PUFFCO DROPS NEW PROXY DROPLET

Puffco released the Proxy Droplet today adding to its long line of killer accessories. 

This time around, the Puffco team is dropping an accessory to go with their newest device, the Puffco Proxy. 

One of the cool things about the proxy is the number of custom pieces we’ve seen glassblowers all over the world making for it. The stock version is essentially a dry hash piece with a really advanced atomizer. The Proxy’s tech in development was what the 3D chamber was originally based on. 

But the dry rips weren’t for everyone. Puffco took note and developed a water piece attachment for the Proxy not too long after its initial release. The Bub accessory is a hybrid piece you can use with both the Proxy and dry flower, thanks to a bowl you can replace the proxy with. It’s a bit beefy and doesn’t feel as travel-friendly as some of Puffco’s other stuff. 

The Droplet takes us from the more traditional water pipe shape to a more contemporary hash consumption device. It definitely looks like something you would smoke hash out of in 2023. We haven’t had the chance to hit it yet, but we’ve hit a lot of rigs that fancy bottle shapes. They’re rippers.

Puffco described Droplet as, “A premium percolated water filtration piece for the Puffco Proxy. As effective as it is elegant, the Proxy base inserts into the top of the Droplet to deliver cooler, smoother hits with an unforgettable rumble,” the announcement reads. “Droplet’s beautifully hand-blown borosilicate glass displays an ocean blue drop within a clear, gradient-frosted body. Its fluid design flows seamlessly between form and function, fitting comfortably in your hand and on any surface in your home.”

The Droplet does not come with the proxy base unit — you’ll have to grab one of those separately.

It’s easy to have faith in Puffco’s accessories after years of hits. Just look at the hot knife — lots of folks that don’t even rip electronic dabs still use those. That’s the kind of innovation that transcends their own devices. So when they come up with something new for their own hardware, it’s easy to see why people want to get their hands on it. 

The things Puffco has come up with in the past to complement its devices have always been fun. Be it custom colors on the bases or glass, or having Ryan Fitt engineer a crazy recycler, they’ve always felt proper. 

Now that Puffco has gone a bit more on the beefy side in regards to its first Proxy accessories, we’d like to see a water piece a bit more compact for the Proxy — not that the first two aren’t lovely. 

DIRTY WEED WORDS: COMMERCIAL VIABILITY

Commercial viability may be the phrase that has changed in cannabis the most over the decades for the industry.

During my chat with First Smoke of The Day, which dropped last week, the subject of commercial viability came up. Basically, I said once you got past the lovely people that got screwed by circumstances of licensing or location, there are a lot of people who got eaten up by the times because they wouldn’t change their ways. This received the most positive feedback of anything I said during the hour-and-a-half talk. While I’ve attempted to articulate the idea of people not being able to keep up with the game, it was never with the ethos of how many of the world’s best growers hit me up or tagged me on Instagram over the last week. 

At its core, the attempt to define commercial viability in cannabis has proven a double-edged sword. On the one side, the meaning represents progress in the game. The bar for commercial viability has risen with the progress of the times across every market. This includes recreational and the still massive underground cannabis economy thought to dwarf California’s legal market at least 2 to 1, given the vast swaths of the state without legal access and people everywhere else wanting our weed. The pot has certainly increased in quality on both sides of the market. 

On the other side, not all ships have risen with the tide due to various circumstances. Be it their own stubbornness to not change their ways as advancements in the game had been made, or never actually knowing what the bar was for commercial viability in the first place whenever they jumped ship from whatever industry expecting to carve a piece of the cannabis industry for themselves.

Let us not forget a mere 20 years ago, brick weed stuffed in a tire was commercially viable for American distributors. So imagine you’re a person operating under the protection of 215 in that era. Ninety-nine percent of the domestic marijuana supply is absolute garbage. It’s fair to say you’re a hot cookie at that moment. 

But, as the years rolled on, the bar went up.

