Roseberry Kush by Grass Roots

This week I’m dispensing with the rambling narrative, as this review is taking a different approach altogether. This time I’m comparing Roseberry Kush flower and live resin. Both were cultivated by Grass Roots, and the live resin was extracted for Grass Roots by SeaWeed Co.

I guess I’ll jump right in.

The first thing that struck me about the buds was that they’re very tidy. They were fairly regularly shaped, with most of those that I’ve seen having been variably sized, but almost all shaped like candles flames: rounded along the bottom and edges, with one side maintaining the soft curve all the way to the top and the other side scooping inward and then gently back right at the top, as pictured. The buds also had a uniform feeling of structural density, yet they were soft to the touch. That touch however left my fingertips lightly sticky from the dusty trichomes. They were also a nice color, mostly bright green, but with big (for the size of the buds) sugar leaves of a much deeper, nearly pine green. The orangy-brown pistils (the little hairs) were distributed mostly in clusters throughout.

The live resin is one of my favorite textures for dab rigs that use a bowl or cup or banger: a rig where you load the concentrate, as opposed to hitting right off of a spoon or out of a puck. Roseberry Kush looks like clumps of either enormous sand or super tiny pebbles, kind of like the larger pieces left behind if you sifted out the fine particles from sandbox sand. I hesitate to call them diamonds, because diamonds is its own category of concentrate, but it really is similar to lightly sticky golden diamonds. It’s a gorgeous color, and it handles so well. One would think, from the opening of this paragraph, that I used a dab rig with a bowl of some kind, but mine is currently in mid-repair, so I used a glass dab straw and kitchen torch this time around. It was a little tricky to get the resin crystals onto the spoon, so I quickly blasted the spoon with the torch and then pushed the spoon down on a small cluster until they stuck. It worked pretty well, though I’d prefer my electronic loadable rig for future hits.

Back to the flower. Its aroma was very pleasant; notes of fruity sweetness with just a hint of grape brightened an herbal undertone reminiscent of fresh sage. These two left a gentle funky aroma lingering in the nose, still fruity and quite enjoyable.

The live resin’s aroma was actually what prompted me to do this side-by-side review in the first place. I’d had the flower a few times, and really enjoyed it, but that first nose-full from the resin was – in a word – inspiring. First, it’s a really similar overall aroma profile, on paper at least. As is almost always the case, the concentrate is brighter and the terpenes pop as they aren’t masked by any of the plant smells. Sweet and tart and pungent smells tend to be much bigger. And Roseberry Kush delivers. It had a warming and comfortably familiar aroma reminiscent of a spiced fruit cake. My dad has started making a fruit cake every year around Christmas since he retired, and while I know fruit cakes get a lot of hate (and in all fairness, my enjoyment of fruitcake itself is very tenuous, as I’ve loved some and couldn’t take a single bite of others), the aroma of a well-balanced not-too-boozy fruit cake can be really lovely, I think. And Roseberry Kush live resin brings me to that place in my mind. Sense memory and all that. I’ve written about it before. I’ll take a smell that reminds me of a happy time or place over just a nice smell alone any day.

The flower smokes quite well, bringing the herbal flavors a little more to the forefront, though not so much that the fruitiness is lost, it’s simply muted a bit, replacing the funky afternote with a bit of the fairly normal light bitterness typical of cannabis. The smoke itself is clean and smooth, with a medium body. It’s not a smoke for smoke rings, necessarily, but neither is it a heavy and cough-inducing smoke. It’s like a Goldilocks smoke, if Goldilocks were old enough to legally and safely use cannabis.

