirts and his hard-to-read books and his government job. However, the years passed, and I finally figured out that the poster was indeed a relic from my father’s hippy youth. But I still didn’t know what “kief” was.

Fast forward to my freshman year: a guy named Drew gave me a homemade kief box as a gift. As a side note, they call them “pollen boxes” now because kief is still illegal in most backwoods states, but that’s irrelevant. Anyway, when Drew gave me the box, I opened it and looked inside. There was a fine screen in the bottom with another compartment below it. I asked Drew what the hell a “kief box” was, and after giving me an incredulous look, he told me to keep my weed in the box and shake it gently from time to time—Drew told me that the “kief” would fall through the screen into the compartment below, and that I could take it out and smoke it.

So, I did exactly what Drew suggested. And after an eighth or three of that good west coast weed, I’d collected a decent dusting of kief in the bottom of my box. I took it out, sprinkled it on top of a bowl loaded in my bong, and I smoked it. I sat back in my dorm room and I waited for the strength of one-hundred camels; I waited for the superpowers promised by my father’s poster. They never came, of course, but at least I figured out the riddle to that poster (by the way, Google says it’s worth $1000 now), and at least I discovered kief.

Kief is an Arabic word meaning “pleasure” or “intoxication,” which, if you think about them, are two pretty damn synonymous words to start with, so it makes sense that the Arabs would use only the one word. But the kief I’m talking about is something you smoke: it’s a naturally-made marijuana concentrate formed from the dried trichomes found on cannabis flower. And frankly, kief is one of my all-time favorite ways to get high. But it’s always been difficult to find, just like all the good stuff in life, because most kief is homemade and so good that most people won’t share it. However, that’s an annoyance from the past because The Greenery Hash Factory has started manufacturing and selling old-school kief right here in Durango, Colorado.

We make it simply and naturally—we put premium, boutique flower in our dry-sift machine (using a 150-micron filter), and we let friction do the work. The flower tumbles around for a while and all the wonderful kief falls into a collection bin below (it’s like that little wooden kief box of mine, but on steroids). We take out the powdery kief and compress it into a brick with a pneumatic jack, and then we cut it up into grams of “kief brick” that we sell for $30 before tax at our local dispensary. The batch I smoked just before writing this (yeah, that’s right) was made from Indiana Bubblegum flower, and the numbers are incredible: the THC came in at 44.9%, and the CBG came in at 3.1%. At this point, especially if you’re a regular reader of marijuana blogs, you’re probably bored to tears when it comes to information on cannabinoids like THC and CBD because it’s ubiquitous, however, CBG is an up-and-coming cannabinoid you should pay attention to—this odd little chemical is actually the parent of both THC and CBD, it’s thought to have anti-inflammatory properties, and it might even be a neuro-protectant (smoking high-CBG concentrates might actually protect your brain, despite what your mother told you).

However, just like I said in last week’s post, the numbers don’t matter much, nor does the science—it’s the experience that counts: our kief is incredible, and I’m pretty sure this is the stuff Tinkerbell sprinkled on the Lost Boys to make them fly. And smoking kief is like eating the frosting first and leaving the cake behind, because you’re smoking the trichomes without the sticks and stems you’re used to. It’s flavorful and rich, and the smoke expands in your lungs, like a genie trying to get out of his claustrophobic lamp. The high is complex and long-lasting, with warm body notes and a cerebral giddiness that seems way too intense for something that costs only thirty bucks per gram.

But it’s the flavor that’s remarkable.

All the terpenes for which marijuana is famous are found in the trichomes—these terpenes are what give marijuana its smell and taste, and when you’re smoking pure trichomes, the flavor is multiplied exponentially. You can taste all the fruit and citrus and pine notes as if they were highlighted by a big marker, and all the subtle nuances that were hinted at before in plain flower stand out in kief like the stars they truly are. And this stuff smells exactly like it tastes: pungent, like intoxicating potpourri.

Actually, you just need to see it for yourself. You need to smell this stuff in person. You need to smoke it and sit back, and experience if it’ll make you feel stronger than one-hundred camels in the courtyard. So please, come in to The Greenery and ask one of our budtenders to show you our kief; this stuff is just as good as it sounds, and we’ll share it too, because that’s what Your Best Buds are for.

