EVERY STRAIN HAS A STORY : WHITE TAFFI

As many legendary strains before our time, the White Taffi was the result of a mistake. In 2022 Rusty aka the Duke of Erb, took a male of his Afternoon Pineapple and pollinated a cut of Gelato 41 that I got from Ted from Alien Labs. We phenohunted the Gelato 41 x Afternoon Pineapple aka P41 with Dave from Preferred Gardens and found a keeper; a pheno that expressed desirable traits from both parents and had a good structure for production viability. We distributed clones to my contracted grows in Sacramento, Florida and AZ and also to our affiliates in NY and OKC. In addition we also gave the cut back to Rusty so he could make crosses with our new selection of the P41. Rusty crossed the cut to staple strains such as Gelonade, Permanent Marker, LCG, Mochi and Duke’s Crumpets to name a few.

A few months later as tester batches started to come in from our cultivation partners I immediately noticed that they were different from the P41 pheno that we had originally selected with Dave. I tried to explore the possibility in my mind that the phenotype was just showing different expressions in this particular clone generation but I couldn’t believe it. Soon after we had a batch come down that we knew for sure came from the original P41 mother plant and sure enough it was way different. So now I had given out this unidentified cut to a lot of our cultivators and Rusty had made seeds with it that were already in testing so we could drop the crosses in Barcelona at Spannabis. I called Dave from Preferred and we traced the cut back to the source. It came from a grower in Grass Valley California and it came to Dave as “Zoap” but when it was tested it obviously wasn’t Zoap but Dave kept it backed up in veg because of the unique characteristics and somewhere there was a mixup and clones went out as P41.

It was at this point where I was forced to make a game time decision. I started thinking about people’s reaction to the unknown cut; it always seemed to impress. I thought of all of the particular strains that we had crossed it to and tried to picture how the crosses would be and that thought interested me. At this point I took some prize pieces out of a tester pack and rolled a joint of the unknown strain. As I was sitting there and contemplating all kinds of scenarios ran through my head; how am I going to tell Rusty about the mistake? If we keep running it what are we going to call it? What is it anyway? I had never seen or smelled anything quite like it. The nose was like a creamy menthol with gassy nutty white chocolate and tropical fruit and the smoke was flavorful with a good level of expansion. I thought of how airheads candy had a “white mystery” flavor and since this was a mystery I decided to keep it and call it White Taffi. I explained the situation to Rusty and we decided to stay on track and see how the new White Taffi crosses came out and to no surprise they came out amazing. Some of my favorite phenotypes in our genetic development program came from those White Taffi crosses and the White Taffi is currently one of the top selling varieties on our menu. People love the unique profile of the White Taffi and so do I. The number one question I get asked is “what is it?” and the truth is, I don’t know. You can’t make this kind of thing up, this mixup was a gift from the plant to help us in our journey. Thank you Mother Earth.