THE SPANNABIS 2023 TRAVEL DIARY Spannabis 2023 once again proved to be a can’t-miss international event, as cannabis access levels continue to rise around the world. It was fair to say, this year proved Spannabis had exited the pandemic slump in its 19th edition. It certainly felt a lot more crowded than last year, as…
THE SPANNABIS 2023 TRAVEL DIARY
Spannabis 2023 once again proved to be a can’t-miss international event, as cannabis access levels continue to rise around the world.
It was fair to say, this year proved Spannabis had exited the pandemic slump in its 19th edition. It certainly felt a lot more crowded than last year, as visitors interacted with the 280 exhibitors, 500 companies and nearly 5,000 cannabis industry professionals at the show. Prior to the pandemic, attendance numbers had been as high as 35,000.
It’s important to note all the things that happen in the orbit of Spannabis. While the main show over the weekend is massive, there are a lot of big annual events taking place throughout the week also drawing tons of attention. A lot of that attention goes to hash. The week of Spannabis is essentially home to the biggest flower and hash contests in the world outside of America. The week also features Spain’s largest business conference, the Barcelona edition of The International Cannabis Business Conference.
As for the contests, they offer a few different formats. The weekend of Spannabis is dotted with awards shows starting on Wednesday with Ego Clash, all the way through to The Secret Session’s Sunday contest announcement. Other contests throughout the week included Masters of Rosin and the Spanish Champions Cup hosted by Spannabis. A win in any of those contests is one of the biggest things you can do in cannabis.
The Ego Clash originally was founded in California and made its way to Spain in the late 2010s. After its founding by Brandon Parker of 3rd Gen Family, one of the most award-winning farms in cannabis, The Ego Clash quickly vaulted itself to the top of the mountain in a world flooded with cannabis events.
This year’s Barcelona Ego Clash may be the most surprising yet. While many big-name Americans would make the trip, Bask Family Farms took home the top prize in flower. BTY Terplandia was the highest-scoring American flower in second, and the stacked trophy shelf over at Growers with Attitude would round out the podium.
Ego Clash Flower Judging
But many consider the hash the star of the show at The Ego Clash. Top honors in the hash category went to Ogre Farms. A Half-American team placed second in this category, too, with The Emerald Cup’s personal-use winner Wooksauce Winery. Dochazed came in third place.
The top prize in rosin went to Have Hash. This was their second time winning The Ego Clash and they would place third later in the week at Masters of Rosin.
Things started to feel a lot more European after The Ego Clash ended on Wednesday. Partly because a lot of Europeans get there on Thursday for Spannabis setup while Americans making the trip tend to spend closer to a week or longer.
A packed Friday at Spannabis.
Friday would prove to be mobbed. One of the things about events like Spannabis that feature seed companies is the best gear goes early. People will take the day off work to get there early in hopes of buying a pack of seeds that holds their Golden Ticket.
This year felt like it featured more American seed drops than ever. Many of them were people we traditionally think of for their quality of production and not breeding. The list of American seed drops includes Los Angeles top-shelf regulars like The Terp Hogz, Wizard Trees, Cali-X, and Doja, on top of the traditional breeders you would expect to see in Spain.
Friday also would feel like the most business-heavy day. Many people were searching out those conversations they needed to have with their industry peers before the weekend was in full gear.
Among the craziest business things we saw was Athena’s mobile tissue culture system. Farmers will be able to do in the middle of a field what they once needed a lab for. It won’t clean your genetics like meristem work in a lab will, but it will certainly make preserving genetics that much more accessible.
Saturday and Sunday felt very similar. They were both packed-to-the-wall celebrations of cannabis. Saturday certainly seemed the most crowded of the three days.
It’s a safe bet as more and more countries continue to reform their marijuana laws, the 20th edition of Spannabis next year will be simply massive.
The Legendary cultivators are prepping for their first Illinois drop and gave an update on their return to California
Few things have been more devastating to the California top-shelf cannabis smoker in recent years than the night IC Collective burned down in July of 2021. We caught up with founder Ben Brown as he prepares to enter the Illinois market and return home when possible.
