Wine, coffee, tea and whisky all have formal tasting methods, with a set procedure, a controlled environment and a shared vocabulary. Cannabis mostly does not, apart from a handful of competitions. So most quality checks come down to looking at a jar and guessing.
There is a method. Alchimia has documented one, and it is not complicated. It is written here as a quality-control tool: for growers checking their own harvest, GACP farms, licensed shops doing intake checks, and lab or competition panels. It is not a guide to personal consumption.
This post sets out the procedure, the vocabulary and the physiological limits of your own equipment. One of those limits catches out most people by about the third sample, usually without them noticing.
Legal note — read first. In Thailand, cannabis flower is a controlled herb under the Notification of the Ministry of Public Health Re: Controlled Herbs (Cannabis) B.E. 2568 (issued 26 June 2025). Use is for medical purposes under current rules: flower may be dispensed only against a prescription on form PT 33 from an authorised practitioner. Smoking in public is restricted, and flower may not be advertised or sold online. Recreational use is not permitted. The Cannabis Control Act is still a draft: Cabinet approved it on 22/09/2026 and it is now before the House. In many other Southeast Asian countries cannabis is illegal. If you live in one, apply only the dry, non-consumption parts of this method, and only to legal hemp. Nothing in this post encourages anyone to break local law.
Preparing the assessment
Keep the method constant. Most of the useful information comes from the dry stage, and many QC programmes stop there, with lab terpene and cannabinoid results alongside. If a lawful panel also heats the samples, use the same device and settings for every sample. Otherwise you are comparing devices, not flower.
Clean palate. Don’t eat, drink anything flavoured, smoke or brush your teeth just beforehand. Water only.
Clean room. Use a neutral space with no cooking smells, incense, perfume or air freshener. Clean, odour-free hands. Ventilate between samples.
Conditions. Alchimia’s guidance is about 22–24 °C and around 50% relative humidity, so samples don’t lose their aroma while you handle them. Warmth releases volatiles and a cold room mutes them, so the same sample can smell weaker in a cold room than at about 23 °C.
Assess sober. No alcohol or other substances before or during a session. Anything else in your system affects your judgement.
Take notes as you go, not afterwards. Memory for smell is unreliable and fades fast.
Running it in Thai heat and humidity
On a normal day in Thailand or most of Southeast Asia the room is above 30 °C with humidity well over 70%. You won’t reach the target without air conditioning, so:
- Use an air-conditioned room and leave it running long enough to bring the temperature down and dry the air. A cheap digital thermo-hygrometer tells you when you are close. Write the actual temperature and RH on the sheet so later sessions can be compared.
- Let sealed jars reach room temperature before you open them. If you open a jar straight from a cold store into warm, humid air, moisture condenses on the flower and spoils both the sample and the reading.
- Keep samples open only as long as you need them. In humid air, dry flower picks up moisture quickly, and that changes texture, the stem snap and the smell.
- If you can’t control the room, say so. A reading taken at 32 °C and 80% RH is still useful for spotting faults. It just shouldn’t be compared directly with one taken in controlled conditions.
Stage one: dry assessment
This happens before anything is heated, and it tells you more than most people expect. For many farms and shops it is the whole assessment.
Sight. Colour: light or dark, and whether it is even. Structure: dense or airy, and whether that holds across the sample. Trichome coverage, and whether the heads are intact or knocked off. Trim quality. Any seeds, stems or foreign matter. Whether it looks young or mature, and whether it looks dry or damp.
Touch. Hard, soft, spongy, sticky, dry, brittle, dusty. Squeeze a flower gently: it should give a little and spring back slightly. If it crumbles to powder, it is over-dried. If it stays compressed and feels cold, it is too moist, and mould is likely to follow.
Sound. A small stem should snap cleanly. If it bends, the flower is not dry enough.
Smell, closed. Bring it to your nose without disturbing it. Write down your first impression before you start thinking about it.
Then break it. Split a flower in half and smell the inside. This is the most informative single moment in the whole procedure. The inside usually smells stronger than the surface, and often different, because the surface has been losing volatiles to the air since the day it was jarred. If the surface smells of nothing but the inside is intensely aromatic, the sample was stored badly but is intact inside. If the inside smells of nothing as well, it is old, was dried too hot, or never had much aroma.
This is also where you catch problems:
- Musty or damp-basement: possible mould. Discard the sample. Don’t consume it.
- Hay or grass: chlorophyll left over from drying too fast or curing too briefly. This is a drying/curing fault, not mould.
- Ammonia: jarred too wet and fermenting.
- A chemical or sharp note that doesn’t belong: suggests residue and is worth a lab test.
Optional dry pull. Alchimia also describes drawing air through the ground, unlit sample. This gives a clean read of the base aroma without any combustion products.
Stage two: heating (lawful panels only)
Do this stage only where it is legal for the assessor, for example a licensed or medically supervised panel. In Thailand, flower must be obtained by lawful prescription. Everyone else should stop at stage one.
First draw. Exhale through both mouth and nose. Most of what we call “flavour” is detected retronasally, as air passes from the throat up into the nasal cavity. If you exhale only through the mouth, you lose most of that information.
Second draw. Keep the vapour or smoke in the mouth briefly before exhaling, so the tongue and the retronasal pathway both get involved.
Record the main notes. Be specific: not “fruity” but “ripe mango” or “green mango”. The two are genuinely different.
