6 Tips on How to Recognize Quality Medicinal Cannabis

  • In the following article, you will learn a few tips on how to recognize and select the right medical cannabis for you when choosing an already prepared product ready for consumption.
  • The tips in this article come from professional staff at a medical cannabis dispensary in Washington state, where cannabis is already legal for medical and recreational purposes.

"As a budtender (a combination of the English word 'bud', meaning cannabis flower, and 'bartender'), I'm responsible for helping you choose a cannabis strain based on your current needs and preferences. You can imagine me as a sommelier (without a uniform) who helps you select a cannabis strain exactly to your specifications.

As a budtender, I try to sample as many products as possible and thoroughly know the entire range of strains and brands in my store. Because of this, I've developed my own cannabis tasting technique, which I use both to determine product quality and find the right strain for myself personally.

1. Taste with a Clear Head

This advice might seem trivial to some, but that's why it's even more important to mention – to truly understand a strain's characteristics, sobriety and overall mental freshness are necessary. Personally, I incorporate testing new products into my daily "ritual" after returning from work or test fresh in the morning on free days.

Testing new products and strains with a clear head is absolutely fundamental if you want to explore all properties and effects with some accuracy.

2. Use a Clean Pipe

Taste is possibly just as important for medical cannabis as its effect (taste directly influences effect through terpenes), so using clean "equipment" is equally important. As an absolute minimum, you should have clean water in a bong or extract pipe. If my tool is clean and the first draw doesn't taste good, I know it's the product's quality and not my pipe.

cannabis quality

3. Observe How the Strain Affects Your Lungs

It's generally known that medical cannabis can make most of us cough with larger draws. However, if you find that a particular strain chokes you while inhaling, you need to pause. Sure, there are those who believe that "to get high, you must cough", but remember there's a difference between coughing and choking.

I consider a quality medical cannabis model to be one that is overall mild on the lungs even with larger draws and doesn't leave me writhing in a coughing fit for several minutes.

4. Try the Effect of Just One Hit

Instead of smoking an entire pipe or joint at once, try how just one quality hit affects you. I've really come to love this method because it helps me understand the true strength and duration of a strain. Personally, I consider a quality medical cannabis strain to be one where I feel the effect of a single hit for more than half an hour.

5. Watch the Ash Color

Cannabis flowers that have been thoroughly flushed before harvesting, freed from residual salts, and properly cured in airtight containers are ultimately stripped of chlorophyll and moisture, making them a much smoother and tastier product. Such cannabis can be recognized, among other things, by the remaining ash, which should be white-gray. If the remaining ash is black, the cannabis was not properly stripped of residual nutrients.

6. Trust Your Intuition

This tip is the last and, in my opinion, absolutely the most important. Every strain will affect each person slightly differently because we each have a slightly different endocannabinoid system. While all these tips will help you choose quality cannabis, the absolutely most important thing is your personal instinct."

Author: Randi Wooten

Translation: Filip Maral

Sources: leafly.com

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