Hits of the live resin were also exceptionally nice, though surprising. Above, when I mentioned that the aromas of concentrates are usually brighter, and frequently this translates over to the flavor as well. Roseberry Kush is a bit different in these regards: I found the hit to be almost disconcertingly light and easy. I was concerned I wasn’t getting a good hit at all. At first. The flavor was so delicate, leaving just a hint of the sweet and fruity of the aroma. The vapor entering the clear glass chamber of my dab straw was thick enough (again, given that this was not the rig that I feel was most appropriate to the crystalline form of the resin), and on the exhale there was still visible vapor, but the flavor was so insanely light. I’m really quite torn between effusively praising this aspect of the resin, and being a little disappointed that a strain for which I enjoy the aroma and flavor so much was so light here. If this were a really gassy or cheesy strain, something acrid or barnyard-y, perhaps I’d be more excited about the lighter flavor, but I could have used a stronger flavor on this one . But again, being torn on this, it’s not that I’m unhappy about the flavor, I could be happier. Delicious, just light. But it did make for really easy hits. Which brings us to…

The effects. I’m going to write about the effects of each together, to better compare and contrast directly, as I was expecting a more similar high between the two. I deliberately tried to balance them by having a clean go at each individually. This meant replicating the context, both externally and internally. Both were in the evening, after a light dinner, solo, and (as much as is really possible) as unaffected by other cannabis such that the high would be isolated to just the Roseberry Kush.

The amounts too were measured to be roughly the same volumes of cannabinoids and terpenes making it into my system after burn-off estimates are taken into account. What I mean here is that smoking flower is estimated to burn off in the ballpark of 50% of the THC, while dabbing concentrates typically is estimated to only burn off much less than 10% of the THC. So I took an amount of flower, calculated how much THC I’d get from a single bowl using the percentage of the flower, the approximate weight of the amount being smoked, and cutting the THC number in half to account for burnoff, and then the next night dabbing an amount of the resin to match that amount of THC as close as I could. For science!

I was shocked, upon revisiting my notes (which are in spreadsheets, using a Google Form to make sure I’m recording all the same categories and using common language between reviews, nerd that I am) that the high from the flower actually hit harder, stronger, and was more heady. If it weren’t for seeing the thick vapor in the straw and exhaling enough of a cloud after the hit, I would think that maybe I wasn’t hitting the resin as efficiently as normal, given the light flavor and lighter head high. The flower left me feeling a little hazier in the brain, a light euphoria that inspired me to go ahead and make a new Google Form for concentrate reviews, so that I could more easily track them separately from flower. The next night, the resin hits left me feeling lighter. While the creative high of the flower was accompanied by what I tracked as a reduction in anxiety, I had no such note for the resin, which leads me to believe that perhaps a factor I hadn’t accounted for was what kind of day I’d had leading up to these reviews.

The flower was following a day of outside family activities in the hot and humid weather, with lots of juggling both my parents and my children (among other family as well). Not what I’d call a stressful day, but a day where there was a little less predictability, and a lot of expectations to meet. The resin was after a full day of work, which normally one might think of as potentially more stressful than a day with the family, but this particular day of work I recall was a good one, and possibly most relevant to my point here, it was predictable. I suppose I was carrying a little more stress in my body following the family gathering than I had previously considered.

But regardless, the high from both were really nice. The flower felt a little more like that “kushy” kind of mellow, where the resin was a little more broadly uplifting. In place of the anxiety reduction note on the flower, I noted that the resin gave me a nice body calmness, which I think is a reflection of the kind of day I’d had more than the perhaps the difference in the highs themselves. The head high on the resin wasn’t quite as hazy, but it still had the creative and cognitive braininess of the flower’s high. Ultimately, I’d like to go back and dab the resin in my electronic rig, and maybe even deliberately after a more stressful day to see if the effects come to match the flower a little more closely. Even if not, it was an extremely pleasant and enjoyable high. I very much recommend this strain, flower or concentrate, for anyone looking for a nice cognitive, creative, and calming high.

Just a little note before I wrap, having just remembered something: I’ve had the live resin vape cartridge of this strain as well, and I recall it having a high more similar to the resin than the flower as well. I may revisit this review in the future, if I find that this strain’s effects are more heavily contextual than average. I’ll be paying close attention and I’ll write it up if I find it to be any more noteworthy than what I’ve already said here.

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Notes – Flower

Notes – Live Resin