The finish. After exhaling, notice what stays in the mouth and on the tongue. Aftertaste is separate from flavour, and it often gives away badly dried or badly cured material.
Ash. If the sample was burned, ash colour mainly reflects moisture content and how completely it burned. Controlled studies have not linked ash colour, or taste, to pre-harvest flushing (see topic 1136, Pre-Harvest Flushing: Science or Myth?). Dark ash that won’t stay lit usually means the sample is too moist. Treat ash as a rough burn-quality signal, not a judgement of how the crop was grown.
Vocabulary
You can’t describe what you have no word for, and vocabulary is a large part of what separates a trained assessor from an untrained one. A working list, grouped by sense:
Touch: hard, soft, spongy, sticky, dry, brittle, crumbly, dense, heavy, light
Sound: crisp, dry, snapping
Sight: light, dark, rough, refined, clean, dirty, dense, immature, mature, dry, damp
Smell and taste: acidic, sweet, deep, light, savoury, sour, spicy, pungent, dried fruit, ripe fruit, overripe fruit, floral, cheesy, wine-like, raw meat, musty
That last group is worth reading twice, because it is broader than most people’s cannabis vocabulary. Cheese, wine and raw meat are real and recurring cannabis descriptors. Having permission to use them changes what you can perceive, because naming and perceiving are not separate processes.
Ed Rosenthal’s The Big Book of Buds published an organoleptic chart for cannabis on this model. Wine and coffee aroma wheels work the same way, moving from broad categories in to specific ones.
Stage three: tolerability notes (supervised settings only)
This applies only where heating or use is lawful and supervised, for example a patient using prescribed flower and reporting back to their practitioner. Keep it neutral and factual:
Onset. How long before any effect is noticeable.
Adverse effects. Anxiety, racing heart, dry mouth, red eyes, dizziness. Record them. They are part of the profile and should be reported to the prescriber.
A caution that deserves emphasis. Some older guides suggest patients judge whether a sample helps their condition. That is a personal observation, not a clinical trial. An uncontrolled, unblinded self-assessment made right after taking a psychoactive substance is one of the weakest forms of evidence there is. Record what you notice. Don’t conclude what it treats.
The limit nobody accounts for: your nose stops working
This physiological limit ruins most informal comparison sessions, and almost nobody plans for it.
Olfactory adaptation: smell receptors become less sensitive with continuous exposure to an odour, and recover with time away from it. That is why you stop noticing a restaurant’s smell a few minutes after walking in. Sensitivity comes back once you leave, but not instantly.
The practical consequences:
- Later samples are not comparable with the first ones. The further you get into a run without a break, the more your readings reflect your own receptor state rather than the sample.
- Work in small blocks of about 3–4 samples, with real breaks between them. Leave the room, get fresh air, wait. Trained sensory panels routinely assess more samples than this, but they build in breaks.
- Randomise the order if you are comparing seriously. If there is more than one assessor, give each person a different order. Otherwise a sample’s position in the sequence gets read as a property of the sample.
- Don’t put the strongest-smelling sample first, for the same reason.
- Code the samples (A, B, C… or numbers) so assessors don’t know the strain, grower or batch.
And a myth worth killing: sniffing coffee beans does not reset your sense of smell. Perfume counters offer coffee beans as a “nasal palate cleanser”, and the ritual is well established. It has been tested. Grosofsky, Haupert and Versteeg (Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2011) found that sniffing coffee beans did not improve identification of a new fragrance compared with lemon or plain air. The ritual is not supported.
What does work is time and fresh air.
A reusable scoring sheet
A farm, shop or panel can copy this for each sample. Score 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) and always write a note. A score without a note can’t be acted on.
Header: sample code · batch/lot · harvest and packing date · assessor · date · room temperature / RH · position in block
| Criterion | What to check | Score 1–5 | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appearance | Colour evenness, structure, trichome heads intact, trim | ||
| Cleanliness | Seeds, stems, foreign matter, visible mould | ||
| Moisture / texture | Squeeze test, spring-back, stem snap | ||
| Aroma, closed | First impression, intensity | ||
| Aroma, broken | Interior intensity and character | ||
| Faults | Musty (discard) / hay-grass (drying-cure) / ammonia (jarred wet) / chemical | Pass / Fail | |
| Overall dry quality | Assessor’s overall judgement |
If the batch has lab results (cannabinoids, terpenes, microbial, residues), attach them to the sheet. Sensory notes and lab data together are far more useful than either alone.
Why bother
Three reasons.
It makes your grow reports useful. A structured sensory section is worth more than an adjective. This method gives you the structure. For examples, see topic 248 (Strain Reviews), and for the underlying evidence, topic 273 (Science and Research).
It catches problems. Must, hay/grass and ammonia can all be detected in stage one, before anything is heated, and they matter more than any pleasant note you might find.
It trains perception. The vocabulary is not decoration. People who practise structured assessment tend to pick up distinctions they missed before, largely because they now have categories to sort the sensations into. Run the dry assessment regularly with a notebook and a scoring sheet, on your own harvests or on legal hemp samples, and you will notice the difference.
The procedure, the room conditions and the unlit dry pull follow Alchimia’s “Introduction to cannabis tasting” (Introduction to cannabis tasting). The organoleptic chart is from Ed Rosenthal’s The Big Book of Buds. The coffee-bean finding is from Grosofsky, Haupert & Versteeg, Perceptual and Motor Skills (2011).