My friends and I drank a lot of beer in our shared house in college.
We made a wall mural out of bottle caps and it spanned the entire kitchen and dining room areas. Although most of my roommates bought Bud Light and Miller, I loved to find unique crafty beer varieties. The flavors were complex and the effects were always more unique. I was shocked to learn that beer has an entourage effect between the alcohol and the terpenes inside each variety. When I was younger and drank more with friends, I couldn’t put two and two together to figure out why whiskey would give me a harder-edged “buzz” while beer was always a full-body experience for me. I know it’s subjective, but I always had better physical feelings from beer consumption compared to hard liquor. Learning that beer contains terpenes similar to cannabis made a lot of sense to me. Wine is similar, albeit different in its terpene profiles. They contribute to the complex flavors that drive some people to pay outrageous prices for one bottle over another. Regardless of whether or not it’s wine or beer, either will make me feel more intoxicated and “buzzed” than shots of hard liquor. I prefer the experience as well. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that I am not hardpressed about having insanely high THC levels in my cannabis products. I’d rather look at the lab testing paperwork and confirm that the batch has high terpene levels. Just a 1.5% boost in terpenes alone could make one batch of cannabis flower buds “fire” opposed to “decent.” I have smoked cannabis with 30% THC but didn’t really feel overly impressed because the terpenes were under 1%.