As predicted, the marijuana industry has been blowing up across the four states it’s legal. Taxes are raining profits, jobs are being created, and innovation has turned a once black market industry into a juggernaut of mass-appeal And now, there’s something even newer and more different: A dining experience in Colorado shirks the after dinner digestive and replaces it with a cannabis pairing to round out the meal and send you off on a high (sorry).
Cultivating Spirits has hired accredited cannabis sommeliers to artfully and skillfully pair the right strain, strength, and dose of weed with your meal. Hold up a sec, you can now get accredited as a cannabis somm? The answer is a hard “yup.” The Trichome Institute in Colorado offers accreditation courses that range from two-hour seminars to one-day affairs with oral and written tests, lectures, and, we assume, smoking some f*cking weed. So, okay, it’s not the three to five year process it takes to be a master wine and spirit somm. But it’s a start that’s so befitting of the stoner world (come on, guys, one day…).
Regardless of the low bar for becoming a weed somm, or “bongelier,” weed culture and innovation isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Cultivating Spirits just landed a $400,000 investment to expand their brand. With Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia already fully legal, expect this sector to blossom (sorry). And 2016’s election will see Arizona, California (again…), Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada voting on full legalization. It’s about to get hazy in here!
(Via Bloomberg)
