Golden Goat is a strain of marijuana distinguished by a citrus scent and a potent but mellow buzz. “The person who originally created that strain, I knew him personally,” explains Garrett Pearson of Natural Remedies Medical Marijuana Dispensary in Colorado. “There was a recycling plant out in Kansas where the strain is originally from. When the sun hit those empty bottles and the scent of soda and beer mingled, it smelled a certain way, and that’s just what the strain smells like. So he named it Golden Goat after the Golden Goat recycling factory.”Greg Williams, better known as Marijuana Man, told me the story behind another strain. Williams used to sell seeds by mail order, “There was a strain in our catalogue called A-Frame. We always wondered why it was called A-Frame,” he said, in exactly the sort of leisurely drawl you might expect from someone known as Marijuana Man. “We thought maybe it was because the shape of the plant was like an A-shape but it turns out, the seeds originally came from a guy who lived in an A-frame.”
OG Kush, Big Afghan Skunk, AK47, Alien God, Fraggle Rock, Smelly Guy, Blueberry Yum Yum. There’s one named Snoop Dogg too. It’s potent and cerebral. According to online reviews, your brain will feel like it’s hovering over your body.
Linnaean biological classifications divide the genus Cannabis into three species: indica, sativa, and ruderalis. The strain named for DO-double-G is one of many indicas, distinguished from the sativas by its drowsy, fullbody effects. Sativas provide a more energetic high. To speak in reductive binaries, indica is nighttime while sativa is daytime. No one really cares about ruderalis because it has a negligible THC count.
Many of the strains come from crossbreading indicas and sativas to get that perfect high, the best of both worlds, the stoner’s holy grail. (Ruderalis are often cross-bred as well, but only for the plant’s auto-flowering and therefore fast-finishing trait.) S.A.G.E. stands for Sativa Afghani Genetic Equilibrium and was designed to be 50-50 sativa and indica.
At Natural Remedies in Colarado, they cross-bred S.A.G.E. with another strain called Hanis. For no good reason, they call that one Bob Saget. That’s the non-story behind a lot of these strain names. Others are descriptive. Girl Scout Cookies supposedly smells and tastes not like the cookies themselves but the box they come in, a mix of mint and cardboard.
The demand for all these different strains is relatively recent. Once upon a time, pot was pot and you bought what your dealer down the street was selling. But a new breed of cannabis connoisseur has emerged alongside increasingly nuanced legal restrictions. In the Netherlands in the 1970s, coffee shops dispensing marijuana tolerated by the government started cropping up. For the first time, there were dozens of different strains on the menu. Today medical marijuana dispensaries in North America offer a similar range of choices.
Even before growers started crossbreeding there were regional varieties. The term “landrace” refers to a strain of cannabis that was geographically isolated and pollinated itself — it’s the same phenomenon that we refer to as “heirloom” in the world of vegetables. Marijuana Man’s favourite strain is one of these landraces, a rare pure African sativa called Congolese. The landrace indigenous to Jamaica is known as Lambsbread (or sometimes Lamb’s Breath, a mondegreen suggesting the oral history of these names). Whatever you call it, its effects include energy and positive introspection. (...)
At the medical dispensary where Pearson works in Colorado, they have 60 to 80 varieties in their garden and offer about 20 different strains at a time. They always have a mix of sativas and indicas to provide different types of relief to their patients. Pearson sees clients refining their tastes. “There’s lots of nerds out there,” he explains.” It’s like wine.” He adds that a lot of this comes from an increased level of comfort talking about marijuana on the Internet and on the phone. “People don’t use secret code words anymore,” Pearson said.
by Whitney Mallett, TNI | Read more:
Image: Imp Kerr
