I am reading a lot of forums lately concerning the flavors or lack thereof in today’s weed. The advice offered in forum suggestions range from curing your weed longer, to changing smoking utensils, swapping rolling papers, timing the harvest differently or adding molasses or terpenes to the plants before harvest. Some suggestions make sense like pruning for bud growth and some are bizarre like choking your plants with wire binding or withholding their food and water. But there is not any one reason to blame for today’s weed all tasting the same. Instead there are several. I remember Thai smoke as wispy and sweet and smooth. Vietnamese weed knocked my socks off with a spicy flavor of incense and a high that had me clutching my armchair to prevent me from taking off. Santa Marta gold was a unique flavor of exotic spices with a thunderous high that seemed to last hours. All of those weed types were uniquely different from each other. What was not different were the flavors from the same landrace strains grown or crossbred indoors. I call it Basement weed. Some of it tastes good. Much of it is bland. Afghani Indica and Hindu Kush are possibly the best suited plants to grow indoors. They are very sturdy and have a delicious hash flavor. Most of today’s indoor plants are crossbreeds with Indica and Kush plants that add bulk to wispy Sativa buds with exotic sativa landrace names like Acapulco Gold, or African Durban Poison or Swazi Redbeard. In their original state these land race marijuana strains taste out of this world, but today’s seed sellers have often crossed Sativas with Indicas to produce a decent yield in bud weight. Pure sativa buds grown indoors yield less than half the weight of sativas grown outdoors. Indoor Sativas yield less and take almost twice as long to reach maturity as Indica plants. For seed sellers it makers perfect business sense to provide a profitable weed strain to the retail market. For this reason, hybrid weed strains prevail throughout the commercial cannabis seed markets.  But for every gain there is often a loss and, in this case,, it is flavor. Basement weed as I like to call it is often very much all the same in flavor. Basement weed is often quite earthy and moist because of the enclosed basement growing chamber. Instead of wafting in the breeze like outdoor weed basement weed has to suffice with a 4-inch vent fan and a twelve inch exercise fan to remove moisture from the plants. The resulting musk and fungus often deteriorates the marijuana flavors and terpenes so that the different plant varieties end up smelling similar. Another element affecting the taste of today’s indoor weed crops are variances in soil composition. The original landrace Jamaican weeds are usually grown in red volcanic soil. African weed is grown in dry earth that is rich in natural nutrients. Colombian and Mexican soil have their own special qualities that contribute to the taste of the cannabis plants. Basement weed is usually grown in Pro Mix or rock wool cubes which add nothing to the flavor of the cannabis plants. Natural fertilizers make for better tasting weed but many professional weed growers prefer the ease of commercial fertilizers. Commercial fertilizers often leave a bitter aftertaste in the marijuana buds that overwhelms the natural weed flavors. There is one other reason that today’s weed strains have lost their flavor. It is painfully easy to advertise a certain seed strain and substitute another. So that you think you are ordering one flavor and end up with a different flavor. By the time you realize you have been duped months may have passed. It used to be that when you purchased marijuana the name had meaning. Like Panama Red. Or Mexican Michoacán. Or Cambodian.  Today’s weed is whatever you want to name it. OG Kush. Boy Scout cookies. It could be any weed from anywhere. And that is why today’s weed all tastes the same.