Craft Cannabis
When shopping cannabis flower and pre-rolls, you might sometimes hear people talking about craft cannabis when looking for high quality strains. But just what is craft cannabis and why is it so actively sought out by long time cannabis smokers? Well, your friendly budtenders are here to provide a little illumination to help you decide if craft cannabis is what you’ve been looking for all this time.
What does craft cannabis even mean?
Think of craft cannabis in the same way that you would think about craft beer: it’s a product that’d been produced in smaller batches, with a lot of care being put into virtually every step of the process. In terms of cannabis specifically, it’s flower that’s been cultivated with care and produced under fairly strict criteria in order to adhere to the craft moniker. For example, virtually all craft cannabis has to be grown indoors to prevent cross pollination and is usually cultivated and trimmed by hand as opposed to using machine-based methods to separate the buds (the good stuff), from the rest of the plant. This mean that those precious and delicious trichomes remain as intact as possible. There are other criteria that a grower has to meet in order to have their flower certified as craft, such as ensuring the batch yield doesn’t exceed a certain level so as to be able to maintain close attention to each individual flowers life cycle and adapt for what it needs. The growing methods used also tend to be more environmentally friendly, with some growers using unique growing mediums or planting their flowers in more eco-friendly materials like coconut husks while avoiding chemical pesticides and relying more on traditional methods to keep their plants healthy. They also eschew the use of radiation on plants, which some growers use to eliminate unwanted organic material that may be on the flower once it’s grown and ready for trimming.
What does that mean for me?
If you’re the kind of person who wants the highest quality cannabis that Ontario is producing at the moment and if you appreciate the natural methods being used to grow these plants, then that means that craft cannabis is right up your alley. We here at Circa 1818 can’t get enough of them. They tend to have a higher concentration of terpenes which, as we’ve discussed in previous posts, result in more pronounced flavours as well as more potent effects.
How will I be able to tell what’s craft and what isn’t?
Learning what growers are considered craft is the best way to be able to identify craft cannabis in the long term, but in the meantime, your budtenders are the best resource you have. Here at Circa 1818, we have all of our craft cannabis marked with a special symbol, a little pot leaf in a yellow background, to indicate that it is classified as craft. These symbols are located in the upper left of our tags so that all of our customers can quickly identify them from other products. Beyond that, simply ask your budtender and they’ll happily guide you towards the craft flowers that dot our shelves.
Go the hankering for some craft brands? Check out some of our favourites like Carmel, Mood Ring and Qwest!
