Finding pot from a respectable grower has become surprisingly hard if you're not ready to spend top dollar, but it's no joke to Sam Rosenberg, Andrew Simons and Antonio Flores. The cultivation crew at Laughing Grass dispensary in Denver is proud to serve quality cannabis without expensive marketing flair, and the trio believes that their $30 eighths and $100 ounces stack up with other hitmakers charging twice that.
"We kind of feel like underdogs. The bigger players have these huge followings, and they don't always want to try something new," says Flores, who handles harvesting and post-cultivation work.
Laughing Grass's mothership dispensary and growing operation are in an old tile factory at 1110 West Virginia Avenue. Although the building doesn't sit in a heavily trafficked area and legal pot's allure is no longer strong enough to draw people from across town, much less the country, Rosenberg, the director of cultivation, hopes that Laughing Grass will attract more customers by selling its flower cheaper from the source. The model, similar to that of craft breweries in the early 2010s, isn't groundbreaking, but it does go against current cannabis industry norms.
The majority of Colorado's craft cannabis is now grown by wholesale labels, with eighths from the likes of 710 Labs or Green Dot Labs packaged in sleek jars and carrying $50 price tags. However, state regulations forced most of Colorado's legal weed to be grown in-house during the early days of recreational dispensaries, so most of the best growers were working for dispensaries. Those rules faded after a few years, and now most growers prefer to run their own ship. Dispensary-grown flower has since been relegated to the bottom tier, with few exceptions.
Laughing Grass's Ice Cream Kandy has become one of the grow's top strains.
Laughing Grass Dispensary
Laughing Grass opened in 2018, after the rule changes were made, and owner Corey Rosen hired Rosenberg, Simons and Flores a year later. They then focused on tuning up the 200-light growing operation, which eventually began producing buds for other dispensaries. After a shift in store management and a handful of breeding projects, however, Laughing Grass believes it has the goods to become a regular dispensary in the rotation of educated cannabis users. And as Colorado becomes less and less of a destination for cannabis tourism, local followings have never been more important.
"Every weekend, we'd have four or five cars from other states waiting for us to open in the morning, but that's not the case anymore," Rosenberg recalls. "We had a pretty big wholesale operation going in the pandemic, and still do. But we're trying to get more people to come into the store. We've got a lot of new stuff coming out of the grow, and we like to grow classics, too."
Shoppers can find old-school favorites like AK-47, Sour Diesel and the CBD-heavy Harlequin, as well as a long list of Chemdog-centric strains at Laughing Grass, while Simons and Flores have been working on new strains from Hand Banana, an "offensively strong" banana-forward strain created internally. H-GMO, a mix of its new banana stud and the ever-popular GMO, was an early hit, but more strains are in the burner, according to Rosenberg and Simons.
Simons, who leads the day-to-day inside the grow, is particularly proud of the Chem offerings at the store, but the creative aspects of breeding have also sparked new life into the grow, he says.
"It's really fun to pheno-hunt. I live for that funky, burnt-tire sort of stuff," he adds. "Now that we have the grow dialed in, being able to do these sorts of projects brings a new level of fun to the day."
Keeping up with consumer trends and preferences is a constantly changing puzzle, according to the Laughing Grass trio. Dispensary shoppers can't get enough of strains with candy qualities right now after years of infatuation with Cookies, Cakes and Pies, yet customers always want something new on the shelf. Seasoned nostrils in the grow prefer more gas-forward qualities, but most new users point their noses away from pungent, skunky weed.
"It's so hard. Sometimes we have plans in the grow for months for a new candy strain or something, and then everyone wants purps all of a sudden," Rosenberg bemoans. "That's part of the business, though. The goal here is to sell flower, and we're looking for qualities that get public approval."
Ice Cream Kandy is one of Laughing Grass's most popular strains at the dispensary and on the wholesale level, thanks to sugary characteristics and a frosty look that helps coveted bag appeal. Flores, Rosenberg and Simons believe it's the perfect addition to the breeding line, and have already crossed the strain with Hand Banana. The hope is that the newest strain, Banana Stand, has the potential to cross that bridge between trichome-laden candy appeal and the odoriferous funk that so many pot nerds love.
There's always money in a banana stand.