Backboned by Brown’s links to the Chem Fam, the network of famous OG growers that ran the Chemdog strain found by Greg Krzanowski in Massachusetts over a quarter century ago, IC Collective was famous for having the gas. Over the years, Brown collected a variety of killer flavors he would pair with the Chem and each other. The results would start filling their trophy shelves in 2013 and lead to their famous mantra, “We run on fuel.”
In a world of dessert weeds and new equatorial concoctions that breeders pray may end up the next cookies or Z, most still associate the most potent marijuana in the world with that petrol or fuel smell that much of IC Collective’s catalog possessed in spades. And even the things that weren’t fuelly smelling were notable representations of whatever they were. I stand by the statement the best Zkittelz I ever saw that wasn’t grown in Mendocino was grown by Brown.
Despite the large volume of cannabis being grown in California, there are only a dozen or so cultivators that can compare to IC Collective. Hence, even with all that other weed, the void they left behind was massive. Especially given how few other people in that dozen actually specialize in fuel.
But things are looking up. After a massive 1800-seed pheno hunt of gear Brown has been working on or hoarding for a decade, they are ready to send their first product to retailers in over two years. In the end, it looks like there will be about a 26-month gap in production.
“I think our last delivery was July 2? Or July 1 2021. And then we burned down on the fourth. Two years dude,” Brown told L.A. Weekly. “The only thing I say that at that building was some mom plants.”
Thankfully the 12 strains he was able to rescue were some of his bangers. But not all made it, the Ziablo that was winning a lot of stuff was among the fallen. But Brown pressed on with what he was able to save until he finally got his Illinois rooms going.
IC Collective got the permit for Illinois a week after the fire in Oakland. Needless to say, the week between was one of the more stressful of Brown’s cannabis career. As the pound price has crashed in California, we asked if he ever considered throwing in the towel in The Golden State, despite the presumption it’ll eventually be the production capital for the global connoisseur class of smokers that buy top-shelf products from people like Brown.
He emphasized he’s plenty familiar with the challenges of California. But he’s one of the people that grows fire that’s good enough to deal with those headaches.
“We did the same amount of money every year because we didn’t have the funds to build outright,” Brown said. “So I know that challenges in California, like how expensive it was. Even though we were successful, we really didn’t make any money or be able to progress our situation. So I was constantly trying to get better. Get my situation better in California. So that’s how I got to Illinois.”
When the firefighters let Brown rescue his plants the next day, he was but one of over 400 applicants hoping to cultivate in Illinois. He didn’t know how the next week would play out.
“And so that was like a long shot, and then I had already been trying to get a bigger building in California. And on the 15th, we won the license. So July 15, 2021, 10 days later, we won the license in Illinois, and then later that night, I got approved for my conditional use permit for another town in California,” Brown said.
Coming Home
That town was West Sacramento. He just needs time and revenue to get back to doing it properly in California. Come early October, he’ll have both.
“I have the building, I have two licenses for distro and manufacturing. I have building permits. I have half of the equipment. Like it’s a real thing,” Brown said, “It’s just you ask the question like you, you watch this, the 2021 market, and yeah, I’m scared and I think we can do it right.”
Brown said anyone who can make it in California can make it anywhere since they’re basically selling bottled water next to a waterfall and still surviving.
“But yeah, it’s hella scary to come back to work here,” Brown said. “And before it was just all me, everything I work for I dumped in, and now I have supporters and like if a fear of disappointing other people, you know, or like failing is the ultimate fear for me. So we are slow rolling California, but I mean, I was just on the phone with the municipality the other day telling them that we’re still in the game.”
When asked if he expected to have the gassiest weed in Illinois come September, Brown replied, “1,000%.”
As 2022 comes to a close, we again look back at one of the most brutal years ever on both sides of the cannabis marketplace in California.
And I assure you, that is no exaggeration. On the recreational side, more and more farms went under or simply chose not to plant a crop this year. And those are the moms and pops feeling it — not those with cash reserves to burn while they wait for more shelf space to open up across the state and beyond its borders in the not-too-distant future.
