We have a confession to make. We’re weed hoarders. Well sort of. Hoarding assumes that there’s a perceived scarcity of whatever it is you’re stockpiling and we are pretty sure that there’s no scarcity of weed in this country, yet we still set it aside and save it. Scratch that, we savor it. We took curing bud to a whole new level and decided to set aside an ounce of every single one of our favorite strains for a long-term curing session. In this case, we’ve defined two types of curing as it relates to marijuana storage: harvest marijuana curing and vintage marijuana curing. The two are one in the same, one is just, well, longer term. Curing takes place right after you’ve harvested and dried the buds. It’s recommended by connoisseurs to cure your buds for at least 4-8 weeks, although others prefer even longer (see our last interview with grower and aficionado @Missradreefer here). We’ve decided to keep the process on-going for over a year to see if there’s a noticeable difference. It’s now incredibly obvious that we can definitively say there is a big difference between marijuana that’s been cured for a month and marijuana that’s been cured for a year.
Curing bud for this amount of time takes an extraordinary amount of patience. For one, doing something like this commercially doesn’t make much sense if you are looking for short term profits. It’s already expensive enough to cultivate marijuana under the right conditions, even more so if your state/municipality requires lots of red tape and high taxes. Speed to revenue is key to success for many commercial growers, so it’s no wonder that certain batches miss their mark. This begs the question whether there will ever be a grow operation that specializes in vintage cured marijuana. Grandiose? Over-the-top? That’s probably what the first wine makers were thinking when they found out that their neighbor was storing wine in a cellar for years on end. Granted, the chemical process of fermentation is more complex than curing, and also necessary to produce alcohol, which is quite different from the process of producing THC–it’s already in the buds prior to curing. However, enhancing the curing process by way of time and exposure to O2/moisture has the potential to augment potency, flavor and aroma, so it’s vitally important to a well balanced smoke, which in turn translates to a premium value.
We probably won’t see any producers lining their basements with Miron® jars creating a ‘bud cellar’ full of vintage reserves any time soon. For now, we’ll champion the idea and call it ‘over-the-top,’ but mark our words when we say the finish is beyond smooth and the taste is unrivaled.
