HQ Barcelona

WORDS FROSTY HASH

We always love coming to Spain. It’s like a home away from home. HQ Barcelona does a great job at holding space for international stoners from around the world. It is a pretty cool place to be. The first time we went to HQ was a special time, and we will never forget it. Everyone feels like a VIP there! Recently I was happy to catch up with David Madilyan, owner and founder of HQ, to ask him a few questions about his work and vision.

FH: When did you first found HQ Barcelona and why?

DM: I found HQ Barcelona in 2013 coming back from a long one-year trip to Asia & Montenegro. I came back to Barcelona, where I’ve now been living for 21 years. I had one year of living in Asia and Indonesia, Bali… then I was working on some project in Montenegro, and then I came back, with a clear idea of making it happen because back in 2011 and 2012 when I was on my trip, I came back to Barcelona for a quick visit and my friends were like: “Hey dude, this social club, cannabis club, is beginning, and we could be the first ones to open.” I was like: “Is this fucking real?”

When I understood that there was a place to make it happen, I just made it happen. So I came back in 2013. We started all the legal paperwork, and we found HQ. Why did I do it? Because that was my dream. It was all a dream. It’s just like that, like a dream. I was born in the Soviet Union in Moscow in an Armenian family, and back in the days in the ‘90s, I remember being in university when we were already smoking in the backyard, and they were asking: “What are you going to do with your future?” Because I was studying to be a lawyer, I was like an International law student, and I was like: “Yeah, I want to do this, and I want to do that… yeah, I’m going to open a coffee shop.” Everybody was laughing at me like: “What the fuck are you talking about? Shut up. Come on.”

So yeah, I’ve always wanted it, and this is what I really believed I wanted to do. Like, this is the real moment when what you do is really what you love to do in your life. And I’m so blessed and happy to feel this, to be part of it, yes? This is very important, and every day I’m coming to my workplace, and I’m like: “Hey, is this real?” So we’ve been here eight years already, and I’m still asking myself how we made it happen? It’s very, very, very like, heart touching? I don’t know how to say, like, overwhelming. Yes, like that.

FH: What is the Masters of Rosin competition that you hold every year, and what were some of

the highlights from this year’s competition?

DM: Masters of Rosin was born in my head back in 2015, when I was already doing and introducing rosin here in The Club, in our dispensary. I don’t want to argue with anyone, but I think we were one of the first, OK, let’s say one of the first in Spain for sure, in Europe to offer it in dispensaries. I was squishing my first rosin with the t-shirt press, you know, the press you use for printing on t-shirts—the old-school one, you know, like the really heavy one. So I remember that the first press, there were no screens… I was just putting buds together and squishing it with parchment paper. That’s it—just the press and parchment paper. We would be standing upside down on the press, me and a couple of friends always, just to give it extra pressure, (laughs) you know? So I remember it was 2015 for sure because I have a picture, we were pressing in HQ the first rosin, and I remember I was like: “Hey, what do we do with it? How should we charge for it?” I didn’t even know how it should be presented. It was just the beginning, you know, we were experimenting with it. So, I really liked what happened. There was so much interest towards it, and I felt like this is something new. This is like a new product, a whole new concept of cannabis product.

This is the field I really love working in. I like inventing new products for the cannabis sector. It’s very interesting. It’s very inspiring. I feel that as a very gastronomic person, that it’s like wine… making hash...making rosin. Making rosin for me is like making hash. So rosin derives from hash, actually, so making hash is like making wine. It’s about the incredible passion behind all of this work.

So Masters of Rosin HQ was also born as a dream.. It was 2015. Back in the days when HQ was competing in different cannabis cups, I wondered why there isn’t a category just for rosin, not mixed with all solventless extractions, then was when I decided to create a competition dedicated solely to rosin.

At that moment in time, I thought I should do a Cannabis Cup myself but different. And the idea was to make it with just one category: rosin. That moment in 2015, I was with another cup, and it wasn’t possible, and then I was feeling it wasn’t so popular yet. Even in 2016, I wasn’t feeling like that, but we wanted to do it, but didn’t. In 2017, we were making some other cannabis event. It doesn’t matter what’s the name of it. We made it during you know, this work, working on that project, I was thinking already of making a rosin-only Cannabis Cup. It was still very new here, and we were really not believing that we were gonna have enough competitors.

So the first Masters of Rosin event eventually happened in 2018, and we have made four editions, and we’re going to have the 5th edition of Masters of Rosin in 2022. I’ll be coming later with more info about that. When the first edition happened, and we had 49 entries, it was an absolutely — wow effect for us. I mean, we could see that it had a real big “wow” effect