Khalifa Kush, Dreamer Cannabis, and the Joy of Contrast

About a month ago I had the opportunity to visit a cannabis dispensary outside of Maine for the first time. If you read the previous two posts about the LotR Bowl (and if you haven’t, please do), that’s where I was (Western Massachusetts) and what I was doing (LotR Bowl). It was glorious. I hadn’t seen Aaron – one of my very best friends in the world – since pre-COVID, and we hadn’t all done a LotR Bowl together since 2017. My wife and I have always said that if we weren’t living in the area we are now, the only other place we’d really want to live would be in Western Massachusetts, near our college family.

If you’re a regular reader (as regular as you could be given that I had only published this blog last 420 and took a long break due to health issues at the end of August) you’ll know that my reviews each tackle a specific strain by a specific grower, but that the writing itself trends toward long, rambling narratives that eventually get to the strain review after 1000 or more words. I had even added a “skip to review” button to some posts, although I sincerely hope that people like my ponderings and read them as well. Going forward I plan to refocus my writing to lean even more into the narrative portion, where the strain will become more of the framing for the rest of the writing. They’ll still include the review, certainly, keywords and all, but my strength is not brevity, so I am leaning into it.

But! There’s a ‘but!” I have to lean into the strain on this one, as a transition for myself. And more than that, I want to shout out the store I hit up in Southampton, Massachusetts, Dreamer. The friends I was visiting in the area had little to no input on where to go, so I was basically on my own. I picked Dreamer based on what I could see online: reviews, website, prices, and vibe which could be discerned from their photos and overall online presentation. I extended my search to cover all the way to the state line along my route home, and I was happy to find that Dreamer was conveniently close to where I was leaving from already.

Anyway, they were awesome. In particular I’d like to shout out Sarah, the budtender that primarily worked with me. She was knowledgeable, friendly, and was even referred to by a coworker of hers as the person to talk to about rosin, which is high praise by itself. I purchased an 1/8th of Khalifa Kush flower by (surprise, surprise) Khalifa Kush, a gram of Pineapple Slapper live rosin by Bountiful Farms, and a mix-n-match 4-pack of CQ sodas and spritzers, which is Dreamer’s in-house beverage brand. Everything was excellent, though I do lament (as it seems most of my customers who come up from Mass do as well) that the state limit down there is 5 mg per edible, so I did find the drinks to be on the light side in that regard, but that’s no fault of Dreamers.

All that being said, I’m writing today to talk about Khalifa Kush, the eponymous strain of hip hop star Wiz Khalifa’s personal brand of cannabis. And since I’m name-dropping on the brand already, I wanted to point out this was also my first celebrity weed, in addition to my first visit to a dispensary outside of Maine. That weekend was one of nostalgia and firsts, a contrast that was echoed in the cannabis that I enjoyed immediately upon arriving home.

As I am nothing if not tediously thorough, some additional backstory to this is that I had not smoked flower – other than the occasional social joint – in months. Back in the late fall I had purchased for myself as a late birthday present a Puffco Proxy (an electronic dab rig), and so my evening smoke turned into my evening dab for a couple of weeks, until I remembered that I have a professional obligation to the vast variety of strains of flower that I am responsible for selling. So one night, back in December probably, I smoked a single bowl, floors away from my sleeping children, using an air filter, behind closed doors, etc. I take great pains to keep any secondhand exposure as far from my kids as possible. I’m not ashamed of what I do, but I also appreciate that exposure to THC before the brain is done growing isn’t typically good (barring medical or therapeutic uses, which is a totally different thing), so I keep it away from the kiddos. Regardless, even with all those safeguards in place, one of the kids got up and asked if I was burning incense, and that pretty much slammed the door on smoking flower inside until I can outfit part of my basement with much stronger air filtration.

For my customers who may be wondering how I’m trying all those new strains that I’ve talked about with the authority of someone who has tried them all, I have either smoked joints outside once my kids are off to school on my day off during the week, or I am extrapolating based on dabbing the concentrates from the same source flower. Or I ask my coworkers, mostly my one reliable joint smoker who takes it as a point of pride that he’s had everything I haven’t had, and frequently everything I have had as well. He’s a reader of this blog, so feel free to thank him in the comments for helping me out. He’ll see them.

Back to the story. Fast forward to the end of LotR Bowl weekend, and I’m home all by myself, as my wife and kids were staying a couple of extra days down in Mass since it was school vacation, but I still had to get back up here for work. So fuck it, I’m smoking some flower in the house! Like an adult! Or whatever. I broke out the neglected bubbler which I had sorely missed, and cracked open that jar of Khalifa Kush. Not gonna lie, I was a bit giddy. I was also exhausted from the whirlwind weekend, all that driving, and having consumed far less cannabis over the weekend than I am used to.

So I sat down with my little Dalek-looking bubbler full of ice-cold water, my grinder, dab spoon, and lighter; and cracked open that Khalifa Kush. I mentioned contrast some 100’s of words ago, and here’s where it comes back as a throughline: Khalifa Kush has all the qualities of a top shelf, premium cannabis, while simultaneously evoking the sensory experiences of opening a sandwich bag with what sure looks like must be 20 (30, 40…?) dollars worth of some weed that that guy in your college dorm assures you is “medical grade” weed that his friend back home totally gets from Canada. Or California. Or whatever, let’s just pick all the seeds out and smoke that shit out of an apple (or a soda can; or a rudimentary bong made out of paper cups, a bottle cap, and a BIC pen).

