So I was feeling an itch to grab a few grams of something that I could smoke with my Happle. Well, that was my excuse anyway. So I went on an errand run with my local cannabis store as my first stop. For those of you who aren’t suburbanites in a big city in a country with legal cannabis, local means that it is one of four shops that are within a 1.5 km drive from my doorstep – and that doesn’t include a brand new indigenous one that I just discovered when I went to Google maps to count the shops for this review. Yes, it is a good time to be a cannabis consumer in Canada. We have gotten over the truly shitty offerings that the legal market threw at us for the first few years. The product quality has improved steadily with some great products popping up from craft growers and product selection has improved dramatically. As the market saturated, the price bottomed out with $80 OZs now available . . . but you get what you pay for . . . although a $99 oz of Pink Kush that I sampled wasn’t terrible. But I don’t buy flower since I grow more than enough. I do sample legal hash however, and it has gone from crappy lightly pressed kief to pressed sift augmented with oil – with widely varying degrees of success – and a few companies are making real old schoolish sift hash. There is also lots of bubble and fresh frozen premium offerings as you move up the price and THC scale. Traditional hash has disappeared. The black market offers products that claim to be imports but nothing I have seen or smoked truly is. They are Canadian-made look-a-likes and – at best – they may use original genetics. There is a growing market in generic or strain-specific hash in the BM (including in the indigenous stores), but with the high prices that I have seen from them, my legal options are actually a better deal. So the times they are a-changing. While I can only really speak about hash, I imagine that the tide will shift on flower as well.
Back to my local store . . . It is in a small rundown strip plaza and the windows are covered – of course. Inside, the display counters are filled with packages because we are not capable of viewing or smelling real product without going crazy. We also cannot sample or consume in a store but we could walk out to the parking lot or sidewalk and legally fire a blunt up. It’s a good thing there aren’t any children out there . . . Yeah, the rules are stupid but give them a decade and I am sure that they can make them worse. Anyways, I asked for a couple of my staple hash buys and the budtender steered me to a new one. He even got his personal sample from the back room for me to smell. WTF? Real service? I guess that’s why I keep coming back . . .
MTL Cannabis - Sage n’ Sour Hash
Genetics: A Sativa dominant hybrid cross from T.H. Seeds. Sour Diesel x S.A.G.E. (Big Sur Holy x Afghani)
Grower/Producer: Abba Medix Corp
Overall Rating: Very good
Smell: smoked lime
Taste: citrus incense
Consistency: Soft black-green texture – not sticky or oily
Duration: long
Potency: Tested @ 48.2% with 0.7% CBD
This is another hash that falls in the budget hash territory. It is Sage n’ Sour kief combined with sage n’ sour rosin to get the consumer-demanded high THC numbers - but it seems to blend well. The smell is very distinct – the main terp is terpinalene which smells like I imagine a double smoked lime would smell like. Sharp, sweetish, funky. A drift from old school tastes but not too far afield to be unnatural or unpleasant. The smoke is the same – a nice sweet thick incense with some rubber. The high is long and a good upward balance of mind and body to keep you moving and motivated. This goes on the rebuy list.
