420 All Month: Citral Glue

Sometimes I sleuth around about a strain that catches my attention, just to see what I can learn, and not for any particular reason related to either getting high or selling cannabis. Sometimes I’m just intensely curious, and I need to satiate myself with knowledge, or at least the act of trying to acquire that knowledge. Call it any variation on rabbithole – Wiki-hole, deep Googling, whatever – I love losing myself in research just for fun. 

Citral Glue caught my attention this way, because of its qualities and quality, but also its name. I’ve been slowly putting together a master genealogy chart of the cannabis varieties I’ve consumed, trying to tease out details here and there where the information doesn’t exist in an easy to access form or location. I’ll look to the genetics and breeders behind the specific cultivations I’ve had access to (as some strains of the same name have slightly different or sometimes radically different lineages, and some differently-named strains have the same lineages), and trace the lines back to the landrace strains. From there, I’ve looked what other popular lines have come down from those same landraces, so that I can put this new strain in the context of the greater cannabis world. 

That’s part of how I came across a line called Pakistani Chitral Kush, but for whom I was struggling to find much about what hybrids had come from this seemingly ancient lineage. This was earlier in my studies of cannabis, and I had fewer trusted resources and less core knowledge, so Citral Glue came along at just the right time. I started digging into this new strain and happened across a reference to Pakistani Kush, and it came together. I had been focusing on “Citral” as a citrus reference, specifically the terpene of the same name, but perhaps (as frequently happens) a misspelling either intentional or not dropped that “h” from Chitral? It would connect a lot of dots. It seems very likely (and if someone knows for certain that I am wrong, I’d love to know) that Citral Glue, whose parent strains are Citral Skunk and GG4, is pretty directly descended from Pakistani Chitral Kush, a landrace strain from a region that is deep with cannabis history.

The Chitral region of Pakistan is surrounded by significant regions, strains, and evidence of historical importance, such as: the Hindu Kush mountains, home to the Hidu Kush landrace variety of cannabis; the Pamir Mountains in nearby western China is where the oldest archeological evidence so far of cannabis being smoked was found; the Tibetan foothills are suspected to be roughly where cannabis first began to grow millions of years ago; Chitral is adjacent to the ancient trade route called the Silk Road, placing Chitral in the region where Hashish may have been either created or perhaps simply refined in one of its forms.

There’s so much good weed stuff in that small(-ish) part of the world.

So the flower itself. Like I said before, it would have gotten attention on its own, without the name that sent me distractedly reading pages and pages of cannabis and Central Asian history. They’re squat buds, fluffy and light, but appearing more dense than they feel. It’s an interestingly colored flower too, exceptionally pale but simultaneously vibrant somehow, as the distinctly orange pistils contrast the more muted greens. The trichomes pop more in the picture than with the naked eye, but you can feel them on the bud, dry to the touch, but they stick to your fingers as the delicate outer layer of sugar leaves and bud give way.

The aroma is enticing. It’s equal parts citrus, skunk, and something cheesy, with a lingering but very subtle note of tea leaves leaving the nose not feeling so assaulted by the overall pungence of the dominant tones. The smoke is light but a bit spicy in texture, shifting the flavor to bring out the skunkiness a bit more, muting the cheese and tea from the aroma tasting more of butter and dried herbs. Which makes it sound – as I am typing this – like a description of a Thanksgiving Skunk (a thing I just made up, and not a strain of cannabis, at least that I know of).

Coming back to the genetics and lineage a bit to set up the effects, every different website seems to think Citral Glue (and some of its parent strains get this too) are different genetic variations between sativa, indica, and hybrid. So much of its line is straight up indica-dominated, but a few sativa-leaning pieces poke in here and there. So I’m calling it a hybrid, since that’s technically accurate regardless. But anyway, I was expecting a heavy, classic, old world and old school indica Kush high, and it would be that, but not for the relative uplift in the brain that keeps the whole thing from sinking into the couch. My body gets super relaxed, my brain feels like it’s going to turn off as it folds in on itself in blissful euphoria… but I don’t generally get sleepy unless I already was. It’s so wonderfully brainy and chill. I wouldn’t want to do anything much more complicated than something like what I’m doing right now, perhaps, but for a nice social high when you have like-minded company over, or for watching an intense and twisty movie or long-form show, this is just perfect.