Not all weed is created equal. While many weed lovers have smoked their fair share of garbage flower, we live in an era of options. If your weed budget allows for it, you can smoke extremely high quality weed for an experience that far exceeds its cheaper counterparts. To better discern if your weed is good, mid, or actually trash, read on.

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What to look for when assessing weed quality

I’ll go more in-depth on each of these later on, but here are the top characteristics to assess when evaluating your weed quality:

• Appearance
• Smell
• Feel
• Cultivation method
• Test results

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Appearance

The first part of your weed to evaluate is the appearance. You can learn a lot about the flower by how it looks.

First, check out the color. Green is the most obvious color associated with weed, and it’s a good sign to see a vibrant green when assessing your bud. Vibrant purples, oranges, and even blues and pinks can also be present in some strains.

What you don’t want to see is a nug that is entirely brown. This means that the flower has been improperly cured or stored, or it’s simply well past being fresh. Vibrant hues are good. Dull brown hues indicate low quality.

Assess your flower’s trichome coverage, too. Trichomes refer to the tiny little resinous, crystalline-appearing structures found on nugs. Found on the surface of the bud, trichomes are responsible for the sticky oil found on high-quality weed. The more trichomes the better, as they produce the terpenes, cannabinoids, and other compounds associated with a great high. If your bud has a light frosty coating, it’s probably high quality.

Look for pistils, too. These are the little hair-like structures that pop out of high-quality flower. They come in a variety of colors like orange, white, purple, and even pink or blue. Growers often use pistils to indicate the perfect harvest time. While different growers may offer slightly different opinions, orange and red hues are typically considered “peak” for harvesting because it aligns with peak trichome production.

If you find seeds in your weed, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s trash right off the bat. A few seeds here and there can be a natural result of the cultivation process. But if you’re finding a lot of seeds, that doesn’t just mean the product was poorly processed to remove unwanted seeds, it also means you’re paying money for unsmokeable weight. That’s never a good sign.

Smell

Aroma can tell you a lot about your weed–so much that some researchers are working on a scientific lexicon to better categorize different strains. While the average person may not be able to determine the exact qualities of weed via smell, there are a few scent-related characteristics anyone can assess.

First, how strong does the weed smell? The more intense the aroma, the better. Whether it smells strongly of citrus, grape, diesel, or cheese, the key word is strongly. If you take a whiff and are met by an intense aroma, there’s a good chance it’s high quality weed. On the other hand, if it doesn’t smell at all or the scent is mild, you’re likely dealing with low to mid level quality.

Try to sniff out any complexities, too. High quality weed won’t smell just like *one *thing. You should notice hints of many scents. For example, a high quality strain might smell like lemons, pepper, berries, and gas all at once.

Feel

High-quality flower should bounce back a bit when you give it a squeeze. But it shouldn’t feel excessively spongy. It should also feel sticky to the touch because of its trichome coverage.

You want some density to the nug, though this can vary from strain to strain. It should be fairly easy to break apart by hand, but it shouldn’t crumble to the touch. While you don’t want your weed to feel extremely dry, you also don’t want it to feel particularly moist. The stem should also break easily, not bend.

Cultivation Method

Now we’re getting into more of the connoisseur territory. The above information can help you assess any weed, including unlabeled products. But if you’re serious about quality, you might want to take a look at your weed’s cultivation method.

I’m not going to say indoor or outdoor grown weed is better, though I do have a preference.You can learn a lot about quality by looking at the cultivation techniques used. If a grower uses only natural cultivation methods (think living soil, organic nutrients, and integrated pest management), their plants likely have more rich and complex profiles that would qualify as “higher quality.”

Test Results

Along with the above methods, test results can tell you a decent amount about your weed’s quality. Comprehensive test results should include the THC percentage, along with percentages of other cannabinoids like CBD, CBN, CBG, and more. Results might also include terpene profiles to give you an even more comprehensive picture.

Test results will also prove that the product is free from dangerous levels of harmful contaminants. You can see how much pesticide residue, heavy metals, microbials, and other unwanted substances are in the final product by checking out the test results.

Checklist: Good, mid, or actually trash?

Compare your flower with this checklist and see where it falls on the quality spectrum:

Good weed qualities:

• Vibrant colors
• Frosty trichome coating
• Intense aroma
• Complex aroma
• Dense but not hard
• Slight bounce-back when squeezed

**Mid weed qualities: **

• Typical weed colors (greens, purples, oranges, etc)
• Light trichome dusting
• Noticeable aroma
• Somewhat dense
• Few stems and seeds

Trash weed qualities:

• Dull brown color
• No noticeable trichome coating
• Dull, undetectable, or musty “off” smell
• Brittle, crumbly to the touch
• Lots of stems and seeds
• Mold or mildew present

There’s nothing wrong with smoking mid weed. It’s a budget-friendly way to get high. Of course, higher quality weed is generally preferred among connoisseurs, but don’t let anyone tell you your mid weed is anything less than mid. It’s a perfectly reasonable option.

However, trash weed is a solid no-no. Whether you bought some seriously bad stuff or found some stashed away trash weed, it’s not worth smoking. The lack of color and aroma indicate that the effects will be muted and the taste might be nasty. Worse, if it contains mold or mildew (which is a surprisingly common problem among commercial weed), you could actually make yourself sick by smoking it. Toss it out.

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