Your weed is old, but maybe that’s a good thing

A few months ago I attended an event at a popular pharmacy and consumption lounge in West Hollywood. There I bought three jars of flowers, each a current favorite that I had tried many times. I looked forward to showing my friends and colleagues the fire I wanted to light them up to, and announced to the crew what I would be rolling.

I opened the first jar, took a whiff of it and immediately closed it again. There lay dead, lifeless little buds devoid of any sensory properties. I figured it must have been a coincidence so I opened the other two jars – same devastating smell of hay. I checked the date on the first glass. It was packed 54 weeks prior to my purchase and harvested four months prior.

Unfortunately, the problem that weed is old by the time it reaches the consumer is all too common, especially with sun-grown flowers. While indoor growers can harvest as often as they like, sungrown farmers only harvest once a year, in October. And weed shipped from rural areas has a much further way to travel than flowers shipped from urban facilities closer to dispensaries.

How weeds spread from the farm to the pharmacy

How the cannabis industry is structured in legal markets can encourage the problem of selling old weed. Once the flower leaves the farm and is transported to the pharmacy, there is no more supervision. The pharmacy is not responsible for the transport and the farmer has no way of knowing what happens to his flower during transport. If a driver were to stop and eat something on a hot summer day, the entire crop he is transporting could be destroyed in a matter of minutes.

Gina Coleman/Weedmaps

“With all the different steps that herb has to go through before it hits pharmacy shelves, the average batch lasts [between] 30-45 days to reach consumers,” said Alec Dixon, founder of SC Labs, a quality control center for cannabis and hemp. “Unless you actively refrigerate it all the time and treat it like lettuce, we typically find that 60-90% of the terpene content is gone by the time it goes on sale.”

Chiah Rodriques, a regenerative cannabis grower in Mendocino, is all too familiar with this problem. “Everything is the responsibility of the farmer,” she said. “Because of the way the regulated system is set up, once my flower is at a retailer, it doesn’t technically belong until it’s packaged and sold to retailers.”

She continued, “I don’t get paid for the product until it’s sold by the retailer. The distribution doesn’t owe me anything, but they can mess up the product between storage for orders and delivery. It ends up biting the farmers in the butt because I am responsible for everything, even though the product I delivered to them was perfect when it left the farm.”

Mature weeds versus dead weeds

There are two types of old weeds: dead and mature.

• mature grass is an old-fashioned term that refers to cannabis that has matured in a state of constant curing—or ideal conditions of light, heat, and humidity under the supervision of a master grower. Although the harvest and pack date is even further away, it’s still very good, and some will argue, even better than its freshly harvested counterparts.
• Dead Weed refers to flowers that have been exposed to harmful elements such as light, heat, and improper humidity during curing. As a result, it lacks the active ingredients that get you high and determine the smell, taste, nuances of the experience, and so on.

How long does it take for grass to mature?

Chaitanya – known as “Swami”, founder of Swami Select – has been a famous breeder for over fifty years. He believes weed gets better with time, arguing that if properly dried and cured, then properly jarred and stored, the buds will last in a stable chemical position for at least another year after harvest.

“Even after the plant is technically dead, it’s still very active biologically,” Chaitanya said. “When cannabis is harvested there are a lot of volatile compounds on the living plant. Some gasify, others remain on the cannabis and become a more complex substance… This entire maturation process, this change that takes place in the molecules within the cannabis, takes several months. I like to say that it takes four months or more for cannabis to reveal its true nature.”

Gina Coleman/Weedmaps

“The idea that you can’t do anything with the flower three months after it’s harvested is just wrong and hurts a lot of farmers because it’s difficult to get the product to market,” he said. “When you finally do, the buyer says, ‘Oh, it’s been three months since the packaging.’ I can’t sell this. So they won’t buy it.”

He continued, “Often times the packaging date is irrelevant because the man driving it from your farm to the retailer stopped and had a hot dog and it was like 120 degrees in the car. These are serious issues that we need to address as an industry. How do you know where your flower is when it leaves your hands? You do not do that.

How to tell if your weed is dead

Here are some signs that your weed has died:

• It smells like hay: “The ‘schwag flag’ is essentially that state we see when all the primary monoterpenes and aromatic compounds are gone and it smells like hay,” said Alec Dixon. While the monoterpenes and aromatic compounds that get you high and taste good go down, terpenes ending in “ol” — like bisabolol and nerolidol — have much higher boiling points. They’re around long after everything else is gone, and tend to taste and smell like hay.
• You bought a pre-roll: Often acting as an overpriced Trojan horse for biomass products like shakes and sticks, pre-rolls are much hated for good reason. A major problem with them is that grinding the bud exposes its entire surface to harmful factors such as heat, light and dryness.
• The weeds are completely brown or brown: “Brown weeds are not necessarily bad if they were originally very purple and have lost some of their green,” Swami Chaitanya said. Chlorophyll oxidizes fairly quickly in the absence of oxygen. Just because weeds are less green doesn’t mean they’re bad. But it’s probably dead when it’s fully tanned or brown and doesn’t smell much.
• Check the harvest date: While we’ve discussed why the dates on the jar can be misleading when the distributor or pharmacy exposes the flower to degrading elements, packaging and harvest dates are still a good way for consumers to protect themselves. That’s not to say you should be wary of weed that’s a few months old, but if your package date is more than a year, claim your money back. Nobody deserves dead weed at full price.

Because customers typically cannot see or smell the bud before purchasing it from legal retailers, consumers often don’t realize the weed is dead until after purchase. Check the appearance, smell, and harvest date of your newly purchased weed to determine if it’s dead or not.