So Good Brings Bright Eyes and Blue Dream Back Into Dispensaries

Falling in love and starting a business together has high ceilings and low floors for bank accounts and relationships, but Jaymes Chancellor and Valerie Van Halen believe their cannabis is good enough to prevail. In fact, they're so accustomed to hearing "This is so good!" that they named their growing operation after the phrase.

So Good, the engaged couple's recreational cultivation in north Denver, is less than a year old. They're only a handful of harvests into their journey together, but Chancellor and Van Halen made a splash in Boulder dispensaries this summer, thanks to successful runs of hash-heavy strains and a buried classic. Before So Good's Blue Dream and Papaya were selling out and Soiku Bano came calling to make rosin out of its flower, however, Chancellor and Van Halen were facing unemployment at the same shuttering dispensary.

A proud cannabis nerd since the age of eighteen, Chancellor began working in Colorado's medical marijuana industry over a dozen years ago. He spent eleven years with Urban Dispensary, a now-closed dispensary on West 38th Avenue, eventually working in the outfit's extraction lab before transitioning to leading the grow for his last five years there.

"Cannabis has always been my passion," he says, pointing to his low badge number as a point of pride. "I got my state worker's badge at a dog-racing track, because the MED didn't have an office at the time. That's how long I've been in this."

Van Halen, also a cannabis industry veteran, met Chancellor while working at the same extraction facility, but for a different company. She then found herself working at Urban Dispensary, and that's when their relationship started.

"He'd go to libraries and read all of the books about growing," Van Halen recalls of her time getting to know Chancellor. "He was in the grow, and I handled compliance, product testing and things like that."

A few years into their time together at Urban, however, both the dispensary and its production licenses were purchased by Schwazze, a publicly traded cannabis corporation that owns Emerald Fields and Star Buds dispensaries in Colorado. Schwazze quickly turned Urban into an Emerald Fields, and the cultivation didn't fit into the company's plans. The couple went from planning their wedding to searching for new income.

"Schwazze's people were nice, and they were fans of the flower, but you know how corporations go. Everything becomes a spreadsheet," Chancellor says. "It ended up being a good thing, though, because we realized that our hearts weren't into that sort of business model."

But a new business model presented itself in the nick of time.

Right after they were laid off by Schwazze, the owner of a separate growing facility neighboring the old Urban cultivation decided to move on from the legal pot trade. According to Chancellor, he made the couple an offer: Take over the business and pay its current licensing fees, and the building and growing licenses were theirs. They raised money through family to pay the licensing fees and renovate the building and equipment to So Good standards, which took most of their time and money and is an ongoing project.

"It wasn't in good shape when we got here. It was a bad grow," Chancellor recalls of So Good's start. "This was such a unique opportunity, though. If we wanted to build out our own, it would've cost millions of dollars. That seemed even more daunting."

So Good depended on friends and family to help clean and work on the facility. Right after the two took over the grow, sixteen people showed up to help them clean up the place for free. For the most part, they're now past paying for help with beers and pizza, and are relying on their own hard work and occasional advice from their peers in the industry.

"We don't come from money, and we don't have investors and partners — just a family who believes in us," Van Halen explains. "We want to bring back that excitement of opening a great bag of flower and smelling what's inside. We're not focusing on high THC."

Once Chancellor is able to dial in the space and equipment, he promises the buds "will go up another notch."

Most of So Good's twenty strains stem from Chancellor's time at Urban, so fans of the old dispensary's flower can look forward to more throwbacks as well as new genetics. Blue Dream, one of Colorado's most popular cannabis varieties in the early days of legalization before the genetics were muddled and misrepresented, is finding a comeback through Chancellor, whose cut of the strain proves itself the second the aroma hits your nostrils.

"If it tests at 12 percent THC but it smells great, you'd better believe we're going to run with it. And if you see it for sale at a dispensary, we're smoking it at home, too," he says.

Beyond Blue Dream and Papaya, Chancellor is particularly excited about his Sour ’91 Pie from Klone Colorado, as well as the Iceberg and Purple OG, which he describes as "smelling like IHOP blueberry syrup." Van Halen is partial to So Good's Wedding Cake, but also highlights the Cherry Gar-See-Ya, which has rich notes of cherry amaretto ice cream.

Popular Boulder dispensaries Eclipse Cannabis Co. and Maikoh Holistics are quickly burning through So Good's flower, while Soiku Bano's rosin extracted from So Good's Papaya is available at a few more stores in the metro area. Chancellor and Van Halen are hoping to break into more Denver stores after they sent samples to prospective retailers.

"More people are learning about us and beginning to seek us out more, and there is a big enough market out there," Van Halen concludes. "We really do think the weed is so good — and that is always the goal. We're So Good."