THC is no longer the headline. Terpenes are..

Ten years ago selling a strain by its THC percentage made sense — the spread on the market was wild, anywhere from 10% to 22%. Today any commercially viable genetic sits in the 24–28% band. Anything above that is overfeeding, marketing copy, or a lab drawing pretty numbers. The real difference between strains is no longer the percentage; it is which effect and which aroma you actually get.

What terpenes are.

Terpenes are the aromatic molecules the plant produces alongside the cannabinoids. There are around 200 of them; about twenty matter in cannabis: limonene (citrus), myrcene (herbal), caryophyllene (pepper), linalool (lavender), pinene (pine), terpinolene (fresh greenery). The combination and the ratio of terpenes decide how a strain smells — and, more importantly, how it works on you.

Entourage.

Cannabinoids and terpenes work together — this is the entourage effect. The same THC with a different terpene set produces a different experience: with myrcene, sedative and couch-locked; with limonene, lifted and bright; with caryophyllene, bodily and muscle-relaxing. Two strains with identical THC numbers can behave completely differently.

How we measure it.

We use two tools. The first is the nose: several people independently describe the aroma of every phenotype in a blind format, and we keep the ones whose descriptions converge. The second is GC-MS analysis of the terpene profile, which we run on every batch. A terpene tag will soon appear on every strain page in the catalogue — right above the table with THC and flowering time.