AK-47: four regions of ancestry, met in one of them

At a glance

Type

Sativa-leaning hybrid

Parent strains

a Colombian sativa × a Mexican sativa × a Thai sativa landrace × an Afghani landrace

Where and when it appeared

the Netherlands, the early 1990s

Credited to

Serious Seeds (Simon)

Flowering

9–10 weeks indoors, in the range growers usually report (as usually given)

Terpenes usually reported

myrcene, beta-caryophyllene, limonene (as usually given)

Aroma

damp earth, skunk funk, dry wood, citrus peel

Aroma family

skunk and earth

How the character is usually described

sits in the middle, without a strong lean, conversational rather than introspective, a clear-headed start

Also sold under

AK

Compare it against

White Widow, Jack Herer, Super Silver Haze

Documented composition, undocumented crossing

Serious Seeds states which four regions the parent material came from. What has never been published is how those four were combined — which was crossed onto which, in what order, over how many generations. So the composition is documented and the pedigree is not, and the catalogue entry on this site marks exactly that distinction.

This is a more honest position than most strain pages take. It is common to see a neat four-way cross drawn as though somebody had the breeding notes; nobody does, and inventing the diagram would add nothing except false confidence.

What can be said is that three of the four ancestral regions are equatorial and one is mountain indica. Equatorial plants flower long; the Afghani component is what pulls the finish back to nine or ten weeks and makes the plant practical to grow.

The Thai quarter

Thai landrace material sits in the ancestry of very few internationally known cultivars, and this is one of them. On a page written in Pattaya that is worth pausing on: a plant assembled in the Netherlands from four continents' worth of seed carries genetics that came from this country before the industry that now names strains existed at all.

It also explains a little of the aroma. The profile is earthy and skunky with dry wood and a citrus-peel edge — not the sweet fruit of the modern dessert families, and not the incense-and-lemon of the Haze line either. It sits in its own corner, which is why it appears as its own aroma family in the list.

Nothing about that ancestry makes the plant local. Thai landraces and a Dutch-bred hybrid built partly from them are different things, and a jar sold here is a jar of what somebody grew here, under this climate, this season.

What we repeat and what we do not

The breeder claims more than two dozen competition placements for this line over three decades. That is the breeder's own count, published on the breeder's own site, and this page does not repeat it as an independent fact — which is why the facts block above lists no competition results for it while listing them for plants where an outside record exists.

The classification is documented rather than merely repeated: the breeder describes the ratio himself. That is the strongest form of evidence available for this kind of claim, and it is still a claim by an interested party.

Where a fact is only as good as the person asserting it, this cluster says so. Confidence marks in the table above are printed for the reader, not kept in the source code.

Reading it beside White Widow and Jack Herer

White Widow is the closest comparison and the pairing is instructive: both are early-1990s Dutch work, both sit near the middle, and both have landraces rather than named cultivars as parents. The split is aromatic — White Widow is pine and pepper, this is earth, skunk and wood.

Jack Herer, from the same decade and country, went the other way entirely: terpinolene and pine, bright and resinous. Someone who finds AK-47 too earthy usually gets on with Jack Herer, and the reverse holds too.

The character here is described as sitting in the middle and being conversational rather than introspective. Like everything else in this section that is a description of how people talk about the plant, not a forecast of what it will do.

AK-47: common questions