Gelato: the label names a family and stops there

At a glance

Type

Indica-leaning hybrid (as usually given)

Parent strains

Sunset Sherbet × Thin Mint GSC (as usually given)

Where and when it appeared

the San Francisco Bay Area, the early 2010s (as usually given)

Credited to

Cookie Fam / Sherbinski

Flowering

8–9 weeks indoors, in the range growers usually report (as usually given)

Terpenes usually reported

beta-caryophyllene, limonene, myrcene, alpha-humulene, linalool (as usually given)

Aroma

cream, sweet berry, citrus peel, sweet dough, black pepper

Aroma family

dessert and baking

How the character is usually described

sits in the middle, without a strong lean, noticeable weight in the body, conversational rather than introspective

Also sold under

Gelato #33, Larry Bird

Compare it against

Runtz, Girl Scout Cookies, Wedding Cake

What the number means

The 33 in Gelato #33 is a selection index. It records that this was the thirty-third phenotype pulled out of the hunt and kept, and it says nothing about strength, quality or rank. People read it as a grade constantly, and it is not one.

Larry Bird is the other name the same selection travels under, which is a basketball reference rather than a description. Between a number and a nickname, neither label on this plant tells you anything sensory — the facts table above does that work instead.

The cross is Sunset Sherbet with Thin Mint GSC, made by the Cookie Fam and Sherbinski in the Bay Area in the early 2010s. It is a second-generation dessert plant: its own parent is a selection from the cultivar that started the category.

Cream is what separates it from its parent

Put it beside GSC and the difference resolves immediately. GSC pushes dough and mint over an earthy floor. This pushes cream and citrus, because Sunset Sherbet is the parent doing the work on that side.

The reported terpene list is longer here than on most pages in this cluster: beta-caryophyllene, limonene, myrcene, alpha-humulene and linalool. Humulene is the dry-hops-and-cut-wood note and linalool the soft floral one, and together they are why a good example smells layered rather than simply sweet.

The aroma descriptors are cream, sweet berry, citrus peel, sweet dough and black pepper. The pepper at the end is the caryophyllene showing through, and it is the detail that keeps the whole thing from reading as dessert with nothing underneath.

Purple is a pigment, not a grade

Purple in the calyxes appears mid-flower when nights are cool, and photographs of it sell a great many jars. It is a pigment expression and it correlates with temperature rather than with anything you would want to buy.

In a tropical grow room it may not appear at all. A green Gelato grown well in this climate is a better jar than a purple one grown badly somewhere cooler, and colour cannot tell the two apart. The Granddaddy Purple page in this cluster goes into how that pigment works, because that is the plant that made colour a selling point in the first place.

Eight to nine weeks of bloom is the usual report, which is ordinary — this is a plant that spread on aroma and on lineage, not on being fast or slow.

Sorting it against the rest of the dessert shelf

Runtz is its child on one side and the sweetest of this group; Wedding Cake is vanilla frosting with a gassy floor; Do-Si-Dos is the heavy, floral one. This sits between them: creamier than GSC, less candied than Runtz, less gassy than Wedding Cake.

The practical question at a counter is which of those four descriptions you want, and it is a better question than the name, because all four names get applied loosely and the descriptions do not.

Character reports place it in the middle without a strong lean, with weight in the body and a talkative quality. That is how people describe it; a specific jar, grown by specific people, is still its own thing.

Gelato: common questions