What’s In A Strain?
Sure, we all know what strains are. We’ve got the classics that seem to never go out of style: Blue Dream, Jack Herer, and Girl Scout Cookies (GSC), among others.
The word ‘strain’ is common slang used to refer to different cultivars or varieties of both hemp and cannabis plants. And today’s strains come from a very long line of predecessors that were created over decades of careful breeding. The Cannabis sativa L. family tree is huge.
Indica, Sativa, Hybrids: Let’s Get Weird
Before we became mad scientists crossing cultivars left and right to produce ingenious hybrid strain innovations like White Widow and Gorilla Glue, there were the “parents” at the top of the strain family tree. These include what we call “landrace” strains that evolved naturally: Thai, Durban Poison, Acapulco Gold, and Hindu Kush, for example.
Bigger picture, the OG landrace strains came from two distinct subspecies of the cannabis plant—what we now call indica and sativa. Pure Cannabis indica plants are shorter and have broad, dark green leaves, while pure Cannabis sativa plants grow taller and develop thinner, pale green leaves.
Any cannabis connoisseur knows their indicas from their sativas, and generally has a good sense as to how hybrids might perform based on whether they are sativa-dominant or indica-dominant. These remain the go-to ways for consumers to shorthand what their experience with a strain might be.
But here’s the thing: the cannabis plant, along with the physiology of how our body interacts with any particular plant, is complex. Cannabis has hundreds of chemical compounds, and due largely to our own contributions to cultivation and breeding, the chemical composition of plants has evolved substantially over the years.
Genetics, Cultivation & Chemotypes
While one grower might get their hands on Blue Dream genetics, the chemical expression of their mature plants is impacted by a whole lot more than just genetics. Temperature, nutrients, humidity, light and other cultivation techniques can make two plants with the same genetics turn out quite differently when grown by two different farmers.
So what’s a weed lover to do?
Focus on the chemical composition of a specific product or flower.
The effects that we associate with an indica, for example—like relaxation, pain relief, couch lock, euphoria—don’t come from one particular compound in the plant. THC plays with CBD, but these two play with over one hundred other cannabinoids like CBN and CBG to name only two.
And cannabinoids play with another prominent group of compounds in the plant, terpenes. Terps are what give cannabis its scent and flavor, but they also have effects all their own like relaxation, mood boosting and pain relief.
So, given the genetic diversity we’ve achieved over generations of cross-breeding, today’s strains are often very different from a pure indica strain or a pure sativa strain. You could even end up with an “indica” that makes you feel like a sativa might, and vice-versa. Maybe you’ve already experienced this and wondered what was up.
Paying attention to the concentrations and combinations of key active ingredients —like cannabinoids and terpenes—in strains you love could help guide your future purchases more accurately than just going by the strain name or its designation of sativa or indica.