Really, whatever your personal experience was with cannabis before it was legal, when we would get that “good shit” – and while few of us knew what made weed good – we knew it when we saw it. Like art, or… you know, whatever.

Khalifa Kush came in an opaque jar, which I appreciate. It protects the flower from light (especially UV light) that degrades the cannabinoids and terpenes, lowering the potency, flavor, and effects over time. It also means that I hadn’t had a terribly good look at the flower before burying my nose in the jar and taking in the aroma. It has a brightly pungent and herbal nose, with notes of pine and sage balancing the citrusy overtone. It’s sweet, but not sugary, green but not earthy. It was, in a word, delightful.

[While I was making my final edits before posting, I discovered that some Khalifa Kush flower comes in clear jars, which lead me to looking into Massachusetts laws and regulations, and I found that all cannabis in Mass has to be in opaque packaging.]

After gently tipping the two nugs that comprised the 1/8th into the lid, I found the flower itself to be impressive as well, and it comes down to that contrast again. At first, the buds give a little when gentle pressure is applied, but beneath is a dense core that holds. It speaks to the quality of the curing process. There is a sweet spot for curing cannabis flower, and every strain, every individual grow, is going to benefit from slight variations in duration. I’m not a cultivator myself, so I’m not going to dive into all of that here (though, as usual, I’m inspired to do a deep dive in another Ramble in the future), but the short is that drying and curing cannabis flower not only removes moisture which makes the flower more smokable and more enjoyable to smoke, but it also helps to concentrate the cannabinoids while minimizing terpene loss, essentially maximizing the potency and effects. All this while protecting the plant from mold and fungi and such. The people cultivating the Khalifa Kush for the Massachusetts market did a fantastic job.

Aside from what I already described, the nugs were beautifully covered in trichomes that were more dusty than sticky. I know we love a sticky bud, at least for my generation we have since Snoop Dogg declared in Dr. Dre’s 1999 hit “Still D-R-E”:

Smoke some wit’ your Dogg
No stress, no seeds, no stems, no sticks!
Some of that real sticky-icky-icky
Ooh wee! Put it in the air!

And yes, Dre himself referred to sticky green and bad traffic earlier in the song, but it seemed that Snoop’s line stuck in memory due to his penchant for somehow making his gangsta lyrics playful and funny as well. As a total aside, it’s representative of how Snoop was really able to cross over into mainstream, white, suburban popularity in a way few other rap and hip-hop performers have. The guy is friends with Martha Stuart, whom he has joked has gone to prison while he has not. But this is about someone else’s weed, and my point was, as much as we love to talk about sticky buds, I’d rather have this dustier texture with the flower beneath still maintaining some liveliness, as it shows me that the flower is properly cured, not under-cured, which can cause a more acrid and less flavorful smoke. If a bud is dusty and hard and crumbly, that’s over-cured or just plain old, and that’s not ideal either.

But, as usual, I digress.

Or was it just a long segue to the smoke and flavor part of the review? Let’s say yes. Yes, it was. The flavor of the moderately thick smoke was really pleasant. I use a Google Form exported to a spreadsheet to track my notes on all this stuff, and in order to have keywords that I can use as the notes and tags for these posts I have forced myself to have a limited (though large) list of terms to pull from. While reviewing those notes, the smoke and flavor would only have been noted as spicy for the hit itself (indicating a bit of a tingling mouthfeel), and moderately bitter and lightly buttery flavored with a pungent and herbal aftertaste. Which sounds not great by itself. This, however, was much more than the sum of its parts. To come back to the contrast again, it really smoked like excellent, top-tier old school sandwich bag weed. The flavor was disarmingly nostalgic AND intensely gratifying.

The high was, in a word, superlative. This was an old school Kush with new school quality. I was simultaneously mellowed out and euphorically inspired. As I’ve written about before, I love a chill high that’s still got some heady lift to it, and Khalifa Kush delivered on both in a big way. I had started with my note-taking form, but since I had the laptop open, I went down what was basically a Wikihole, but not limited to Wikipedia. I started reading about Wiz Khalifa, then his cannabis company, then other celebrity cannabis, and then other cannabis brands that have reached across state lines while I tried to distinguish between boutique operations that managed to grow state-to-state as opposed to national “Wal-Mart” cannabis corporations. I had a tv show playing in the background that caught my attention and I fell down a rabbit hole researching fan theories and meticulous detail-hunting for insight into the metaplot and world-building of the show.

The body effects were great too. After a weekend of eating like an absolute monster (or average college student), and driving 3+ hours twice in three days, I was happy to experience the calming of my stomach – and my nerves in general – from Khalifa Kush. I was relaxed and feeling better, while not glued to my couch. It was a great high. 

I know we can’t get it here in Maine, but I’m already seeing some strains coming through that have some of Khalifa’s other strains in their lineage, so I’m hoping we’ll see more direct versions of those genetics in our local menu soon. Until then, I’ll be getting back to more locally available cannabis, and telling these long stories about getting high. Just like we did back in the day, but with a new twist.