Fox Street Wellness4773 Fox Street Denver, CO 80216 720-881-7460 www.foxstreetwellness.com Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday; Closed Sunday. Raw marijuana price range: $25 to $40/eighth, $200 to $250/ounce. Non-members pay about $5 more per eighth, capped at $320/ounce. Other types of medicine: Hash, wax, BHO shatter, minimal edibles. Online menu: Yes. Handicap-accessible:: Yes.
There aren't any signs on the building yet, but the security cameras over the door hint at the use of the otherwise nondescript building. Inside, Fox Street Wellness is clean and quaint. It's also new. A manager I spoke with said the center opened in April, and was one of the very last dispensaries to do so. "We wanted to make sure we were up to code and met all the requirements," he explained. They converted the front of the building into a small but functional dispensary, tiling the floors and painting the walls a blend of earthy greens, tans and blues. Against those walls are color and black-and-white Colorado nature pics shot by local photogs, which hang from thin metal cables strung from the ceiling.
The simplicity flows through to the sparse but welcoming bud bar. A dark-stained wood and black metal counter is in front of the the west wall, with all thirteen strains stacked in tall jars along the top, prices increasing from left to right. There's some artwork on the walls, but otherwise the room is left wide-open. It made me realize how much crap -- pipes, shirts -- other dispensaries put out for sale to patients, and how nice an uncluttered space can be.To the right of the herb jars is a simple display of the few edibles at Fox Street, including Blue Kudu and Cheeba Chews. The dispensary also has a small display with grams of its bubble hash, butane wax and strain-specific shatter hash. The latter two sell for $30 a gram, while bubble hash goes for $25. The shatter, processed by Sacred Seed Pharms, looked well made, with a dark caramelized sugar color; the wax and bubble hash had more of a generic warehouse appearance.
The strains range in price from $25 to $40; high-yielders get put on the low-price tier, while low-yielders like Mob Boss stay up around the $40 range per eighth. Ounce prices are capped at $250 for members, and get up to about $320 per ounce for non-members. (Non-members get member pricing for the first thirty days after their initial visit.)
My budtender was a woman who knew a lot about the strains she was selling. I told her that I prefer more uplifting sativas, and she zeroed in on a handful of her favorites, while encouraging me to check out the entire stock --including a jar of impressive pink Strawberry Cough buds, and another with golf ball-shaped Blue Dream nuggets.Most of the thirteen strains looked like they were grown really well, with healthy fat buds that were fully developed and clearly harvested at the right time. The buds also looked like they had been dried and cured well at some point, but then someone put humidipacks in the jars to add moisture. As a result, the strains had a similar wet-cardboard smell, rather than anything distinct. A manager I spoke with said the center is testing the humidipacks, but so far they really like how the moisture content stays constant.
Page down for the rest of the review, as well as more cannabis photos. I understand wanting to not sell dried-out buds, but proper curing and having display jars so that the stock jars aren't opened and closed all day long can mitigate the need for adding moisture. Strains like the Lamb's Bread and the Casey Sour smelled nearly identical, even though one should have a more acrid, sour stink while the other borders on sweet skunkiness mixed with earthy hash.It was a shame, too, because the $30/eighth Lamb's Bread buds were all fat, moderately dense pinecones of THC goodness. The small calyxes had thin hairs like threads of red silk. The one stalk I brought home dried out after a few hours without the lid on; broken up, some of the sweet skunkiness came out. It was unexpectedly potent as well, with a nice, energetic pick-me-up that made it a good morning smoke to get the stomach gears rolling.
The $30/eighth Casey Sour didn't fare as well, though. Despite being coated in dark amber trichomes, the leafy buds burned with the same bland, wood-pulp flavor as their smell. Only one of the buds I broke up at home let out any sort of Sour smell, but it was only on first crack of the bud -- and I still didn't notice it in the flavor when it was sparked up in a clean pipe. Nevertheless, it was a mildly stoney sample, one that went well when winding down at the end of the day.
Three or four strains managed to avoid the humidipack curse, including the extremely stinky and sour East Coat Sour Diesel and a Durban Sweet Kush crop that was ripe with the Pine-Sol spiciness of Durban. Of the two, the Durban Sweet Kush was the most appealing, with a light green coloration to the leaves and calyxes and light, rust-colored pistils snaking around. There was good trichome coverage as well, with a sandy dusting around the entire bud. The bud was moist, though, and stems tended to bend and peel rather than snap for the first few days I had it at home. It burned well, however, with surprisingly little popping for the moisture content and a pleasant pine forest undertone to the otherwise spoiled lemon spice Durban flavor. The $35/eighth East Coast Sour Diesel was impressively tart and rubbery out of the jar in the shop, like pulling a pair of brand-new snowboard boots from their box. Fox Street's cut is a really wild grower, with some major stacking of the calyxes creating what is called fox tails. In a way, it looked like the green tentacles of an upside-down marijuana octopus. The plant was well developed, and left to flower well into its fall stages as the few brown and purple sugar leaves left behind indicated. The buds burned down to a snow-white ash and had an enjoyably earthy flavor out of a dry pipe -- and went down especially well through the bubbler. The manager said the ECSD is a favorite among the growers and staff, and I understand why.He also said that all of their plants are grown in an organic peat moss medium, and are hand-watered and hand-trimmed. And that effort is obvious in the size and overall quality of the buds. If they got rid of the cigar humidifiers, I think they could be putting out a much better product for their patients. Still, the shop is worth checking out -- especially for the reasonable prices on what is otherwise solid-quality herb.
Read more reviews from Westword's medical marijuana dispensary critic, William Breathes, in our Mile Highs and Lows blog, and keep up with all your Colorado marijuana news over at The Latest Word.
