[If you don’t like loooong posts, please jump ship now! Otherwise, strap in, load up a bowl, and follow along—I think it is actually on topic, but it’s gonna be a bit of a ride … .]
I buy my product where I live in Oregon (temporarily away in Michigan now). Most dispos in my town (there are about 50) do not sell pre-packed stuff, although I have some experience with that in Washington state, where I think
only pre-packed is legal. My shoppes mostly use large, clear glass apothecary jars, typically maybe a half gallon or so capacity—they will usually pop the top and let you smell, and often even the cheapest, most run-down little shoppes have swing-out magnifiers so you can peek at the triches more closely. (Some of the more “boutique-ey” places have small samples before you get to the counter, in little glass containers with built-in magnifiers, themselves in glass display cases.
)
I buy in single grams, usually hand-weighed and put in plastic “pop-top” pill bottles. When I get the stuff home, I transfer it to boro vials I get at a discount vial place, maybe $0.60-0.75 each. (I tried Boveda or similar several years back, but they seemed to diminish the flavor somewhat, so now they just go raw into the boro.) Because I buy and keep so many strains at once (currently about 85-90 at home), these grams often sit for a year to eighteen months at a time, tucked away in cases against any light, and in a cool and dry basement.
But the cool and dry doesn’t matter that much anyway, as I don’t open the cases very often or for very long (I tend to grind in fits and surges). I usually grind about 1/4 gram per strain at a time (way too fine) into much smaller vials (same boro, same company), capacity of 5/8 or 1 whole dram, about the size of the last digit of my pinky finger on the 5/8 size.
And there the ground stuff sits, for months at a time: at 3-5 strains per day, usually 0.02-0.06 grams per load, I don’t hit the same strain more than about every three weeks on average, unless I want to.
Anyway-anyway, the point of all this long-windedness is this:
I have zero problems with flavor or effects degradation at all. None. And I am a real (combustion-)fucking stickler for flavor—that’s why I keep close to 90 strains on hand all the time.
In fact, I have just the last dregs of a favorite strain now, maybe 1/3 gram left, 5-10 more hits of it:
Purple Magoo. It was pretty ratty when I bought the first gram several years back, for $2-3, and likely harvested even a year before that. (I could look it up if I were at home, as harvest dates, etc., are legally required on the labels, and I peel ‘em off and keep ‘em.) I eventually bought another gram or two over the next year or two because I loved it
so much—likely from the same apothecary jar, exposed to the light, oft-opened for people to take a sniff, etc. So maybe
5 years now since harvest, no “bag appeal” at all, even at the start, and poorly stored and handled before it got into my hands, straight up/no Boveda, and then ground and waiting around for months at a time once I got it …
And every time I vape a stem/bowl it is effing glorious! Some grapey/berry flavor (like
Purple Punch or
GDP, I think of it as the “purple part”) and some kind of cotton-candy sweetness (like earlier phenos of
Blue Magoo I’ve had, kinda the “magoo part”). There is
no way in hell this stuff should be anything but awful … but it is
still amazing!
And although this strain stands out for unlikelihood of any flavor left at all, but also for freakin’ amazing flavor, I have roughly the same experience with everything I buy: rarely do I come across something that’s even just “meh”, and most are delicious, many sublime.
None have been handled in anything even
remotely like a “properly approved” manner, and I have
no right to be living in this amazing DHV/cannabis paradise that I inhabit (when I’m at home—
sigh). But it is what it is, and I am so grateful for it.
OK, thanks for coming to my TED talk, and I hope your bowl went well. If you are very careful and such about your storage and handling and grinding … well, good on you, and keep it up. But my own experience suggests that the Goddess Sinsemilla is not so demanding of us, that she forgives us our trespasses, and that she
fucking provides!
[OK, now all I have to do is make it through the next few weeks here in Michigan with no access to a device and get back to my home in paradise—but if I come across enough nickels in the couch, I may have to buy an Angus Enhanced and sample some of the recently-legalized local product!]
PS: I actually have 4 different, more recent cuts of Blue Magoo at home right now, from different farms, trying to chase down that cotton-candy sweetness. But they all have more of a licorice-y base than the sweetness, like I find in strains like Silver Train and Where’s My Bike. Multiple stems on my E-Nano, comparing and contrasting, whiling away my days in paradise … tough work, but somebody’s gotta do it 
.
