Many people find buying cannabis a bit intimidating. When you go online or enter a cannabis store, you face a vast selection of plants. How do you start to navigate the options? From the smokable flower and oils, to edible gummies and baked goods, there are many different ways to ingest cannabis. When it comes to buying cannabis, many people use a system similar to buying wine: Find a fancy label that fits their budget and go to the cashier. It’s fast and easy, but does it help you find a good Shiraz? Nope!
For most people buying cannabis, the price, THC percentage, and strain name are the biggest reasons people buy a cannabis product. While those criteria can help you somewhat, none of them have anything to do with product quality.
So how do you find good cannabis? Below are some vital points to remember.

Quality Is More Than THC

Have you noticed that the top-shelf cannabis product does not always have the highest level of THC? The best cannabis features a high-quality, complex combination of terpenes and cannabinoids, not only THC. This complex arrangement of cannabis compounds, known as the entourage effect, produces a well-rounded, robust effect that gives you a more pleasant high.
A flower with high THC with an improper balance of cannabinoids and terpenes may provide the user with a one-dimensional, short-lived high.
Here’s another way to view it: When you pay more for good cannabis, you are spending on compounds that are not merely the THC. But few of those compounds make it to the label. So it can be challenging to know if the cannabis you buy is worth the extra dough.
The good news is, even if the product does not list its full chemistry on the label, there are ways to find out if the cannabis is high quality.

Vital Characteristics of High-Quality Cannabis

If you cannot smell the flower before you buy it, freshness is a significant indicator to determine the quality of the product. Cannabis quality degrades over time; terpenes evaporate and are mostly gone after 180 days.
Proper storage and rapid delivery can help with freshness, but nothing will end the process. So, be sure to review the harvest date on the flower before you buy it; the chemical complexity of the product depends on it. You want to make sure the vital compounds that produce the entourage effect are there!
If you are fortunate enough to smell the flower before it is packaged, you’re lucky. Smelling the flower is the most effective way to determine what its terpene profile is. The stronger the aroma, the higher the level of terpenes. You want the smell to be INTENSE!
Also, check the ripeness and health of the trichomes. A good trichome should be milky white in appearance, and a plant with good genetics should be covered with them. Clear trichomes suggest the growers harvested the plant before maturity. If you see brown or amber trichomes, the grower harvested the plant too late.
Ensure your cannabis has ripe trichomes: It allows you to experience the product at its ideal ripeness.

The Grower Matters

Quality growers produce the best cannabis. Growing fantastic cannabis is not magic; it is a skill that takes time to develop over the years with a lot of hard work. Good cannabis should be excellent because a lot of time was put into it. You should be able to taste, see, and smell all the effort to grow the cannabis you buy.
Trusting the grower provides you with the confidence to try a new strain. You might not know how your body will react to the strain, but you know it was grown by a professional who puts quality first.