Flavour and Terpenes

Sweet, citrus, earthy, skunk. The flavour words on a strain are the least regulated part of a listing and among the most useful, because they point at the compounds you can actually smell: terpenes.

What terpenes are

Terpenes are the volatile aromatic compounds a plant makes in the same glands that produce cannabinoids. They are not unique to cannabis: limonene is what a lemon peel smells of, pinene is pine resin, caryophyllene is black pepper. In cannabis they occur together, and it is the mixture rather than any single compound that gives a variety its smell.

Four appear often enough to be worth knowing by name.

Myrcene is the most common in modern cultivars, earthy and slightly herbal, and it is associated with the heavy end of the effect spectrum. Limonene is the bright citrus note. Caryophyllene is peppery and is the only terpene known to bind a cannabinoid receptor directly. Pinene smells of pine, and it is the one people recognise long before they can name it.

What the science supports, and what it does not

Two claims need to be kept apart.

The first is well established: terpenes are what you smell and taste, and their proportions differ sharply between varieties. Recent genetic work found that the industry's own labelling follows a handful of these compounds more closely than it follows ancestry, which says something good about the flavour words and something poor about the indica and sativa ones.

The second is not established: the idea that terpenes reliably modify the effect of cannabinoids, the so-called entourage effect, remains unproven in controlled human trials. A 2024 review put it plainly: there is exploratory evidence, but no demonstrated synergy. Individual findings are interesting, and one recent study suggests limonene counteracts the anxiety THC can cause, yet a listing that promises a particular mood from a particular flavour is selling certainty that nobody has.

Read flavour tags as a description of the smell. Anything past that is guesswork.

What the words look like across a catalogue

Flavour tags are written by shops and breeders rather than by a laboratory, and the vocabulary is loose: "sweet" covers an enormous range, and "skunk" is as much a family of strains as it is a smell. Across the 384 strains here, 24 distinct flavour words appear, and the spread is heavily weighted toward a handful:

A strain usually carries several. That is not vagueness on the shop's part; it reflects how these compounds actually occur.

What decides whether you get it

Genetics set which terpenes a plant can produce. The grow decides how much survives. Terpenes are volatile, which is why you can smell them at all, and they evaporate under heat and rough handling: a hot dry, an aggressive trim or storage in a warm room strips aroma while leaving the cannabinoids largely intact. This is why the same variety can smell intense from one grower and flat from another, and why slow drying at moderate temperature is where flavour is won or lost.

Browsing by flavour here

The flavour lists are built from the tags shops supply, so they inherit the shops' vocabulary. Sweet, citrus, earthy and the rest each have a page, and every strain page shows its full set of tags next to the price per seed.