My second offering from Big Al’s was just as great a pleasure as the first. Beautiful to look at, beautiful to smoke, and hits you in the face with a two by four.

At seventy bucks an eighth this stuff is not cheap but it is exactly what you expect when you buy wicked good bud. It was a little less crystally than the Mai Tai, our last Big Al’s strain that we smoked, but it was still super strong with three big buds and nothing else. Really clean trim and all of those things. This bud was well loved by whomever the grower was.

We did some research on the brand when the second one came up strong, and it seems that Big Al’s is under NorCal Cannabis, a big investor in weed who are marketing a number of brands to various demographics. So basically the model is – they buy grass from a bunch of farms sort it then brand it in different jars and send it out to dispensaries. Which is fine I guess, but a couple of things bother me about it:

• It obfuscates the source of quality
• It centralizes the interests of distributors into a few small entities
• In doing the first two, it disadvantages both growers and dispensaries on either side of the supply chain by introducing a strong middle man. The folks who do this neither grow nor sell grass, so why should they dictate market prices? Having capital really should not equate to having power as extremely as it does.

That aside – these guys do seem to be very adept at sourcing good grass, at least under the Big Al’s brand. In future we have made a note to try out some of their other brands and see whether they all hold up or not.