Who’s Smoking Gilbert Grape? Spoiler Alert: It’s Me!

Gilbert Grape is next on the list of strains from Preposterously, Spose’s cannabis brand in collaboration with Faded. For the full background on all this, check out Gas Face and Sub Zero.

I would like to make my quick aside on this post to say that I really like the movie for which this strain is named. 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is an intensely moving story of a young man, Gilbert Grape (played by Johnny Depp), just trying to find some kind of happiness, while feeling trapped in a life monopolized by caring for his intellectually disabled little brother, Arnie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his severely obese mother (played by Darlene Cates). For a movie that I feel gets a lot less attention than it deserves, it’s got a stellar ensemble cast beyond Depp and DiCaprio, including Juliette Lewis, Mary Steenburgen, John C. Riley, and Crispin Glover. For real, if you haven’t seen this movie, if you’re up for something that aims for a lot of gut punches, watch it.

Moving on to the cannabis itself. These buds are crazy. Look at that picture. They’re downright fuzzy with trichomes trying to hide the pale green beneath. I also really like the look of the light purple tips and minimal light brown hairs that can easily be missed in all this. For being so snowy, they’re easily handled, and break apart easily, leaving a bit of sticky dust on the fingers, but grinding very clean.

The aroma is quite sweet, evoking at first the scent of high end grape hard candies, with a subtle and herbaceous musky undertone, giving it body and depth. It’s quite pleasant. Some aromas are insanely complex, which is oftentimes very enjoyable, but sometimes it’s nice to have a straightforward, easy aroma, and Gilbert Grape falls much, much closer to the latter.

The smoke was surprisingly much more nuanced than the aroma. Like a thick fog that seems almost pregnant with rain, the kind of fog that feels too close to mist to be hanging in the air with such neutral buoyancy, the smoke of Gilbert Grape is simultaneously thick and light, with just a hint of spicy throat tingle betraying its otherwise effortlessness. The flavor too is more dichotomous than the aroma, keeping with the primarily grapey top note, but taking the aforementioned herbaceous musk and morphing it into something more akin to a gassy pungence. It’s not quite diesel, but plays with the idea a bit.

The high too is interesting and nuanced. In the head, it feels very specifically like it settles around the top of the brain stem itself. A trusted source for these things placed it squarely between their ears, deep in the core of their head, while I felt it at the base of my skull, which is so close to the same place that we may have been experiencing the exact same thing, but simply conjured the image differently when imagining how to describe it. Regardless of the exact placement of the high, it was calming, hazy, and just a touch euphorically stoney. While not particularly anxious at the time, I felt that sense of emotional and physiological relief that we are sometimes seeking in our cannabis, which was a welcome note to take. The rest of the body high was also generally calming, a bit tingly just on the surface of my skin, and my stomach felt exceptionally well settled. I would also like to mention that I wrote in the notes section at the end of the form I created for these reviews that my brain and body felt somewhat disconnected, but in a good way. This was before the conversation I had concerning the placement within the brain of the high, and I think this is what I was attempting to describe the first time I smoked this strain. Anxiety heightens sometimes due to feelings in the head elevating feelings in the body, and the body in turn elevating the brain, until it all spirals out of control, and this gentle severing of that connection feels like the root of the anxiety relief I noted above.

While not a crazy high overall, the pleasant and not-sleepy anxiety relief of this strain puts it in a particular category that is not always overly represented, which I am happy to share with those customers looking for a calming high, or a even a more traditional type of high in place of those I’ve written about with strains like Princess Magic Girl. Which should perhaps come as no surprise, as they share the same dominant terpene: Linalool. If this is a need you have, give Gilbert Grape a try. Thanks for reading. Enjoy.