Strain notes
Strain notes: start from the smell, not from the label
Nobody chooses between twenty names. People choose between about five smells, and then within one of them. So this page is arranged the way the decision actually happens: five aroma groups, a line explaining who each group suits, and one sentence per cultivar saying how it differs from its immediate neighbours. Pick the group first and the individual pages will make sense.
Five groups, twenty pages
Pine, earth and pepper
The plainest corner of a shelf and the oldest. These are plants bred before fruit became a selling point, and their aroma vocabulary is forest floor, resin, dry wood and black pepper — nothing sweet, nothing baked.
That plainness is why they work as reference points. If you know how one of these reads to you, everything else on a menu can be described as a distance from it.
Choose here if sweet smells put you off, or if you want a baseline to judge everything else against.
- Northern Lights
Earth, pine and hash depth, with no fruit at all. Six to seven weeks of bloom — the short schedule that made indoor growing practical.
- White Widow
Pine and pepper with a citrus edge; a Dutch classic that sits squarely in the middle and is the easiest reference point on this list.
- AK-47
Earth, skunk and dry wood. Four ancestral regions, one of them Thai, documented by the breeder himself.
Fuel, solvent and lemon
The register people mean when they say a jar smells strong before they have opened it properly. Solvent and petrol notes sit over an earthy floor, and what separates the four plants here is what else is in the room: lemon, sourness, roasted cocoa or berry.
Almost every dessert cultivar of the last fifteen years has one of these somewhere upstream, which makes this group the most useful family tree on the site.
Choose here if you like a sharp, chemical top note, and use the four descriptions to decide how heavy you want it.
- Bruce Banner
Berry laid over OG Kush fuel. The name is a comic-book reference and tells you nothing; the phenotype number tells you everything.
- GG4
Solvent with roasted cocoa and coffee underneath. Exists because of an accidental pollination, and renamed after a 2017 lawsuit.
- OG Kush
Lemon over fuel and earth, from a disputed lineage that half of modern western cannabis descends from.
- Sour Diesel
The sharp, sour version of fuel rather than the heavy one. Ten to eleven weeks of bloom, and a second parent nobody has settled.
Citrus, incense and resin
The haze corner. Lemon and citrus peel over incense, green herbs and pine, with no sugar anywhere in it. Three of these four take ten weeks or more to flower, which is why the names appear on far more menus than the plants can be on.
Blue Dream is included here because its structure is the same: a berry note laid over a haze backbone rather than a sweet plant in its own right.
Choose here if you want bright and dry rather than sweet, and read the flowering times before believing a label.
- Amnesia Haze
Lemon over incense, with ancestry in the same equatorial material Thai landraces come from. Ten to twelve weeks, sometimes fourteen.
- Jack Herer
Pine and lemon with a floral lift from ocimene. Named after a person, and split into phenotypes that finish a week apart.
- Super Silver Haze
Citrus and incense with a skunk backing. A documented cross built to make haze growable, and the winner of three consecutive Cups.
- Blue Dream
Sweet berry over a bright haze backbone; the Californian clone that became a house default across the 2010s.
Bakery, cream and vanilla
Everything in this group descends from one Bay Area cross of the early 2010s, and between them these four changed what a menu sounds like everywhere in the world. The impression of dough and frosting comes from terpenes, not from anything sugary.
They are close relatives, so the differences are specific and small: mint, cream, vanilla or florals, over floors that range from earthy to gassy.
Choose here if you want the register that dominates modern menus, and pick by which of the four notes you want on top.
- Do-Si-Dos
Citrus and dough with a floral line underneath from linalool. The heavy, slow end of the dessert group.
- Gelato
Cream and citrus rather than dough and mint. A family of numbered selections, not one plant.
- Girl Scout Cookies
Dough and mint over an earthy floor. The plant the entire dessert era descends from, and a classification catalogues still argue about.
- Wedding Cake
Vanilla and lemon over a gassy Kush floor. A clone-only selection that growers, not breeders, named.
Fruit, candy and grape
Sweetness that is genuinely in the aroma rather than in the marketing — at least in the plants that started these lines. Grape, tropical fruit and confectionery, with weights ranging from almost none to considerable.
This is also where colour gets used as a sales argument, and where it is worth knowing that purple is a pigment expressed by cool nights and not a grade.
Choose here if fruit is what you want, and decide how much weight you want underneath it.
- Runtz
Candy on top, cream and gas underneath. The most copied name of the current era, prefixes and all.
- Zkittlez
Clean fruit candy and grape with almost no weight beneath it, and a third parent the breeders have never named.
- Granddaddy Purple
Grape and florals over damp earth. The plant that made colour a selling point, with two competing accounts of its own parentage.
- Purple Punch
Grape and vanilla, candied rather than perfumed, and fast — seven to eight weeks in a family that usually takes longer.
- Pineapple Express
Pineapple and tropical fruit over dry wood — fruit rather than sweets. Its origin story is contradicted by the film that made it famous.
Why a strain name guarantees less than people think
Nobody owns these names. A cultivar bred thirty years ago has been re-selected by hundreds of growers since, in different climates, from different cuttings, with different intentions. Two jars honestly labelled with the same name can be further apart than either is from a jar with a different label entirely.
That is before the second problem, which is that names sell. A grower with something sweet and a market that recognises one sweet name will use that name, and no register exists to say otherwise. This is not unique to Thailand; it is the state of the whole trade.
So use these pages the way a wine note is useful rather than the way a specification is: they tell you what a family tends to smell like and what to compare it against. The jar in front of you is still the thing being bought.
What each page actually contains
A facts block that is computed rather than written: parentage, where and when the plant appeared, who it is credited to, flowering time, the terpenes laboratories usually report, and the aroma descriptors. Every one of those rows carries a visible mark saying how firmly it stands — documented, commonly given, or disputed.
Then prose about the thing that makes that cultivar different from its neighbours: a lawsuit, a withheld parent, a phenotype split, a bloom too long to be commercial, a name that arrived before the plant. Where two published accounts disagree, both are printed and neither is chosen.
The comparison rows are not decorative. Each page names the two or three cultivars it is worth holding against, and those names are links, which is how you walk the shelf without reading all twenty pages.
What these pages never contain
No price, no weight, no stock status and no product photographs — public advertising of a controlled herb is restricted in Thailand, and stock changes daily in any case. What is on the shelf today is answered at the counter or by message.
No cannabinoid figures and no claims about strength: those numbers belong on a laboratory report for a specific batch, not on a page about a cultivar in general. And no health claims of any kind, because a shop is not a clinic and a description is not a diagnosis.
About strain names
Does the same strain name mean the same plant everywhere?
No. Names are unowned and widely re-selected, so two honestly labelled jars can differ substantially. Treat a name as a family resemblance rather than a specification.
What is more reliable than a strain name?
Aroma. Describe the family you like — pine, sweet fruit, fuel, citrus — and a counter can match it from whatever arrived this week.
Which group should I start with if I have no idea?
Pine and earth. It is the plainest register on a shelf, which makes it the easiest thing to measure everything else against once you know how it reads to you.
Why are there no cannabinoid percentages on these pages?
Those figures describe a specific tested batch, not a cultivar in general, and they say nothing about aroma or curing. Ask to see the lab report for the batch in the jar.
Get in touch
One number for everything — a person answers.
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