Commercial viability got to the point where it didn’t just mean you were talking about the quality or price of the product, but also accessibility and ease of transport. California has a firm grip on illicit domestic cannabis production as the feds’ annual plant eradication counts firmly show. But it’s not the same. In the past, the worst cannabis California has to offer used to get scooped up faster than Olive Garden breadsticks coming out of the oven. 

Now we’ve reached the point where people don’t have to buy California’s worst product anymore. California cultivators aren’t competing with Mexican brick weed anymore. They’re competing with the Oklahomas and the Maines — hell, there are probably even some decent beaster packs from Canada still making it over the border.

A lot of the lost souls in California on the illicit side are those who couldn’t keep up with people growing decent weed in those places where people could drive to pick it up. The best weed in the world is still grown in NorCal, especially on the illicit side of the market. Not being able to grow commercially viable pot in the rec market is one thing, but if you are having trouble on the other side, maybe it’s time to do some soul-searching on your craft. Do those little things you see your neighbors doing that you didn’t want to because you convinced yourself you knew what you were doing. 

The most important thing you can do to survive in this market is to grow the best cannabis possible. People that worry about pinching pennies first are destined to fail. At that point, the quality of the marijuana is the second most important thing to you, and you’ve already lost.

Courtesy of NASA

Hash Holes Go to Mars With Jiko+

Jimi Devine August 18, 2023 Cannabis

Can tech-backed oversupply ruin clout? We’re about to find out with the new Jiko+ Donut Maker designed by a former NASA engineer.

The creators of the Jiko+ are looking to conquer one of the points in the cannabis supply chain people have not been able to automate up to this point. Sure there have been infused preroll machines, but they were never a true donut, or as we call them now, hash hole. The tech attached to those machines was mostly needles attached to a heating element that would shoot the concentrate into each joint evenly as it removed the needle. A lot of the time the material being used in these infused prerolls, both the flower and hash, was between garbage and subpar.

On many occasions, those infused prerolls were simply an attempt to bump the price of their contents by trying to make them sound nicer. These kinds of preroll entities have existed since the early 2010s because, for every more educated connoisseur that knew they were garbage, there were a few part-time puffers that knew they wanted to get “messed up.” Add to that the fact prerolls have continued to grow their market share as a whole in the years since legalization and it’s easy to see why there are some shady folks that remain commercially viable.  

There is an argument to be made that darkness before the light partially helped rocket hash holes into the stratosphere. We were so used to how bad it had gotten with infused prerolls that when we finally started seeing small batch artisan hash holes after Fidel brought the premise back from Barcelona, it was like a hype lightning storm that came out of nowhere. Overnight, the most expensive prerolls in the state were hand-rolled small-batch prerolls filled with exotic rosins and equally high-end flowers. 

Since hash holes came out the gate so strong, it was easy to see who was skimping on quality. To this point, they’ve remained a daily boutique thing. 

When I asked Fidel what he thought of something like the Jiko+, he simply replied wondering why someone would need to roll 800 hash holes in an hour. What will the top-shelf preroll market turn into?

Or, will the hardware truly even be able to compare to Calirofnia’s best rollers? You could even say the hash hole hype helped breathe this new generation of famous rollers that took off after the pandemic. The Brunos, the CGOs, and others who have conquered the space, are turning into legit cannabis celebrities and influencers around the world. When I was at Hash Hole Island earlier this week up north outside Sacramento, I met people from Texas and New York that just flew in to smoke hash holes. The last time I was in Africa, I saw Bruno’s star power firsthand as some of the local hitters were simply giddy to see him. Can a machine recreate this kind of culture?

I don’t know. But once you get past the philosophical questions about maintaining the boutique aspect of hash holes, the Jiko+ is admittedly pretty dope. It accommodates various joint and blunt sizes that range from one to three grams. The amount of hash inside of each range from .2 to a full gram. 

