Sour Chillz, One Step Closer to Pakistani Chitral Kush

Update before I even posted:

Sorry for not posting last week, if you’re keeping track. I was working on this review when I learned that I was operating with some slightly inaccurate information. Honestly, it’s fairly minor, but as my regular readers (or my customers, or my friends, or my family) probably already know, I’m tediously detail-oriented when it comes to things like the finer points of cannabis genotypes and phenotypes. Some of this is due to simply taking pleasure in immersing myself in knowledge, but a big part of this comes from my desire to ensure as best I can that anyone to whom I am providing cannabis (myself, loved ones, customers, etc.) is getting what they want and need, and even more importantly that they’re not getting something that they know they won’t enjoy. There are some strains that I know just make me feel not so great, and so I endeavor to avoid them, and I try to do the same for everyone else as well.

Otherwise, I’m going to tighten up my preamble this week, because it would be a lot of repeating what I wrote almost a year ago in the intro to the Citral Glue. Please read (or reread) that post before continuing.

Welcome back. So, this week’s strain is Sour Chillz, cultivated and extracted as Live Badder (a form of Resin) by SeaWeed Co. The slightly inaccurate information I had been working with had to do with its parent strains. The information I had when I started writing was mistakenly just for the strain Chillz, which is Freezerburn (a strain I was about to review in flower form anyway) and… Pakistani Chitral Kush! Here we are, with a strain directly hybridized from the strain I’ve been chasing since I learned about it almost three years ago. Needless to say – I suppose – I was very excited to try this one.

But chatting with the very fine gentlemen of SeaWeed’s cultivation team, I learned that Sour Chillz is the aforementioned Chillz crossed with “a Sour Diesel cross incorporating a few different, well known varieties of Sour Diesel,” specifically [AJ Sour Diesel x Chem 91] x [East Coast Sour Diesel x D-DNL]. Since I’m digging deep anyway, and I wasn’t familiar with D-DNL, it’s a cross of Chemdawg and DNL, which itself is a three-way cross of Skunk x Hawaiian x Northern Lights. I’m such a sucker for those old school strains, and seeing them pop up in Sour Chillz where I wasn’t expecting them was an interesting twist, since I was chasing a totally different old school landrace. Now I want to start looking for DNL around here.

So let’s get into it.

First, hats off to SeaWeed’s extraction team on this one: it is like the Platonic form of “badder.” There’s no enforcement for the naming conventions of cannabis extracts, aside from the understanding that the method of extraction and processing should be accurately identified. This includes whether it’s Rosin (solventless) or Resin (solvent-based extraction), Live (typically flash frozen at harvest) or Cured (dried for smoking). There are some finer points within each, like the post-processing curing for Rosin (Cold or Hot), and Shatter for Resin, but for the most part, Badder, Resin (sometimes Resin-extracted concentrate is just called “Resin”), Sugar, Diamonds, Diamonds & Sauce, Butter/Budder… these are all used as labels, but don’t necessarily mean much. Sometimes you just have to look at the concentrate and decide for yourself if it’s the consistency you’re looking for. I’ve had Badder that looks like Diamonds & Sauce, and I’ve had Resin that looks like Sugar.

(Note: I tend to capitalize technical terms in my blog when the writing is about those things in particular. If I’m explaining the difference between two things, like Badder and Sugar or Sativa and Indica, I like to draw attention to the relevant terms this way. I could use another method, like bold or italics, but I feel that the capitalization is less distracting, as bold is otherwise used for links, and italics is otherwise used for emphasis. As a former English teacher, I felt it finally necessary to point out this idiosyncrasy in my writing.)

But, as usual, I digress. This Sour Chillz Live Badder is viscous enough that it doesn’t spill, but just thin enough that it’s extremely easy to work with. I started using a hot knife for my concentrates recently, and I’m somewhat disappointed in myself for not getting one sooner. It has made handling almost every form of concentrate easier (with really dry and crumbly textures being the exception), and the combination of the knife and this Badder was perfect in this regard. But my knife battery died mid session just the other night, and going back to my normal spoon for a few dabs, I found that the Sour Chillz handled extremely well even without the heat.

Aside from texture, the color and overall appearance is a pleasing yellow gold, just hinting at the orange end of that spectrum. It’s extremely smooth, and settles back to even, showing little to no signs of having been disturbed, but very slowly.

As for the aroma, Sour Chillz fits into a trend of strains with an odd mixture of individual notes that are simultaneously disjointed and come together to paint a very specific picture. In this case, the topmost part of the profile is strong citrus, with notes of gas, caramel, and berries beneath. After sitting and taking this in over and over, the citrus broke apart into distinctly sour lemon and lime components. There’s another aroma hidden in all this too, that I’ve been unable to name specifically, but the best I can do is to call it a “planty-ness” that I wouldn’t even bother noting if this were flower, but seems out of place (though not unwelcome) in a concentrate.

All these factors were adding up to something, but as I may have noted previously, I’ve spent so much time and effort over the last few years of budtending breaking these aromas down into their disaggregated parts in order to have quick descriptions ready for the customers who don’t want or need a narrative, that I find myself sometimes struggling to put those pieces back together and see the bigger picture sometimes. In these times, I enlist a trusted expert. She hit the nail on the head with this one again: it’s the smell of summer camp. I never went to  a traditional summer camp (I did music camp a few times late in middle school and early in high school, but that was not at all what most people think of as summer camp). The various fruits and plant smells, the rich and sweet caramelly aroma of campfires and S’mores, and with that hint of gas from generators, boats, lawn equipment, and so forth lingering in the background, it’s what I imagine summer camp smells like.

The flavor changes a bit, losing much of the citrus in favor of an expansion of the caramel, which breaks out into notes of banana and butter, with just a hint of nuttiness, and – surprisingly – an aftertaste that after much deliberation I landed on cinnamon. It’s almost like when the natural bitterness of smoking flower isn’t generically bitter but instead has a specific bitter characteristic. It’s just odd to get that in a concentrate, since it isn’t burning. In this case, the combination of nuttiness and cinnamon only reinforces the summer camp imagery, as it is reminiscent of tree bark in a way. Odd as this all sounds, it’s delicious.

The hits themselves were clean, buttery and velvety, easy on the lungs, if just the tiniest bit of tingly in the throat. Very good hits. And some of this was without the bubbler for my Proxy, but with the standard Sherlock pipe that came with it.

Ultimately, though, we’re doing this for the effects, and Sour Chillz continued to impress here as well. The head high is classically Kushy: euphoric, uplifting, giggly, and just a bit fuzzy. I feel supremely happy and extremely calm with this strain. The body high is almost therapeutic, bringing a calming effect to muscles and joints, as well as the digestive system. This does come with a little bit of munchies, but it’s not a desperate hunger, but instead a more organic want of actual food. I find that if I’m feeling snacky with Sour Chillz, I’m not as prone to eating whatever I can find, but instead I’m a bit more deliberate about my choices. While this high doesn’t make me sleepy specifically, I’ve found that I’ve slept easily and well this past week or so, where Sour Chillz has been a pretty regular part of my evening consumption.

In summation, I don’t think anyone has said it better than one of the greatest modern poets, Nigel Tufnel:

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