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Top 5 Ways To Identify High-quality CBD Flower | Determining Hemp Flower Quality

CBD Isolate / CBD Oils / CBD Products / September 10, 2020

Whether you’re a purist or just like to mix things up, you may be looking for high-quality CBD flower. You’re not alone. Joints, pipes, bongs, vaporizers, and many other methods of use revolve around hemp flower and can deliver a potent remedy to what may ail you.

With the recent boom in CBD popularity, the market has been flooded with products of good and ill repute. This can make it difficult to find a brand or strain of CBD flower that is both effective, pleasant, and safe. We’ve put together a few tips on how to spot top-quality CBD flower so you can take the guesswork out of your next purchase.

Follow these 5 ways to identify high-quality CBD flower to avoid a case of buyer’s remorse.

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How To Identify High-Quality CBD Flower

While there are many different ways to categorize and evaluate high-quality CBD flower, we’ll be focusing on 5 characteristics we regard as the most impactful. These are growing conditions, appearance, aroma, CBD content, lab results.

Growing Conditions

The conditions surrounding hemp cultivation have a lot to do with the final product that ends up in the user’s hands.

Be it indoor or outdoor, hemp plants can do a lot of good when cared for properly. If they’re grown in poor conditions and utilize poor agricultural practices, they can spell disaster.

When it comes to growing hemp outdoors, the plant requires quite a bit of care and attention, especially when you factor in the surrounding environment. A farmer may not have complete control of air, soil, and water quality, which can degrade their harvest.

Take for instance a hemp grow that is located near a coal mine or a cattle ranch. By-products, runoff, and air pollutants can find their way into a hemp field that may seriously affect the plant’s development and quality.

Soil testing is a crucial component of outdoor growing and any high-quality CBD farm will make sure to test their soil and water regularly to ensure the best results for customers.

Indoor hemp growing will have its own set of conditions that impact the quality of CBD flower. Nutrient levels, disease vectors, air quality, and temperature can be tough to regulate. Organic versus mineral fertilizers will also impact the quality of the CBD flower you’ll eventually ingest. Proper flushing of those chemicals before harvest can also impact the product you will smoke, eat, or vape.

You’ll want to do your research and connect with the grower directly, if possible. Ask them how their grow progresses from start to finish. In both cases, requesting lab results that verify the quality of their product is not uncommon. Any grower with confidence in their product will be willing to share those details with customers to alleviate their concerns.

Appearance

Who doesn’t like a bit of bag appeal? Hemp flower can come in all shapes and sizes and the same strain may vary greatly in appearance from one grower to the next. As you become more experienced in identifying what conditions cause what hemp flower characteristics, you’ll feel at lease identifying top-quality CBD flower.

Lanky and sparsely joined flower buds are a sign of poor growing conditions. In this case, a lack of certain nutrients cause a spindly plant to focus more on vegetative growth than producing a potent flower. High-quality CBD flower will be dense and uniformly developed.

Then you have curing, which is the process by which CBD flower is aged to reduce the moisture content to an optimal range. Overly moist CBD flower will not burn or vape evenly. It will be too heavy with water and chlorophyll, which is the source of harsh, bitter, and grassy taste.

A dry flower is a sign that there is not enough moisture present to help the bud retain its shape. You can trust resinous glands that contain CBD are also degraded in this case.

An even in-between will ensure you have properly cured CBD flower. You can break off a piece and the larger bud will retain its shape. The bud should also be sticky to the touch, indicating its resin glands remain intact and contain a healthy amount of cannabinoids, like THC and CBD.

Aroma

The fruit loops mascot Toucan Sam always told us to follow our nose and for good reason. The olfactory sense, sense of smell, is one of the most powerful in humans. It allows us to detect when a food or drink has gone “off” and may pose a risk to our health if we ingest it. Your nose can help identify negative smells in hemp flower, as well.

High-quality CBD flower will have a pungent aroma. This is produced by the terpenes, flavonoids, and cannabinoids contained in the flower’s resin glands. Fruity, piney, earthy, and skunky are all words that have been used to describe the finest examples of CBD.

Smells that remind us of cleaning products, solvents, or other undesirable substances will be a dead giveaway that something is up with this flower and should be avoided.

You can get a better depth of the aroma by pinching a flower slightly. This will open up some of those resin glands of the flower, making it easier to smell those good and bad aromas.

CBD Content

So what if the flower we are looking at hits all the marks? Is it still enough to certify this CBD flower is high-quality? The short answer is that while a good indicator of quality, it may still be a poor example of a high-quality flower. Here’s why—just like fruits and vegetables we eat every day, hemp plants have different levels of chemical compounds within them. Making them more or less concentrated in color, smell, and, of course, CBD content.

The only way to truly know how potent or weak a hemp flower harvest is through testing.

What may commonly be referred to as a certificate of analysis (COA), this report is a certified lab result of the chemical makeup of a compound. In this case, hemp flower. These tests are conducted after harvest and used to confirm the content of a specimen. The report will illustrate the concentration, or lack thereof when it comes to various cannabinoids and other compounds found in hemp flower.

The information contained in the report will generally include:

  • Hemp strain
  • Batch number
  • Time of receipt
  • Date of report
  • Expiration of results
  • Production date
  • Testing environment
  • Cannabinoids present and their amount relative to sample size or serving
  • Signature of the laboratory director

More of fewer details may be included, but you can generally find these useful data points on any genuine COA. It should not be difficult for a brand to produce this report for any given sample, because they have to prove their operation is in line with the regulations set by their jurisdiction.

Lab Reports

Certificates of analysis, as we mentioned above, are critical in confirming the science behind high-quality CBD flower. However, not all labs are created equally. Not only has this, but oftentimes a brand may conduct their own test to create the data found on these COAs.

With very little regulation surrounding what goes into CBD products, customers can be put at risk if those certificate’s results are not genuine.

It is for this reason that third-party lab testing should be the gold standard used to confirm a brand’s products deliver the level of CBD and lack of contaminants they may claim.

The best producers of high-quality CBD flower will make those third-party lab results available to anyone and everyone. That is to say, a PDF or other scanned image of an actual report should be made readily available on their website or by request. It’s important that consumers not settle for a typed response, as they may get falsified information.

In short, if you are in contact with a brand and are not sure about the quality of their CBD flower, ask for the COA. If they produce it readily, you can rest assured they are likely reputable. If they cannot or refuse to produce that report, don’t waste time arguing, just move on to the next brand.

Final Thoughts On Finding High-Quality CBD flower

While all these ways to identify high-quality CBD flower exist, you may still feel apprehensive in your search.

When all else fails, you should understand that there is a huge community of CBD users just as concerned with quality as you are. They congregate online and in-person to talk about CBD culture, treatment routines, and, of course, where to find the best CBD products.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to those more experienced than you. They may be able to educate you in a way you weren’t able to achieve on your own. If nothing else, they can likely point you in the right direction to find what you are looking for.

Now, you can confidently go out in search of the best CBD products knowing what to look for and what to avoid.

 

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