“Up until now, crafting these intricate, infused prerolls by hand required labor-intensive processes that lacked scalability, consistency and dependability. We’re proud to have developed the technology and equipment that both brands and consumers will appreciate and enjoy,” says Nohtal Partansky, co-founder and CEO of Sorting Robotics.

Partansky is a former engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. While there, he worked on the MOXIE project. That instrument is currently on the surface of Mars producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. That kind of hardware is obviously critical for any future exploration of the red planet. 

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ZUSHI CONTINUES TO DOMINATE

In a market where truly exceptional cannabis is a rarity, The Ten Co.’s combination of premium quality, remarkable branding and Zushi remains unrivaled.

Our last conversation with The Ten Co. came on the heels of their monumental success in 2021, when they claimed top honors at the inaugural Zalympix event. The competition scene reached new heights after Greenwolf, Los Angeles’ premier heat retailer, stormed out the gates with their top-shelf box contest.

Now, two years later, Zushi has once again emerged victorious. During its initial triumph, some skeptics attributed the win to mere hype. Yet, the myth and allure surrounding Zushi were proven to be well-deserved, evident in the four-hour-long queue that formed at their booth during the recent Zalympix ceremony. However, the mystique surrounding Zushi was even more pronounced two years ago, causing people to fall into various camps of belief. Some staunchly reaffirmed their faith in Zushi after the W, while others criticized the influence of hype. There were also those who may not have personally favored Zushi but acknowledged why it emerged as the winner.

This time, subjectivity was eliminated through blind entries. Zushi had to withstand the scrutiny of over 120 entries just to secure a place in the finals. Once there, it faced fierce competition within the most challenging Zalympix box to date, alongside a plethora of exceptional Z terpenes, as we previously highlighted when reviewing the entries. Undoubtedly, this victory was well-deserved.

We reached out to Staks, the founder of The Ten Co., to inquire if he ever felt concerned about the abundance of exceptional Zkittelz flavors in this year’s competition.

“Absolutely. Z has held the championship title for quite some time now. There were numerous entries that were just as impressive as mine, which was fantastic to witness. It’s about time the industry started emphasizing light green cannabis again,” Staks candidly shared with L.A. Weekly.

Staks acknowledged that the game has significantly evolved since the first Zalympix. He believes that people are actively searching for new and unique offerings that can compete, hence the outstanding quality of this year’s entries. However, until proven otherwise, Zushi remains the reigning king. Staks appreciates the competitive environment within which The Ten Co. operates, considering it beneficial for their business.

Now, the focus is on delivering the hype directly to consumers.

“We are currently directing more attention towards the direct-to-consumer approach,” Staks revealed. “We previously launched but decided to take a step back and now we’re in the process of building up our online delivery capabilities.”

The direct-to-consumer format will enable Zushi to reach consumers as quickly as possible. Given the premium price that people are willing to pay for this product, Staks wants to ensure that the experience is preserved for every individual fortunate enough to acquire one of their bags.

“We have a specified timeframe during which our products can remain on the shelves. If it exceeds this four-week period, or even three weeks, it is promptly removed, making room for a fresh batch. This way, we can maintain stringent quality control,” Staks explained.

While Zushi continues to steal the spotlight, The Ten Co. currently boasts around ten strains in rotation. Additionally, Staks recently cultivated a variety of seeds he acquired from Europe, embarking on a search for the exceptional flavors of his youth, such as Cheese and Sour Diesel. In the coming month, he will undertake a meticulous selection process to identify standout winners worthy of joining their award-winning catalog.

We asked Staks if, when participating in a contest like Zalympix, he meticulously examines every batch or simply puts all his chips down on Zushi.

“I felt compelled to carry on the Zushi legacy for as long as possible. Personally, I believe this strain has so much to offer, and it continues to exceed our expectations,” Staks explained. “We conduct numerous tests with Zushi, and she never fails to impress us. With each batch, we aim for better quality and more pronounced flavors. Our use of live-soil facilities contributes to preserving those unique characteristics. Our plan is to explore different mediums and light spectrums to ascertain what Zushi prefers to express.”