But those without a permit had plenty to gripe on as well. At one point during the harvest, you could get machine-trimmed pounds for $50 a pop. This stuff would have been worth $1,200 to $1,500 a decade ago. It’s not the heat by any means, but it’s still shocking. The underground market is also prepping the transition of enforcement next year from the CAMP program to rebranded EPIC program. The big difference? Private parcels will face much more scrutiny in 2023 compared to CAMP’s targeting of public lands much of the time. A lot of people really needed a good one this year because of this. Despite the perfect conditions, they faced a flooded bottom-dollar market come harvest.
Things We’re Leaving Behind in 2022
Nepotism-Based Shelf Space
As the cannabis industry continues to do circles around the eye of the storm with people falling off the ship left and right, now is not the time to play favorites for shitty reasons. The main determining factor that should go through your head before you stock an item is whether it’s the best you can do for whatever tax bracket you are trying to serve with the said item. That’s regardless of whether you’re talking discount eighths or the mountaintop, purchase from the same ethos. Screw the free doughnuts; never buy cannabis products because someone brought free doughnuts — you’re going to have a bad time.
Getting Shot Over Big Piles of Money
As we exit 2022, the cannabis banking situation still hasn’t been figured out. It looked like it had a chance a couple of weeks back, but it fell short without the support or at least ambivalence of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The industry currently finds itself in two camps at the moment. The first is those that wanted bank accounts yesterday for their own personal safety and that of their staff. The second is those who want it as a bargaining chip to protect social equity in the national legalization debate to come. Both are great takes. Hopefully, it happens soon for the sake of nobody getting murdered over weed money. But given what happened in the Senate, we’re probably not all going to make it alive, so be careful.
Overproduction
There are few things that can devastate the market price of a commodity quite like overproduction. It’s a huge factor on both sides of the marketplace. On the recreational side, it has created a race to the bottom. The “top shelf” just under the true exotics is getting cheaper and cheaper, as people edged each other out 50 cents at a time to get us to this current bummer. On the illicit side, a ton of that oversupply on the recreational side finds its way to the streets. And it doesn’t have a home as it did in the past. That part is thanks to how many places have become less sketchy to grow. Why fly a box in from California when you can drive home from Maine or Oklahoma? Overproduction is the biggest factor in those $50 pounds we mentioned earlier, too.
New York’s first recreational marijuana dispensary sold $12 million in sales in the first six months of operations.
When announcing the figures this week, Housing Works Cannabis Co boasted the store has already directed millions of dollars to some of the city’s communities in the most urgent need of support. Sales are directly supporting programs that provide New Yorkers a variety of services. Housing Works noted those services include health care, housing, job training, harm reduction, case management, advocacy for health equity and social justice initiatives, LGBTQ+ youth programs, and sexual health services.
The shop’s manager noted these kinds of services were a keystone of what Housing Works does long before cannabis permits were a thing.
“Our goal, going back over 30 years ago through Housing Works, has been to empower New Yorkers through advocacy and bridge communities to life saving services,” said Sasha Nutgent, retail manager at Housing Works Cannabis Co. “From the resources we’ve rolled out, to the brands we carefully select for our customers, everything we do here has a greater purpose, and we’re humbled to see the support our mission is receiving.”
Things Started Strong
As expected, New York’s first recreational dispensary was a madhouse when it opened a couple of days before the new year. Housing Works notes the shop did an estimated $40,000 dollars in sales in just its first three hours open. Over the course of the next month, the numbers would get up to $1.6 million with sales continuing to roll on to hit that $12 million mark at the tail end of July.
What are New Yorkers buying?
According to Housing Works’ data from the last six months, New Yorkers are buying for strength. The biggest determining factor in purchases so far is potency. Some would argue that means consumers are uneducated, but that’s not necessarily the case. There is certainly some balance between potency and quality even if the weed with the highest THC number isn’t the best one on the shelf. People that try and disenfranchise the importance of potency in cannabis may be trying to cover for inferior products that don’t get the numbers needed to be commercially viable in this market. In a fun surprise, Housing Works noted that people are leaning towards sativas and sativa-leaning hybrids. Once there is a bigger data pool in New York, it will lean toward gas and dessert weed for sure, with the exception of great diesel.