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Moroccan Hash in Durango

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The Berbers are a people of ancient Arab stock—they’ve lived in the mountainous Rif region of Morocco for as long as records have been kept. Their eyes and hair are deep brown, their traditions are exotic, and they paint their houses and streets blue to mirror the sky, to be reminded always of a god living above. And they make hashish, just as they always have, because it’s a part of Moroccan life.

In the Rif, the soil is red and rich, and the air smells salty because the Mediterranean Sea starts where the mountains end. And hidden in the highlands are terraced hills covered with flowering marijuana. The Berber men tend their crop until it’s time to harvest, and then they reap their fields the way their fathers taught them to. The harvested marijuana is set aside to cure for a month, and then the flower is trimmed from the stalk. The green bud is ground gently, and then placed on a silk drum—the silk acts as a filter: the pollen falls through while the plant matter stays trapped on the surface. The Berber men cover the flower with a tarp, and then start beating on it rhythmically with bamboo canes; they call this “making music.” When the hash-song is done, the men uncover the beaten flower and throw it away. They take the silk head from the drum and look inside; the brittle trichomes that filtered through the silk sit in the drum’s bottom. Light brown, pungent, intoxicating.

The men press the powdery hash by hand, heating and kneading it gently, and they smile as their Moroccan hash darkens. They roll it into balls, keeping the best for themselves, and then they send their hash out into the world; these Berber men make half the world’s supply. But oddly enough, marijuana is illegal in Morocco. Lenience is given to the Berber tribes because it’s easier than policing them, but once their hash leaves the mountains like snowmelt flowing downhill, it loses its protection. It’s coveted and fought over just like anything else that makes you feel good, and it’s always been ridiculously hard to come by in the States. I’ve only had authentic Moroccan hash twice in my life—I could tell by the tribal stamp pressed into the bricks I bought—and I didn’t want to think too much about how I got what I got, because most of this hash is smuggled out of Morocco in a very… personal way. But each time I smoked it, I loved the feeling Moroccan Hash gave me, and after each time I ran out, my smile turned upside-down.

But that’s over: now, The Greenery Hash Factory is making their own Moroccan Hash, and we’re selling it at The Greenery for thirty-five bucks a gram. And the craziest part is that the stuff we’re making is better than the stuff I’ve smoked before; maybe we should call it “Durangan Hash” and smuggle it into Morocco so they can see what they’ve been doing wrong for centuries. For one, we use the best marijuana in Colorado to make our hash—our cannabis is grown in a controlled environment with living soil by a badass Master Grower, not out in the wind and rain of a Moroccan mountainside (and we don’t have to worry about goats eating our pot, which is nice).

Secondly, we use modern technology to make our “music”; quality control is much easier to achieve when you’re using a dry-sift machine instead of bamboo canes. And when you do everything scientifically, from using an exact heat to caramelize the hash to testing the hash in a modern laboratory, you end up with a superior product. Our most recent batch of Moroccan Hash is simply awesome: we made it from Skunk #1 flower, and the THC came in at 65%, the CBD came in at 1.3%, and the CBN came in at 2.3%. Today, when most marijuana concentrates are made using a chemical extraction process, these numbers are exciting because we did it the old-school way, naturally.

But in the end, it’s the experience that counts, not the numbers or the three-letter-acronyms, and I swear to you that to smoke our hash is to know perfection. The flavor is deep and musky, like a velvety dark chocolate or a fragrant black tea. The high is focused and intense, with profound relaxation and a centered calm. It’s the high I’ve been looking for through the years since I held those tribal-stamped bricks of the real deal, but taken to another level in the hands of our hash craftsmen. So, come in to our dispensary and ask one of our affable budtenders to show you what I’m talking about; you can smell it and see it for yourself. From now on, we’re offering this Moroccan Hash to Durango and our neighbors because it’s just better than what has been offered before—that’s what you’ve come to expect from Your Best Buds, and that’s what you’ll get if you try our house-made Moroccan Hash.

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