Hemp Flower

Why There Is Nothing To Buy Here Yet

We could have listed flower months ago. Buying finished product wholesale, putting our label on it and photographing it against a starfield is roughly a weekend of work, and plenty of brands you have heard of are doing exactly that right now.

What that weekend does not buy you is any real knowledge of what is in the jar. You inherit somebody else's dry, somebody else's cure, and somebody else's decision about whether to send a failing batch back or quietly blend it into a passing one.

So this page is what we are publishing instead of a product listing: the standard, written down before there is anything for you to hold it against. It is a slightly strange thing to put on a shop, but it is the honest order to do it in.

Almost Everything Happens After Harvest

The intuition most people have is that flower quality is decided in the grow — genetics, nutrients, lights, the grower's instincts. Those matter. But the gap between flower that makes you stop and smell it again and flower that is merely fine is usually decided in the three weeks after the plant is cut, by somebody choosing to be patient.

Take two growers with the same clone, the same room and the same feed schedule. One needs cash flow, so the harvest goes into a hot room and is dry in three days. The other takes two weeks at low heat and then cures for a month. Those are not two grades of the same product. They are different products, and the second one costs more to make almost entirely in time and electricity.

Most of what you are paying for in good flower is somebody having done nothing, carefully, for several weeks.

That is the unglamorous version, and it is why this page is mostly about temperature and humidity rather than about strain names we do not have yet.

The Dry, Where Most Flower Is Quietly Ruined

We dry at roughly 60°F and 60% relative humidity for ten to fourteen days. That is the boring answer and it is the whole trick.

Push heat into a dry room and two things go wrong at once. The outside of the bud dries while the inside is still wet, which traps chlorophyll and moisture where you cannot get at them later — that is the source of the hay smell you have met before, and no amount of curing afterwards removes it. Meanwhile the terpenes start leaving.

Terpenes are volatile organic compounds, which is a technical way of saying they evaporate at temperatures that do not feel hot to you. The lightest ones go first, and the lightest ones are frequently the interesting ones — the citrus and pine notes at the top of the profile. They do not come back. There is no stage later in the process that recovers them.

The Cure: Two Weeks Minimum, Usually Four

Once the flower is dry it goes into sealed vessels held at 62% relative humidity, and gets burped on a schedule — opened briefly to vent, then closed again.

What is happening in there is slow chemistry. Residual chlorophyll and plant sugars break down, which is what actually removes the grassy note. The vented gas includes ammonia produced as that material degrades, and burping is how it leaves rather than sitting in the jar and being the first thing you smell.

We are targeting 10 to 12% moisture and a water activity between 0.55 and 0.65. Water activity is the measure labs actually use for microbial risk, and it is a better number than moisture content because it describes how much of that water is available to mould rather than how much is present. Above 0.65 you are supporting growth. Below about 10% moisture the flower goes brittle and dusty and you have lost the other way.

This is the honest reason we cannot give you a launch date. The cure does not compress, and a date on a calendar is exactly the kind of pressure that shortens it.

If a brand can tell you weeks in advance precisely which day flower will be listed, one of two things is true. It is already cured and sitting in storage, which is fine. Or the cure is going to be whatever length of time is left before the date they announced.

Then: Cold, Dark, and 62%

Curing well and then storing badly is a way to throw the work away in about a month. We hold finished flower dark, between 60 and 70°F, at 62% RH, and it ships in opaque, airtight packaging with a two-way humidity pack in the jar.

Heat is the slow problem: it drives the conversion of THCA toward CBN over time, which changes the character of the flower in a direction most people are not looking for. Light is the fast problem. UV degrades a terpene profile quicker than anything else in the chain, which is worth remembering the next time you see product displayed in clear glass under a bright shop light. That is merchandising. It is not storage.

When it arrives, the same rules apply at your end, with one addition: do not put it in the fridge. The temperature swing every time the door opens drives condensation, and condensation is how you get mould in something you were trying to look after. There is more on this in storage and shelf life.

What The Lab Says Before We Say Anything

Every batch goes to an accredited third-party lab before it is listed, photographed or announced. The panel covers potency, pesticides, heavy metals, microbials, mycotoxins and residual solvents.

Each batch links to its own COA. This sounds like a low bar and it is not: a common industry practice is to publish one good certificate and leave it up while the product behind it changes underneath. If the batch number on the jar does not appear on the certificate, the certificate is describing something else.

And if a batch fails, it does not get listed. It does not get blended into a passing lot either. That is a real cost, and being willing to eat it is most of what separates testing as a practice from testing as a marketing line. How to read a COA covers the panels people skip.

About The Word "Organic"

Our flower is grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. We are still not going to print the word "organic" on the jar, and you should know why, because most of our competitors will.

"Organic" is a term the USDA regulates. Putting it on an agricultural product you have not had certified is enforceable, and separately actionable by the FTC as an unsubstantiated claim. Hemp is eligible for that certification; we have not completed it; so we do not get to use the word yet.

The word costs nothing to type. A pesticide panel costs money and can embarrass you. We would rather hand you the second one.

When that certificate exists with our name on it we will say so and show you a scan. Until then, the pesticide and heavy metal panels on every batch COA are the thing to check, and they are more informative than the adjective would be. There is a fuller answer in the FAQ.

Compliant, And What That Actually Means

Our flower tests under 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight, which is the federal definition of hemp under the 2018 Farm Bill, and the figure comes off the batch COA rather than from a marketing page.

Here is the nuance, which we would rather explain than have you discover: flower is sold on THCA, and THCA converts to delta-9 THC when you heat it. That is what happens when you smoke it, and it is the entire point. So the compliant number on the certificate and the experience you actually get are measuring two different things. That is not us being clever — it is how the law is written — but it does mean the legal picture for flower specifically is more contested than it is for edibles, and state law moves faster here than federal law does.

We check every order against our restricted list and block shipment to the eleven states that prohibit these products, rather than leaving you to catch it. Our flower guide works through the THCA calculation, and where hemp THC can ship covers the state rules.

Cultivars

The strains we are bringing to market, with the lab work we hold on each. Potency figures below are transcribed from the linked report, and each report is published in full rather than summarised.

What We Will Carry

Three formats at launch. Cultivar names, cannabinoid percentages and terpene profiles publish per batch as each one clears the lab.

The Numbers, In One Place

Everything above, condensed. Published because "properly cured" means nothing on its own, and because a number is something you can hold us to.

Read Further

We wrote the guides before we had anything to sell you, which is either admirable or poor business planning.