Stocking The Shelves
While sales have been great, getting the product to stock the shelves and drive those numbers has not always been an easy task for Housing Works.
“One unforeseen challenge and a pain point for both retailers and customers has been product rollout,” said Nutgent. “There have been major improvements with the state’s product testing timeline, for example, but the feedback we still hear from some Black-owned brands is that there is not enough funding to get their products into the market.”
In recent months the dispensary has added over 200 new products.
Delivery
Make no mistake about it, cannabis delivery has been an extremely popular thing in NYC for decades, with various services coming and going over those years. Housing Works has lucked out in becoming the first legal delivery service in the state in addition to its retail site. The company noted this falls right in line with its quest to be accessible.
“We’ve seen our delivery programs over the years forge meaningful and trusting relationships between our staff and thrift store patrons,” said Charles King, CEO of Housing Works. “To see the same positive dynamic emerge between customers and budtenders reflects our roots in the city, our deep understanding of New York City culture and the community trust we continue to nurture.”
Right now the delivery service is available in select zip codes in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens; anyone over the age of 21 with a valid ID can secure same-day and next-day delivery slots directly on Housing Works Cannabis Co’s website.
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.
Purple weed was already a thing when Ken Estes got his hands on Grand Daddy Purple in Mendocino County and brought it back to his grows in the bay area, but that journey south really put the winds in its sails.
We ran into Estes during our recent travels to cover Spannabis and the wider Barcelona club scene. He noted he had spent much of the last decade dealing with his health — this is what originally forced him to take his foot off the gas back in the mid-2010s. But his impact to this day is undeniable. We’d catch back up in California to talk purple a few weeks later.
While not as prominent in the era of 40 new exotic flavors a month, GDP, as Grand Daddy Purple would be known to many, still dots menus up and down California. Prior to the rise of dessert weeds following Cookies hitting the scene, GDP was where people went for a combination of flavor and impact. Even Cookies’ most famous sibling Cherry Pie was the Durban F1 used to make cookies paired to GDP.
But before all that came to be, GDP was the last stop for those looking for high-impact cannabis that wasn’t OG Kush. Some would also argue the purple was a bit more couchlock-heavy than the OG Kush of the time. And while Ken Estes certainly didn’t invent purple weed, he changed the demand level, all while living through the dark ages of cannabis.
And he was loud. Few pushed the limits like Estes. During an event in 2010, he opened a dispensary 20 yards from the steps of Oakland city hall. When he wasn’t executing his business plans, he was hitting city council meetings, eventually opening one of America’s first chains of dispensaries with his Grand Daddy Purple Collective shops in NorCal. His being so “out there” during that era led to frustrations for both his peers and city officials, but folks certainly had a knack for following Ken into town.
Estes’s path to cannabis would start after a motorcycle accident at age 18 in the 1970s paralyzed him from the neck down. Prior to the accident, Estes had been playing soccer at an elite level in California. Pele, in town with the New York Cosmos at the time, gave him a call of support from the hospital’s lobby so he wouldn’t have to fight the crowd there to support Estes in the days following his injury.
Six months into his rehabilitation, he experienced cannabis for the first time with a group of Vietnam veterans who were in the same care facility. This began his lifelong connection to medical cannabis.
“I was a young kid. I was 18. My first personal experience with weed was pretty strong. But I went back to my room and I slept all night. It was the first night in six months I slept all night,” Estes told L.A. Weekly.
He recalls how common the idea of marijuana being medicine was. All the nurses and doctors knew. And he certainly knew it was medicine from his first experience. After that first joint, Estes would end up having eyes on the scene for the next 45 years.
“I’m shocked and surprised where this movement went,” Estes said. “I thought we were just in California getting it for patients. When I started, it was the gay world that came from fighting for gay rights to we have people dying in San Francisco of AIDS. Why can’t they use marijuana? And then Brownie Mary got arrested and that changed the game.”
