Cannabis Product Review: Lowell Farms Strawberry Bananaz Live Rosin

Highlights

Lowell Farms offers a stacked roster of cannabis offerings. From flower to infused prerolls and their marvelous flower-only cannabis cigarettes to disposable live rosin pens and full line of concentrates, Lowell has got cannabis covered. Bubble hash, full-melt hashish, age-cured rosin, and the live artisanal rosin featured here round a comprehensive syllabus on the who’s who of the California cannabis game. Lowell even offers gorgeous, fully stocked wooden rolling kits and at one point partnered with Billy Ray Cyrus on his very own cowboy-centered smokes. Beyond giving us the utter celestial blessing that is Lil Nas X and playing Hannah Montana’s dad, Billy Ray serves a modern-day reboot of the Old West aesthetic. So take your horse to the Old Town Road and snuggle into the Americana of the Wild West lifestyle.

As we “welcome everybody to the Wild Wild West, a state that’s untouchable like Elliot Ness” let’s start at the beginning with Lowell’s squad of concentrates. Before hitting us “out in Cali where we riot not rally”, the preparation of cannabis into orally ingested resin began before our recorded history of the man we now call Jesus. Because genocidal colonizers set the narrative propaganda still used in our nation’s textbooks today it is hard to find an accurate answer on when the process of making hash first evolved in what we would now call The Arab World. As the term “marijuana” evolved out the efforts of colonizers to conflate anti-Mexican racism with their confabulated dangers of “the devil’s lettuce”, Orientalism (the term critical race scholars use to point to an antiquated, inherently white supremacist view of “The East”) couched anti-cannabis sentiment in implicit linguist racism. The English word for “assassin” evolved from colonizers naming the Sheik’s fighters “the Hashishin” under the guise that this evil drug was what the fabled Sheik Hassan Sabbah gave to his soldiers to make them ruthless, blood-thirsty killers (as the narrative of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim storytelling normally goes). Lowell Farm references the “B.C. ‘Hashshians’” in the description of their bubble hash alongside a shout to the Parsian cafes that sold it for profit centuries and centuries and centuries after its Arab discovery and around the same time European colonizers were promulgating a made-up story about how evil and racially charged its experience was. The “War on Drugs” has always been racist. Lowell, like Emjay, supports the Last Prisoner Project in undoing the racist harms incarceration has fulfilled in this country. Round up your purchase to help undo this legacy.

As it exists today, hash preserves the active ingredients of the cannabis flower without including the green parts. Bubble hash arises from mixing flower with ice water, agitating it, and freezing it to separate the resin glands from the plant. Bubble hash unsurprisingly bubbles when smoked whereas full melt, instead, disappears completely when you dab it (that is, it fully melts). Subsequently filtering and applying great pressure leads to the birth of rosin for a strong, solvent-free dab. Lowell’s Live Rosin comes from the first press of their full melt and contains monoterpenes-home to the most valuable, healing characteristics of the plant. Live rosin is all the rage in the California cannabis game these days.

Let’s see if the hype is deserved.