STARBERRY

CULTIVATED BY SAFFY

Sungrown flowers can have some of the most pronounced effects of any kind of Cannabis. With the Emerald Cup, California’s yearly celebration of sungrown just behind us, there’s no better time than to focus on some of the incredible outdoor flower options that are coming out of the Emerald Triangle.

The first Jamaican-owned equity brand in Humboldt County, Saffy operates a five-acre farm in Northern California not far from the Van Duzen River. They grow in light-deprivation greenhouses to produce Cannabis using natural conditions, but with a smaller ecological footprint.

This special cultivar crosses the legendary Strawberry Cough with Stardawg for a sativa-leaning strain featuring a wild takeoff that drops into a smooth ride. While it’s not harsh, you do find it lives up to the name with a fruit flavor that seems trapped in the exhale. After a couple of healthy coughs in the beginning, everything starts to lazily sway down the river like a boat in a Disneyland attraction.

Light on the aroma, you can pick up a little hint of chem straight out of the bag or jar – but once you squeeze the buds, you get waves of fruit that start to emerge. These nugs, while not fluffy, have that elongated shape with segmented bud sites that snap off into bowl or bong rip-sized pieces.

After you’ve ground it up, the smell is spicy and peppery with a little fruit on the back, but it’s more of a barely-ripened, semi-sweet kind of fruit. Getting into the dry inhale increases that up to about 50% of the flavor, but it’s not until you light up that the two halves start to mix together in the sauce.

Almost from the jump, the fruit will hit the turbo boost and start leaving the spicy, chemy flavor in the dust … until it burns up in the atmosphere and gets trapped in the cough and exhale. With nothing in its way, the rest of the flavor wraps your tongue and taste buds in a rich fullness that manages to soak up the fruit flavor like a sponge cake. As you smoke, that fruit just keeps living in the back while the full-bodied flavor remains dominant and the high creeps up.

Saffy’s Starberry Cough is the total package: pleasant high, nice flavor, good looks – and still leaves you with enough left over for lunch. All good reasons to take a moment to experience some sungrown Cannabis.