Berner pulled a strain back from the scrap pile, then stood on the Mary Jane Berlin floor with 80,000 people and felt something the weed business had misplaced somewhere along the way.
One of the loudest strains Berner is putting his name on this year almost didn’t make the cut. It got written off in selection as a throwaway. He pulled it back out just in time.
That is how Berner works. The best weed does not always survive the first cut, and the people worth betting on do not always look like the obvious choice either. He trusts instinct over paperwork, a way of thinking that runs against where the weed industry has been heading.
Blueberry Caviar, his newest collaboration with Jason Gellman of Ridgeline Farms and a recent High Times Strain of the Month, came out of that instinct. Gellman bred it by crossing his LANTZ with a terpy cut of Compound Genetics’ Grape Gas, and it has already turned up in New Mexico, California and beyond.
“It was actually a throwaway. We didn’t select that at first,” Berner says. He was back in Los Angeles, smoking through the box of cuts, when one number stopped him. “I’m like, ‘Jason, this number right here is going to be Blueberry Caviar.’” Nobody agreed. “No way, it’s not even a keeper,” Gellman argued. Berner shrugged. “Watch,” Berner answered. “And it was.”
He picks people the same way he pulls strains. “First thing, he’s a great guy. I look for good energy, just good people,” he says of Gellman. Someone who had been at it for generations and stayed humble, a small craft family Berner wanted to back.
The Test
That same instinct decides who Berner lets in. He describes the old version of the weed …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
