Is it possible to personally experience every expression of taste or smell within cannabis’ potential?

[GrowMoDroBro]

If you’ve ever wondered if you will eventually get bored with smoking cannabis, or just wondered how many unicorn cultivars there could possibly be lurking within the potential of your seed collection…just think of a deck of cards.

I’ll explain what I mean…

A typical deck of cards has 52 total cards in it. That means it has a 52 factorial of possible configurations. Which as a number is exactly 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 worth of potentials. That means that every time you properly shuffle a deck of cards, the outcome will be a combination that has never been seen before, and will never be seen again. 52 factorial is close to the amount of individual atoms the mass of the earth is suspected to be comprised of. Meaning that to get the same configuration of cards twice in a row after shuffling, would be equivalent to picking a random atom on earth, signing your name on it…throwing it back into the earth, coming back in a billion years (which a billion years worth of seconds is nowhere near as big a number as 52 factorial is, as a side note) and picking out the exact same atom on your first try.

Now…take what you’ve just learned, and consider the fact that cannabis has around 200 individual terpene expressions. Each with its own taste and scent. That gives cannabis around a 200 factorial worth of terpene combinations, each playing off each other in various ways based on amounts of each…which makes 52 factorial look like a drop in the ocean.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it

[Colingordon]

I’ve been hunting and growing since 1993. It’s always been fascinating and it never gets old to me.

[Tater]

Great feedback, thank you

It also explains why every once in a while one tastes special or not as good

[AvgJoePublic]

You also have to take into consideration that we all taste differently. What tastes like good oatmeal to me with the perfect amount of brown sugar is incredibly too sweet to somebody else and another person might need twice as much butter to taste the similar response. So not only do each one of these plants have 200 combination expressions to work off of, but then each one of us have a different perception of what we’re actually tasting too. I think it’s funny when I have been judging cannabis contests and I’ll see that other people made comments that some of the entries were no good or they could tell that they weren’t grown well or so many other things that is just impossible to tell from smoking a blind sample of cannabis and it’s just hilarious… how people think that their sence of taste is a literal representation to the exact analysis of the plant and by their taste they know exactly what’s going on, which in reality, I think each one of us are just making an educated guess combined with our complete individual perception and opinion, which basically may or may not have any correlation with someone else’s opinion or the actual quality of the product. Some of these judges would say that they are sure that the person was running certain nutrients or were saying that they could tell that these people used certain practices or weren’t organic and definitely most responded that a majority of the entries were crap and that’s just so funny considering that I think most people that enter a contest seem to think that they have put up a good effort at producing a quality product… I definitely didn’t think most entries were crap. I thought most entries were pretty good… Maybe I’m being way too general for some of you and giving too much credit… I guess I also have a lot of appreciation for the plant. You know I used to be a chef and I could taste so many different things. But I can also enjoy McDonald’s cheeseburgers and also enjoy very expensive fine dining that doesn’t mean arbitrarily that all fast food is garbage just because the ingredients weren’t sourced organically and produced individually by caring farmers, hand growing in Nicaragua…

Anyways, it’s pretty exciting that we have that many combinations of possible plant outcomes! I often sit here and debate whether it’s better to keep a few cultivars around or run completely new plants every time and experience the variety. As much as I love variety, I do love quality and when I find something great I’d like to be able to enjoy it again, but at the same time I definitely like to be surprised and try new things regularly. So I do a combination right now of keeping a few good ones and mostly new ones every run. I’m considering just doing all new plants every run just to be excited about what is produced. I’m like most people we can always rely on coming back to ethos quality products and we don’t have to keep clones around to ensure that we can get quality. All we have to do is just pop another pack of ethos and we’re insured to come across a great buzz! It would be different if we didn’t have connection to ethos to keep coming back too.

Unlike some of the other judges I’ve spoken to you, I don’t find many plants I don’t like or don’t think is quality. I think as long as they put out a good product that is not full of seeds and gets me high. That’s good bud. I’m interested to know what some of the other people are thinking about my opinion. I’m sure some people are going to be very strict with their analyzation of other people’s products and others maybe more lenient like myself, but it’s interesting to hear what other people think.

I’m really excited though down the line when they will be able to genetically test plants and say that someone else is run is basically all crescendo and as much as the some of these other breeders act like they have started something incredibly special that they literally just unwrap someone else’s seeds and renamed the plant and called it their new strain that they worked on for years and it’s the complete opposite of what they describe. I think it’ll be hilarious to see some plants or literally not mixed with anything at all. And just a pack of seeds opened by about another breeder and then distributed. I think this will be the case more common than not, often when I’ve grown some of these different cultivars there is a definite difference in the appearance of the bud quality. It is funny how a lot of other breeders packs that I pop. Just the structure of the bud is completely different than ethos. A majority of the time ethos has a thicker stouter quality of bud. Then a lot of other breeders which tends me to think that they have not spent a lot of time crossing back and trying to create something special as opposed to just create something quickly. @Colingordon I’m sure would love to hear that from other people too…

I do think that bud and plant structure is something that a lot of people don’t put enough importance on and I think that shows a lot of how much effort was put into a cultivar…