Naturally, we couldn’t overlook the recent Zushi rosin craze. Two-gram jars of their limited release in collaboration with West Coast Alchemy were fetching a staggering $1000 each. This price tag represents the highest ever seen for rosin, yet demand remained strong. The remarkable hype surrounding Zushi flowers seamlessly transferred to their terpene-rich products.

Regarding the price, Staks clarified, “The price point was determined by the market; it had nothing to do with us. The exclusivity and rarity of our collaboration with West Coast Alchemy played a significant role. We never produced these in large quantities; a few batches were exclusively reserved for family and friends.”

Keep a close eye on The Ten Co.’s website for upcoming flower releases and merchandise drops.

Every year there is even cooler stuff available for cannabis consumers on 4/20. 

It will be no different in 2023. There is a wide array of new products and strains sure to take our breath away in the coming months. Here are our must-have products for 4/20/23 next week: 

Puffco Wizard

Courtesy of Puffco

While the Gandalf-style pipe is nothing new, Starfish Designs was famous for pumping them out back in the day, in the past, glass versions have generally been designed for flower. With Puffco’s new Wizard attachment to complement the Proxy, you’ll now be able to smoke hash Gandalf, too. While it looks cool, some people find that little bit of extra space compared to the stock Proxy attachment rips a little bit smoother. The Wizard is $99.99,

Talking Terps Clothing

Courtesy of Talking Terps

Few artists have been able to get the cannabis scene as excited at the concept of high-end art as Talking Terps. Their knack for limited editions and luxury now sees their products gracing the offices and homes of some of the coolest folks in the cannabis space. Some recent hits include the Terp Fetti sweatpants. They look like one of those delicious vanilla confetti cakes but are super comfy to match. We haven’t tried them out yet, but the new footholders they’re about to drop look pretty sick, too.  

Globmops Slurper Cleaner

Globmops are nothing new, the company has long been one of the two main titans of cleaning your quartz after a dab with a lab-grade cotton swab that’s spun a lot tighter than a Q-tip, so you don’t have to worry about it breaking up and leaving behind anything on your quartz banger. But now, Glopmops has a Slurper Cleaner design perfect for Terp Slurpers. They’re kind of a hassle to clean with the standard Globmops so a lot of people would dunk them in iso after every dab; this will make it a bit quicker. 

Wizard Trees Seeds

Courtesy of Wizard Trees

Wizard Trees is one of the most celebrated cannabis farms in California in recent years. While they had traditionally been known for making excellent selections in pheno hunts and then producing great flower, they’re now making an even deeper jump into genetics with their first seed drop ever. It was initially timed with the Spannabis festivities. The drop is available at WizardTreesGenetics.com and there are a lot of RS-11 crosses on the list that are easy to get hyped about. 

Free Seed Day

With the timing of this year’s 4/20 issue, we’re thrilled to be able to let you know you can get out to Free Seed Day this Saturday, May 15, at Masonic’s on Fairfax. The day is a celebration of all things Los Angeles cannabis genetics. We dove into its three-year evolution with Masonic Smoker last week. As the name entails, there will be plenty of free seeds to go around with bags ready for the first 1,000 people that come out. But even if they run out of the official bags, you can expect to not leave empty-handed if you really love seeds. 

Oni Flowers

Courtesy of One

The long-awaited first drop of flowers from the legendary Oni Seed Co hit California dispensary shelves in recent months. So far the flower is holding up, as more people around the state get access. The phenos were selected from a big pheno hunt, when you pop a lot of seeds, of Oni’s storied genetics collection. Two of our favorites so far have been the Zahiti Rainbow and Purple Something, the latter helping fill a bit of the purple void in the marketplace at the moment. 

Brothers Broadleaf

Florida-based Brothers Broadleaf has exploded onto the blunt scene over the past couple of years. We were originally put on to them by Adam Ill at Kushstock a few years ago. In the time since it was like watching a snowball roll down the hill with all of their varieties becoming a massive hit. Even the discount Dudz line made up of imperfect leaves is considered among the top of the game. You can use discount code “JimiD15” to get 15% off on Dudz. 