Mary Jane Rathbun was a San Francisco General Hospital volunteer. She eventually became famous for baking hundreds of brownies a day as the AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco hard. Between 1981 and 1992, she was arrested three times for her famous brownies, but her activism helped push Prop 215 across the finish line. Now, Brownie Mary Day is Aug. 25, in San Francisco.
But we quickly turned back to that first rotation in Vallejo. Since he was still fully paralyzed, the orderly had to hold the joint to his lips for him. But over the next few years, he would work to the point that allowed him to gain some independence.
“It really took me years of intense exercise, but I was an athlete. It was three years, four years, before I really started being able to transfer onto my bed. I could transfer (to) the floor, put my knees together, leaned forward over my legs to transfer back to my chair,” Estes said of his rehabilitation.
That moment he was able to transfer on his own signaled to him he would be capable of living on his own. Marijuana was already his lifestyle well before that day. He was still fully paralyzed the first time his friends took him up to Arcata in Humboldt County.
“I found the Skunk. I found Thai Stick. I found people with Columbian Gold and Panama Red,” Estes said of that first trip at age 19. “I found marijuana so awesome that I wanted the good stuff.”
He’d run into brick weed. The compressed nugs were far from medicine and he knew it. It further motivated him to search for the best options. That first trip north arose from a friend telling him he knew a guy with sensimilla.
“I said, what is sensimilla?” Estes noted with a laugh. “It’s a seedless weed? And it’s green, lime green? Let’s go there.”
The locals hooked him up, given his medical situation. He scored his first pounds of sensimilla for $100 bucks. That would be about $460 today.
As for the traditionally tight community up north, especially during the early era of enforcement, “My disability broke me in. People were very compassionate and they understood medicine,” Estes said.
Estes noted his original host in Humboldt understood the benefits of medical cannabis all too well having recently lost his father to cancer at the time.
“He lost his dad. His dad had cancer. He got help from cannabis. They think it dragged his life another two years, but he swears he was happier. He saw other people who were on pharmaceuticals dying. They were miserable, moaning, and his dad (had) weed on the way out. He really is a compassionate man,” Estes said.
Estes pointed to the statement “all cannabis use is medical.” He said he gets it, to different degrees. But in his case, it wasn’t really up for debate, and the farmers of The Emerald Triangle showed him a lot of love.
Part of it was because they knew in addition to it being for his own medical use, he was paying top dollar. Some of the brown frown was going for between $30-$50 a pound. Estes wanted nothing to do with it.
“When I got the first Skunk, which was fluffy, I had 24 bags. I sold it for $100 a bag and I would buy that. Next time I bought the Skunk it was $200, the next time it was $400 a pound and after that it was $500 a pound,” Estes said.
We asked Estes as he watched the pound price creep up, when did he know it was time to become his own supplier and get in on the cultivation side? He laughed and said it was right around the time he saw that first $500 pound. He’s already been collecting seeds in film containers and noting what they were.
In 1977, he would purchase his first hydroponic system. He said it took him about a decade to get to the point where he is comfortable looking back and saying he was dialed in. To help put that into perspective, the biggest movie of the year in 1987 when Estes started growing heat was Beverly Hills Cop 2.
The first grow went well, but he missed the part about changing the plants’ light cycle to get them to flower. By the time he did, they had been vegging for a couple of months. The plants exploded and he started selling grams for $5 after the harvest.
“I actually started catching a BART to the 51 bus on Market Street. The 51 bus took me over to Haight Street and Stanyan McDonald’s right there. I’d set up with little tiny bags in there. And I could sell down the street over there for 20 bucks,” Estes said. This was around 1984 and 1985.
Estes would move his garden outside. That wasn’t a bad thing — in that era, the best outdoor was widely regarded as the best cannabis available, period. He said it took another decade for the best indoor to start beating out the sungrown.
