Lavender, citrus and candy: weed’s signature aroma changes with the times

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HAGERSTOWN, Md. — Just off the highway and down the road from the sheriff’s office, there’s a large warehouse and greenhouse compound locked behind barbed-wire gates.

If you’re driving by at certain times, you might catch a whiff of what’s inside: Some call it skunky, some call it gassy. It’s the unmistakable smell of weed.

The complex is the grow facility for District Cannabis, which produces 15,000 pounds of cannabis flower each year. “It’s our weed factory — a dream come true,” says Andras Kirschner, founder and head grower.

Inside the factory, it’s not all skunk. There’s the earthy smell of plants growing and botanical notes of citrus and lavender. In recent years, that strong signature skunky funk of pot has given way to scent profiles of new cannabis strains that skew toward fruits, fresh herbs and candy.

It’s a trend that has blossomed with the increasing use of cannabis for recreational purposes, says Pamela Dalton, a smell scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research institute that focuses on smell and taste. “People take all sorts of drugs that are unpleasant to taste or smell, but for recreation, you want something pleasurable in all facets,” she says. “That’s driving some of the hybridization and evolution [of cannabis] – to make something you like smelling, that’s pleasant and reinforces the ease of relaxation.”

At the District Cannabis grow facility, batches of young cannabis plants are grown to maturity, harvested and dried, then processed and packaged for retail sale.

Cannabis with hints of cake

On a recent weekday morning, Kirschner gave NPR a tour of the operations. In a warm, humid room, 1,500 cannabis plants were in bloom, giving off a fruity, musky scent.

Kirschner won the 2024 grand champion title in a competition with weed growers from Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia with a strain called Layer Cake. This one, perfuming the indoor grow room, is a cousin named Gelato Cake. Kirschner says, it’s “one of the more popular top-selling strains in the D.C. and Maryland markets for a number of years now.”

“This is definitely one of our more complex profiles,” says Kyle Perrell, the general manager of operations at the facility, describing the scent as sweetness and grapes with cognac and “a fresh kerosene kind of smell on the back end.”

Much of the scent and flavor variety among cannabis strains is attributed to terpenes, which are chemical compounds found in a lot of plants such as herbs, citrus and pine trees. For the Gelato Cake strain, Perrell says the dominant terpenes are caryophyllene, limonene and linalool, which give off floral, clove and citrus scents.

And while the signature “gas” or “skunk” smell of cannabis used to be attributed to a “skunky terpene,” research over the past few years has pointed to a different culprit, says Monell’s Dalton. “They found out that it was actually a sulfur compound – which, to my thinking, would absolutely be responsible for a sulfur odor – the smell of skunk spray or anything like that,” she says.

It’s the sulfur note, mixed with the fresher, more aromatic terpenes, that gives weed its signature smells. In some strains, though, that skunk note dominates. “We are extremely sensitive to sulfur compounds,” Dalton says, “So if you have a range of compounds in your cannabis, it’s likely that what you’re going to smell first are the sulfur compounds.”

The classic weed smell was what cannabis breeders and growers in the past were going for, Kirschner says, “and so a lot of the strains started to really exhibit that skunk smell.”

In more recent years, there’s been a trend in cannabis cultivation toward new strains and hybrids that are more pleasant-smelling to more people. “Now there’s a wide diversity from berry to citrus, lemon lime, cherry. A lot of the popular strains are a combination between the gas and another flavor,” says Kirschner.

Dalton has observed this trend, too. “I’m almost 70 years old, and the cannabis I smelled when I was 13, 14, 15 was way skunkier than anything I experience now,” she says.

Fruity and frosty

The evolution of scents and flavors has converged on what Jamila Hogan, a longtime weed educator and head of the cannabis experience company Ebony Green, describes as “Runtzacakelato.”

“It’s the Runts (like the candy), cake, gelato profile. You know it because the buds are often a little bit purple, super frosty,” she says, referring to the abundance of resinous glands that coat the mature cannabis plants.

Hogan says this scent and flavor profile – “musky, gassy, sweet and skunk” – has become dominant in the past five or so years. “Before this profile, it was the gas,” she says, “Before the gas, it was fruity, and before the fruit was the kush.”

At the District Cannabis grow facility, every room smells like a different combination of musky, fruity gas. In the greenhouse, a strain called Pavé gives off an “overwhelmingly kushy, earthy, almost a little spearminty” scent, according to Perrell, the general manager.

In the cure room, stalks of Cherry Limeade Cake hang upside down to dry. In the trim room, workers prune the buds of a new strain called Berry Payton. Kirschner describes it as “tropical Runts times Gary Payton [another strain],” producing a fruity blueberry-scented hybrid.

But nobody buys weed just to smell it. The cannabis grown here is destined for the local market. Some of it gets packaged and sold as flower, or extracted for edibles and vapes, or pre-rolled by an automated machine that can make 4 million joints a year, Kirschner says: “We’re currently not selling that much — but we can make them.”

In Maryland, where cannabis has been allowed for recreational use since 2023, consumers have spent more than $180 million on cannabis products in the first two months of the year.

“]] A tour of a grow facility in Maryland reveals the wide variety of scents from different cannabis strains.  Read More  

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