Breweries, dispensaries don’t see collaborations as pipe dreams
Cannabis purveyors would welcome such collaborations, according to Jennifer Ngo, chief of staff at Bud’s Goods & Provisions, a cannabis dispensary on West Boylston Street.
From Greater Good, it is a roughly 10-minute walk across Gold Star Boulevard to Bud’s, formerly home to the city’s first skate shop. Hoping to learn more about terpenes, I met Ngo on a busy Friday afternoon at the dispensary. We chatted in a corner, near brightly-lit displays of products like cans of cannabis-infused seltzers.
“There’s a lot of interplay between terpenes out in nature,” she told me. “Caryophyllene, for example, is a terpene found in pepper, but it’s also found in cannabis. When you crack your pepper over your food, that scent you’re getting is caryophyllene.”
Ngo pointed out a framed infographic on the wall indicating the most common terpenes found in cannabis. On average, according to the cannabis seed seller Humboldt Seed Company, every cannabis plant has a combination of about 40 terpenes, and over 200 have been identified so far.
Bud’s displays these colorful posters at all three of its stores, an ongoing effort to illustrate for customers and staff the multitude of flavors and aromas that different terpenes bestow.
“We look at this as a long-term investment in education for our customers,” she told me. “Worcester has been open for three years, and in that time, as far as terpenes are concerned, we’ve been seeing a lot more of our customers … paying attention to them, because they’re learning more about how terpenes affect their cannabis experience.”
With breweries now highlighting terpenes in their beer, Ngo believes there’s an opportunity for the general public to learn more about the cannabis industry. Bud’s would welcome a collaboration down the line with Greater Good, she said, as there is already mutual respect between the two companies.
“Overall, we want break the stigma around cannabis. Yes, cannabis is a drug. Alcohol is also a drug that people willingly take,” she said. “Being able to partner with a brewery would mean we’re on track to becoming normal. We just want to be treated like another business.”
