If you’re a connoisseur of fresh, powerful, great-tasting weed produced via attentive and proper cultivation that’ll melt your face off and make music, sex, food, sleep, and wasting time better than it has ever been, you’ve probably got an expensive habit on your hands. It wasn’t always this way. A couple of years back, it would cost you $60 tops for a California dispensary’s best product, and if you couldn’t afford that you could sample the top shelf stuff by purchasing smaller amounts, like a single gram.
Good luck finding a gram of top-shelf weed these days. And a $60 eighth looks more like $100 after taxes, etc.
Enter California Cultivator Green Dragon. The brand attempts to ease the financial strain of smoking herb with Féria, or “The Fetti” for those of you too scared of Spanish. It snagged gold for Hybrid strains at High Times’ 2020 Cannabis Cup (California Region), beating out CBX’s massively popular Cereal Milk strain, which is almost twice the price after taxes. Féria is slang for “money” and, with an average price of $45, it attempts to save you some while still providing a powerful high that helps to stretch your dollar and make your weed last longer. But THC% isn’t everything, so we set out to see if this strain is actually worth your time or if it just benefited from a bunch of hype over its low price tag and potent THC content.
For those who don’t know, since the pandemic, the Cannabis Cup has gone from being judged by industry veterans and celebrity connoisseurs like Tommy Chong, Snoop Dog, assorted members of Wu-Tang Clan, and Kid Cudi to being voted on by stoners like you and me. That’s not a knock on the Cannabis Cup, it’s a better model! I care more about what your average stoner thinks than what some rich stoner smokes.
But I still needed to try it for myself, especially since Cereal Milk has been my personal go-to this year. Check my review below:
Féria The Fetti
Retail Price: $45
Strain: Hybrid
THC: 34.9%
CBD: .09%
Dominant Terpenes: Limonene, Caryophyllene, Linalool,
The High
Before we get into the high, we need to talk about the presentation. It’s easy to be unimpressed by Féria — the jar is wrapped in a plastic label that acts as both decoration and the jar’s seal, featuring a graphic of a $100 bill with a cartoon dragon over Ben Franklin’s face, and a whole bunch of mixed fonts. It’s ugly. I realize this isn’t a beauty contest, but great packaging only adds to the experience, and it’s hard to get excited about Féria before you open the jar.
On the cap is a sticker label that lists your basic strain information and also has a QR code that transports you into a portal of your strain’s lab-certified analysis, which gives you a full breakdown of the strain’s terpenes, and other nerdy things like pesticide analysis, moisture content, and cannabinoid potency. As someone deep into weed, I love this kind of nerdy shit, so I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t won over by this feature.
On to the weed!
Féria didn’t get its name because it saves you money, but because of its luxurious appearance — dense frosty green nugs with flecks of purple flowers and wild twisting orange hairs. It’s an absolute pleasure to look at and will make you want to break it up with your fingers just so that magical kief doesn’t get wasted on the teeth of your grinder. It’s not as sticky as I’d like it to be, but it’s easy enough to work with that you can roll it up in a joint or blunt wrap without the need for any additional tools.
The high is predictably powerful, with a THC content of 34.9% this stuff is going to blast even experienced smokers on their ass after a single bowl. If you’re an occasional smoker, pack less than you think you need, because this stuff goes far.
The high began centered squarely above my brow. After a few hits, I felt a weightiness behind my eyes and my whole body slipped into relaxation mode. This is definitely a couch-lock-inducing strain, and I found myself forgetting what I was doing often, so don’t smoke this and then find something to watch, do, or listen to. Pre-planning your experience, which admittedly sounds lame, will help ensure that you don’t waste most of the high laying down trying to remember what it was you were just about to do. Unless that’s how you want to spend your high!
While the high was strong, I wasn’t sold by the taste or smell. Féria has a very dirty and earthy flavor, subtle notes of pine and citrus lurk beneath all the muck, but this strain mostly keeps things in the sort of peppery realm that isn’t easy on the throat, whether you’re vaping or hitting a bong. The aftertaste also has a sort of chemical quality to it — I think Green Dragon was going for mint here, but mint isn’t an easy flavor to achieve in weed. When it’s done wrong, it more often than not tastes like hand soap or lotion than cool and refreshing.
For that reason, we’re going to suggest you skip flavor-focused smoking methods like vapes or bongs and instead roll this up in a flavored blunt wrap, or pack it into a bowl with some of your grinder’s kief catch sprinkled on top.
The Bottom Line
For the price, you won’t find a strain that gets you this high and looks this beautiful, but Green Dragon has a bit more work to do in the flavor department if they want this stuff to really compete with real California top-shelf mainstays like CBX, Connected, Or A Golden State.
It’s not our favorite Hybrid strain of the year, but it’s definitely worth a pick-up on your next weed run. Especially if money is tight.
