Given how long Plain Jane has been in business, it’s surprising that we didn’t get around to them before. My expectations were not built up too highly, based on the standards I’ve come to figure out for this industry. Plain Jane seems to be a brand marketed at those consumers just wanting to timidly dip a toe in cannabis, the new post-legalization generation of first-time cannabis users. Moms in yoga pants trying out CBD, and so on.

So, I didn’t expect much, but man is Plain Jane ever behind the times! The Plain Jane site lists the 3.5-gram bag of delta 8 flower at $17.99 while the delta 8 blunt is $13.99.

Pros

• Reasonable price
• Flower had some effects

Cons

• DRY!!!
• Long-dead plant matter dreaming of its former potency
• Weak even when it was fresh
• Little to no aroma and flavor

Recommendation: Rotate your stock and throw away anything over a year old.

Delta 8 King Palm Twax Blunt: Big Disappointment

Let’s start with the blunt, which is a 1.5-gram log dusted with kief. I reserved it to try in the morning, but when the dawn called me to light this thing, it started burning like a road flare. This thing is way too dry! Blowing out the flame and attempting to smoke it, it was burning so fast that I only got in a few puffs before snubbing it out. I don’t think it could have burned any faster were it dipped in kerosene.

Both the taste and odor were corky and woodsy, so much so that I could just barely tell I was smoking hemp at all. It also had next to no effect, but we’ll talk some more about potency when we get to the flower. I don’t have the numbers on the blunt in front of me, but I suspect it would have to be the same low-potency formula as the flower.

Really blazed half a blunt, felt nothing, and it tasted like licking the sands of the Sahara. How old was this blunt? I want to do some DNA analysis to see if it was recovered from King Tut’s Tomb. Just think, this was allegedly once a green, living plant.

I am a huge fan of blunts where they are done right, so when a blunt scores zero points with me, something has gone terribly wrong.

Delta 8 Elektra Hemp Flower: Weak Even For Hemp

As for the bag of flower: Just like any local dispensary, they have 3.5 grams of flower in a little ziplock bag. Here again, I don’t expect much, because it is clearly touted as “hemp,” the kind where they extracted delta 8 and then sprayed it on the flower.

So it’s “hemp” alright: The kind of dry, grassy hemp we first saw come on the market two years ago. But I have to let go of hope that the blunt was just a fluke. The flower was also impossibly dry and crumbly, with no aroma from the bag beyond a mowed-grass smell. The flavor, again, is mostly dust. I did pick up a very light buzz of a bowl, but then when I check the bag, it says the Delta 8 is only at 4.25%.

Sure enough, that felt like 4%! At this point, I could almost get as much of a buzz-smoking catnip.

To be fair: Plain Jane mostly touts their “CBD hemp,” which does, again, strike me as being aimed towards the medical or therapeutic user and not the recreational party user.

When we first saw delta 8 hemp on the market, I was impressed merely for seeing “legal weed” being made possible, even if it was weak as grass and tasted like hay. But since then, the cannabis industry has learned a few new tricks, such as THCA flower that’s nearly indistinguishable from regular THC cannabis.

Just looking at the flower, you can see the darker, discolored parts where the extract was sprayed on, and the ashy stems inside. Basically tumbleweeds.

Flower Should Be Fresher

The cannabis industry is still young and likely everyone is learning as they go along. I have a new revelation for cannabis producers: Rotate your stock! Cannabis flower has a shelf life maximum of a year – sometimes only six months. Stale cannabis loses its potency, roughly 16% after the first year, and a sharp fall-off after that. From the rash of dry, dusty, low-potency flower we’ve been seeing (from many companies), it is clear that this stuff is sitting in a warehouse somewhere without inventory control.

And I’m sorry, I want to like Plain Jane more; we will be reviewing their accessories later, but so far they seem to fare better. I could let dry tumbleweed delta-8 hemp slide a few years ago. But in 2023, flower this old, dry, and stale is simply inexcusable. Plain Jane is based in Oregon, a thriving cannabis state, so they should know doubly better.

On the whole, this was quite disappointing. The shame of it is, this might have been a perfectly passable flower at one time, which was ruined through mishandling.

Readers, share your dry weed stories here in the comments or in our kush forum.