He saw cannabis grown under High-Pressure Sodium lights for the first time when one of his buddies took a light from a baseball field. Eventually, the HPS lights got a bit more normalized, but there was only one place you could buy them at first. Going in and grabbing more than one light was a red flag to anyone casing the store. Estes and others would send friends and family to grab a light each, until they eventually had enough for whatever size room they were trying to put together.
“If they saw you putting 10 lights in your car, they followed you home. You had a search warrant on your house a week later. So we were all nervous about that,” Estes said.
In the late ‘80s, he moves back indoors and starts building out grow houses. The product would eventually end up in Dennis Peron’s San Francisco dispensary. He would go from a 10-light house to a 100-light operation in Oakland in 1992.
While it was a big jump doing 10 times as many lights, he was confident in his standard operating procedures. He also had a lot of faith in his nutrients and pest management ability, too.
When Peron shut down, Estes went on to work a stint at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club. Eventually, Estes decided to open up his first dispensary in Concord in 1997. As Estes went from city council to city council attempting to open more shops in places with no ordinances around medical cannabis, he faced a lot of opposition. Some of the very cities that he went to battle with are now booming cannabis commerce hubs.
But back then, he was attacked by 1990’s and 2000’s NIMBYs, terrified of the thought of cannabis in their town. They would call him things like a street dealer.
“I said you have never spent one time in my house and at my table having dinner with me. You don’t know who I am at all sir, or ma’am. But I was attacked all the time. That was the way they did it back in those days for sure,” Estes recalled.
He said San Mateo was the most vicious municipality of all back then. He estimates he probably opened 20 clubs over the years in different cities.
Estes credits his activism to meeting disabled activist Dan O’Hara. O’Hara rolled his wheelchair across America and the length of the Mississippi River. He was a vocal advocate in Sacramento and Washington D.C., for the disabled. He was even honored by President Jimmy Carter for his efforts, and the Vatican. Estes and O’Hara became friends.
“So I became very, very active, much more of an open activist. It was not a secret. I wasn’t behind the scenes.”
Estes has witnessed every level of cannabis regulation in California. We asked what it was like seeing things go from Prop 215 to the legal era. He thought it was all going to move a lot faster, given how fast he opened a shop in the wake of Prop 215 passing.
“Even though I wasn’t granted a license to have my facility, and I’ve always lasted about one year in these towns, it was enough to start the dialogue, to start the process where other people came behind me pushing, getting attorneys. And next thing you know, there are ordinances,” Estes said.
The conversation would turn toward the purple weed Estes helped turn iconic. Back when he was exposed to purple on his earliest trips to The Emerald Triangle, it didn’t denote some special quality. He’d see the haze Jimi Hendrix made famous in the late 1970s. He said it was good, but it wasn’t great.
But in the early 2000s, he started to notice some purple strains were bomb. The Purple Erkel was high on the list for quality, but it was a very finicky plant to deal with. Estes argues the Erkel is really just Lavender and everyone changed the name.
“It was finicky, but when you smoked it, it was fire. It had that taste,” Estes noted.
In 2003, his relationship with purple would change forever. He was showing his friends Charlie and Sarah, they were Blackfoot and Pomo Indians. The Pomo have a deep history in Mendocino.
The Pomo traditionally lived in what is now the area around Clear Lake, Alexander Valley, and the Russian River watershed. The Pomo spoke seven different dialects while living in small independent communities that relied on hunting, fishing and gathering to meet their needs.
Estes showed the pair some Big Bud x Erkele from Bodhi. A lot of people thought that was the GDP, but it wasn’t. It did do well though, taking home top honors at an early cup in L.A. at one point. This put the purple, and the affection Estes had for it, on Charlie and Sarah’s radar.
During a later trip to visit their home on the Eel River, Estes saw some suits as he was pulling up. He provided the pair with cash from a score he had made that day to keep their home. Charlie would go on to tell some other folks in the tribe about what Estes had done.
Eventually one of the members of the tribe showed Estes what they called Purple Medicine. It was phenomenal.
“He brought it to me. And I had a bright light shined on them. I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. The color was amazing, purple everywhere. But you could have rolled that pound out of the bag like a bowling ball. It all stuck together,” Estes said. “They had it for 18 years. You could peel buds off the pound like velcro.”