Preferred Gardens

As we highlighted in our explanation about what makes mixed-light cannabis awesome earlier this year, Preferred Gardens is among the most respected names in all of cannabis cultivation. This can be said for both indoor and mixed-light greenhouse operations. They’ve now taken the act on to Florida with more states on deck, but fear not, the weed here at home is still heat. It feels like it’s been a couple of years since we’ve seen something competitive with Preferred in that $35 an-eighth price bracket. 

L.A. Family Farms

L.A. Family Farms winning The Transbay Challenge

Known for both the quality of their flowers and concentrates, L.A. Family Farms continues to shine locally. The Rainbow Belts rosin the farm won Transbay with was some of our favorite hash of 2022 for sure. In addition to all the great product, L.A. Family Farms’ logo is a common sight at cool events around town, its team in attendance, or sponsoring stuff based in the more authentic wing of the Los Angeles cannabis industry. 

Doja Pak Coffin Candy

Doja Pak continues to revolutionize the way Los Angeles looks at Thursday night, as the strain premiers continue to be a massive hit with L.A.’s headiest. Their latest big new strain is a doozie. Coffin Candy is technically (Runtz x (Z x (Gelato 33 x 18 Coffins)). With Doja going all in on supporting the new flavor, we have high school expectations, given their epic run of curating hitters over the last few years. 

Runtz Wraps

Already Runtz up your life? No worries gang, now you can Runtz up your blunts, too. Runts’ new line of Dominican leaves for rolling blunts is awesome. First off, you get six in a pack. For most five packs of blunts, I end up tossing one. Since you never have to toss out the loose leaves, it basically works out to two free blunts in every pack. They are also very stretchy compared to most blunts and forgiving. 

ICEEXTRACT: THE HASH HARDWARE KING

There are few people on the planet that love hash as much as Ashley Gaetrig, co-founder of one of the top hardware companies in solventless hash, IceExtract.

I’ve had the pleasure of judging solventless at The Emerald Cup with Gaetrig for the last couple of years. It’s easy to presume she brings the same focus levels to all her work as she does judging the world’s best hash.

Much of the time over the years she made the hash she was smoking alongside her husband Eric. She emphasized it’s a shared journey. The affection for hash she shares with him proved a major catalyst for where their lives ended up. 

The pair started growing in Michigan for personal use 20 years ago. Eventually, the medical laws passed and they decided to take it to the next level as caregivers.

“Then we got some patients and we were growing the weed for them and basically charging them really cheap prices, $100 an ounce,” Ashley told L.A. Weekly. “That was on top of what we gave to them for free. And then they were buying the crap out of it. And then we realize that, like, oh, this is like crazy. So I started growing larger amounts to supply the dispensaries.”

Eventually, the pair would go on a trip to Amsterdam. While they were there, they tried the Sublimator Vaporizer.

“What it did was destroy our taste for flowers,” Eric said. “Because when we came home from Amsterdam, we started rolling joints again and it just tasted like we were smoking ashtrays. So then we started extracting our trim so that we could smoke hash.”

From there they attempted to research as much as they could in 2013. They started to learn more about how to dry the hash.

Some hash made by Ashley and Eric.

They started microplaning the hash onto parchment paper and drying it in the fridge. Microplaning is just breaking down the hash into a thin sandy looking layer that will release the moisture more efficiently and evenly in the early stages of drying it out, as opposed to the big chunks you get in spoonfuls out of the bag. 

“And we found out that was one of the best ways you can make hash. We fell in love. We haven’t gone back,” Eric said. “We haven’t smoked flower since then. We’ve been strictly nonsolvent hash smokers for 10 years.”

