WRITER •DAVID HODES
properly,” she added. Lewis uses decarbed cannabis butter, which has a precise cooking time, water content, and temperature. “It’s a stirring process in there as well. I stir it every 30 minutes, and then during the straining process it’s stirred again.” Lewis then tests it for homogeneity to confirm consistency before it goes into Mountain Medicine’s baked breads. “Each recipe has a defined mixing process. For our pie bars, it’s mixed seven and a half minutes to the left, and seven and half minutes to the right. It’s really that defined.” Cooks are generally told to taste what they cook as they go, but that’s not the case in the cannabis business. In Colorado, edibles cannot be consumed on site. “I can’t taste my product after it has cannabis in it,” Lewis said. “My staff doesn’t taste anything in my kitchen. We don’t have that luxury.” Instead, Lewis’ team provides samples to dispensaries and asks them to fill out surveys on the products. “From that, we are able to gauge if it’s going to be a flavored product.” “Cannabis, to some consumers, has a very pungent flavor that we don’t generally try to mask in the baked goods,” she said. “But in the chocolates, we just do added things, like add ginger which is actually good at helping cover the flavor of the cannabis.” The biggest issue in this unregulated industry is consistency: a product must have the same level of THC in every bite. If a regulator identifies inconsistency in a product’s strength, the makers face serious consequences. There’s another challenge to consistency, according to Guy Rocourt, a lead extraction artist and partner in Neos. “While the products may be consistent in dosages, especially
when it comes to edibles, the physiology of the consumer is different, so if you have two pieces of chocolates, two different people have a different experience. It’s likely that they just need a different dosage based on their physiology,” he clarified. “We have to understand this, and have to start getting data on how cannabis affects users based on a bunch of other metrics.” The industry is seeking regulation not only to increase understanding of the plant, but also to make edibles predictable for recreational consumption and, more importantly, safer for those with health conditions. This effort is getting a boost from the American Oil Chemists’ Society (AOCS), a nonprofit based in Urbana, Illinois. The AOCS studies fats, oils, detergents, and related materials, and has been looking for an unmet need in the industry, according to Cynthia Ludwig, the AOCS director of technical services and former research scientist for Monsanto. “Cannabis people started calling about a year and a half ago asking if some of our official testing methods would work on THC and CBD oils, and we were like, ‘We really don’t know,’” she said. “We don’t want people to have heavy metals and pesticide residue or any other contaminants in the product. This is about patient safety. So we say, let’s develop some investigative analytic lab procedures to make sure that these things are safe and that the dosage is correct. This is something that’s in our wheelhouse.” In order to determine a validated method for testing cannabis, the AOCS is working with several cannabis labs to do a large-scale collaborative study of hops (the closest cousin to cannabis). Once
GRAPHICS • BRANDON PALMA
“While the products may be consistent in dosages, especially when it comes to edibles, the physiology of the consumer is different,” cannabis is federally legalized, the AOCS hopes to have its method adopted by the industry as a whole. Lewis said that working with the AOCS is one of the most exciting pieces of news she has heard. “We have three to five years of data that we can bring to the table. Smarter people than ourselves can help guide us in terms of taking the cannabis and treating it, just like they do for oils in any other industry,” she said. “This company can bring that knowledge of the standardization process that they have done for every other industry before us.” Ludwig said that she would really like to see industry regulators talk to analytical chemists more before they write their regulations. “They should work together to get things on the books that are enforceable, that are traceable, and that are reasonable,” she said. “Analytical chemists have been around forever. We know how to do this. So let’s look to the people who do this and quit reinventing the wheel.”
dopemagazine.com ISSUE 53 THE DOPEST ISSUE
| 21