Kush, Haze, Cake: Reading Cultivar Families

Thousands of cultivar names, a handful of bloodlines. Almost everything on a modern menu descends from a few great families, and once you can hear the family in a name, menus stop being noise and start being maps.

Kush: the mountain line

Descended from the Hindu Kush mountain belt, this family gave the world its archetypal heavy flower: dense structure, earthy gas and incense aromas, and profiles built on myrcene with caryophyllene and touches of linalool. OG Kush and its descendants carry the line. When a name contains Kush or OG, expect weight, evenings, and the sleep and chill ends of the index.

Haze: the long summer

Bred from equatorial stock in 1970s California, Haze is the opposite pole: airy flowers, long flowering times, and a spiced citrus pine character that usually means terpinolene. The famous energetic cultivars of the last thirty years largely trace here. Haze in a name signals daylight, conversation, and the energized profile. True Haze lines are increasingly rare on menus, which makes a good one worth securing when it opens.

The dessert dynasty

The youngest family and the one that owns the current era. Cookies emerged in the Bay Area a decade and a half ago and its descendants, the Cake, Gelato, and Sherbet lines, define the modern loud jar: sweet dough and gas over cream, built on caryophyllene and limonene. Character wise they sit in the middle of the map, rich and rounded, often under the euphoric profile. Cake, Gelato, Cookies, Sherb: one dynasty, many desserts.

Using lineage without being used by it

Families predict tendencies, not guarantees. Breeding drifts, phenotypes vary, and a name is the least regulated part of any label, which is the theme of the labels file. Treat the family as a hypothesis and the certificate as the verdict. Here, every release page names its lineage where it is known, and the certification library holds the proof.

See what each family currently has open in the collection.