A GDP outdoor crop.
Estes wanted to buy as much as he could, but after a few rounds, the tribe didn’t want to do business with him. They gave him the cut of Purple Medicine so he could run it himself. It became what we know today as Grand Daddy Purple. Estes went all in on his new cut and changed all of his operations to GDP. When he couldn’t produce enough in his 200-light operation, he brought it north for his friends to grow, too. Since he was paying $4,000 a pound, they were more than happy to run it for him.
“I know what I got. I’ve got this. This is it. This is to me just like the Grand Poobah. It’s like the grand something, Grand Daddy Purple, and then I high-five Charlie,” Estes said, remembering how he came up with the name.
As he started making the trip more regularly, farmers would wait for him south of Garberville to try and catch him before he spent all his money on someone else’s weed. One time a utility truck flagged him down at night, the pounds were inside the bucket you would use to do maintenance on a telephone pole.
Estes said the best GDP came from all over. It wasn’t a particularly challenging plant to grow, so a lot of different people in various conditions were able to make the most of it.
On his way back from up north he would call his friends’ answering machines and just say Grand Daddy Purple and code word that it was on its way south. Eventually, he would open his shop in Oakland’s former Oaksterdam neighborhood. Oakland loved purple.
“People back then thought purple meant it was overdried or always moist or something. And then there was no purple on any menu,” Estes said.
In the earliest days of trying to convert Oakland to purple, Estes would hand out nugs to the people in line at his competitor and offer refunds to people who bought eighths if they didn’t like it.
“Pretty soon, within six months, we got E40 and Keak Da Sneak are smoking it. It was on Weeds. It was in Pineapple Express. Snoop Dogg said on Howard Stern it was his favorite strain. It was just this crazy blow-up thing. I did kind of have the idea it could happen, but I didn’t know it would happen as fast as it did,” Estes said.
Estes began collecting seeds from the 200 lights. Every run there would be a dozen or so. When he decided it was time to hunt for a male, he had about 60.
“I backcrossed it to stabilize the genetics. I tried to focus on the traits that I like, the rock-hard buds, the nose, the nice branching, the dark green waxy leaves, so that we came up with Ken’s GDP,” Estes explained. He argued some people liked Ken’s GDP better than the original. In the most technical terms, Ken’s GDP was essentially Grand Daddy Purple Bx1.
He also took that male and put it in a room with seven of the bomb strains out at the time. Estes said a lot of people won cups with the seeds that came out of the room. He believes a big chunk of what’s commercially viable in the market dates back to that breeding project.
Estes ended up dealing with a federal case for six years. Nobody wanted to touch him at the time.
“You have to almost like, stop doing what you’re doing to get them to leave you alone,” Estes said. “I remember being in their office in San Francisco and asking, why do I have this target on my back?”
One of the things that caused Estes some headaches was his choice to start declaring his cannabis income on his taxes early. He figured if he was paying his taxes, how could they say it was illegal? Well, they certainly took the money no problem.
“I want all my cases, but it took me six years. I had three federal cases. I got raided in 2005, 2008, and 2009,” Estes noted.
One of his shops was caught up in the massive San Diego sweep of 2009 that saw 13 stores shut down. People would tell Estes they weren’t growing the Purple anymore because he was too hot and he shouldn’t come around.
But the more cultivation in urban settings got normalized, the less he needed people up north to help, as GDP would prove to be an indoor strain. When you run it outside, it’s 80% leaves and 20% buds; thankfully it’s the exact opposite indoors. While it wouldn’t quench the thirsts of the eventual three-pound-a-light crowd on the hunt for maximum dollars, it was always heat.
These days Estes is doing his best to keep GDP alive. He recently had it tissue-cultured. While a popular long-term storage method, tissue culture is also a way to clean a plant of diseases. The freshest piece of the meristem is cut before it has a chance to be infected like the rest of the donor plant. Two people are currently running the clean version of GDP.
“I just want to be the brand ambassador,” Estes closed laughing.
Photos courtesy of IC Collective