In 2015 the pair would head to L.A. for the cannabis cup and enter, despite living in Michigan. They got to L.A., but the package was yet to arrive. The pair started to freak out a little bit. Eventually, it did arrive. The pair would unknowingly jump in the car to their future home Marietta, where ICEExtract is now based from.

When it was time for the awards show, they ended up winning the SoCal cup that year. Development on the bags started immediately. 

“And then after that, we started making bags basically. My first sale was in 2015 to 3rd Gen at the High Times Cannabis Cup in Michigan in Flint. He bought a set of 20-gallon 8-bag kits,” Ashley said.

In preparation for their next cup, the entry was caught in the shipment to Denver. They would end up getting raided a couple of weeks later. They’d already started looking at bag material samples earlier that winter after the L.A win. This forced them to put their foot on the gas with the bags. They sold their cars and put their life savings into the company, financing one car so they could drive to and from the manufacturing facility.

They would spend two and a half years in Michigan getting the ball rolling on ICEExtract and finishing probation. Eventually, they made the move to The San Francisco Bay area. That was when they made the jump into producing larger commercial-grade extraction equipment and not just bags.

After the CA move came the big hardware used to was the trichomes from plant material into the bags.

“We were sentenced to two years probation. But since we were good boys and girls, we got off early,” Ashley said. “It’s so funny because like a month before we got off, we weren’t even supposed to leave the state without permission for business release right? And we went to Chalice for the last one. I was there and like, literally took a dab and basically almost had a panic attack because I thought like I was gonna get caught.”

The pair noted that toward the end of probation, they knew they had made it when Cookies cofounder Jigga hit them up for some lessons on doing proper extractions. The lessons went great; they said they weren’t sure who was more nervous, them about the meeting or Jigga because he’d never made hash. It was another example of just how welcoming California was to the then-Michigan company. 

Things certainly worked out. But it wasn’t some dice roll, it was effort- and perseverance-based.

We asked the pair what it’s like to see the risks they took before coming to California work out for the best? Ashley quickly replied it was amazing, the way things played out reminds her of all those speeches her mother gave her in her youth about being able to do whatever you want in life if you apply yourself and work hard.

“And that’s essentially like what Eric and I did, every hurdle that gets in our way, we keep pushing it down and keep moving forward and trying to push the envelope for machinery and equipment,” Ashley said. “That is essentially why we wanted to start making the bags. Because like, we wanted better equipment.”

The little tweaks included making the bags a little shorter so they didn’t sit on the hash. That gives it the best shot to be as pristine as possible. They also made the bags a bit more durable than they were seeing in the marketplace. 

Ashley emphasized they just paid attention to detail.

“How can we do this and make these the shit, basically,” she laughed. “When we make and manufacture the equipment. Our goal is to make the best quality out there and it will never change as long as you know, we’re here at the forefront of ICEExract.”

Eric went on to note even with all the success, it was hard to not be a caregiver anymore. They were giving out a lot and it helped many sick people. Having that right taken away from him was one of the hardest things for him to adjust to through the whole process.

“I had to explain to him now instead of us helping just 12 patients and the people that buy our stuff at the dispensary now are helping the whole world like make clean our product and essentially we’re helping more people,” Ashley said. “So at the end of the day, he’s looked at it as being a win whether or not we were directly interacting with patients or not.”

The world of solventless hash is a much wilder monster than it was in 2015. These days, solventless reigns king. They’ve seen the growth as a whirlwind. It was almost like ICEExtract grew with the changing of the times as Ashley sees it.

With the rise of solventless came the fall of BHO. Even world champs say there is no month in it for them anymore. We asked the pair if they ever expected Butane Hash Oil to fall off this far, especially given there are some terpene profiles that just won’t produce through solventless extraction.

“I bet for sure, 100%,” Ashley replied. “Even though a lot of people in the beginning or a lot of the BHO people are like, oh the yields aren’t there. But the health craze is already coming into effect. Where people are more health conscious and stuff, especially here in California and not as much in Michigan. But I think that’s why respect for hash is a little bit greater out here, too.”