I’m not a huge fan of hard liquor, but my father absolutely loves expensive whiskey.
He tells me that it takes years to develop the taste pallet necessary to discern the complex features of the taste of one barrel of whiskey over another.
The type of wood and its age has a significant impact on the taste as well. I appreciate my father’s interest in whiskey, but I don’t share it. I never took to drinking like the rest of my family did. When I got to college, I was a lot more interested in using cannabis in my free time than getting drunk from taking shots or downing bottles of beer. Cannabis can still pose a risk for abuse and dependency, but the effects from the drug are incomparable. Cannabis has a plethora of medical benefits while alcohol is accepted among most medical professionals to be deleterious to users’ mental health when used to self-medicate those very mental health problems. You wouldn’t defend getting drunk to ease your anxiety if drinking caused you to be more anxious in the long run, but that’s the mindset of some people who drink. But even if you’re a whiskey connoisseur like my father, cannabis offers a similar taste diversity with the complex terpene profiles of one strain versus another. I am partial to cannabis sativa strains and one that is becoming a favorite is called Yellow Brick Road. It has about eight dominant terpenes that are listed on the certificate of analysis from the state testing lab. Some batches of cannabis flower products only have a handful of dominant terpenes while most have dozens or more minor terpenes that only appear in trace amounts.