Novarine by Grassroots

I’m stoned. The Novarine is not at all tasty but this is a for-real high.

Let me back up. Grassroots is one of the first growers offering recreational marijuana in Illinois. I remember getting little one-gram containers from them. Northern Lights Haze?

It doesn’t matter. I believe Grassroots is also the company that makes the Wana brand of gummies, which have been consistently good over the years, and across the country. I’ve seen Wanas on the menu in Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Grassroots as a grower selling flower seemed to fade in Illinois in 2022, 2023. They just never had many offerings on the menus I was looking at (Sauget, Fairview Heights). But when I was looking for a sativa-leaning eighth to give as a gift to a friend in early 2024, I was drawn to the strain Novarine from Grassroots. I wanted to make sure I was giving a decent gift so I bought two eighths of Novarine. I’m not sure the logic ever added up. If I cracked an eighth and it was bad, then what? I have two lousy eighths? If I cracked one and it was good, I guess I would also have an eighth for myself. That was my thinking.

I bought the two Novarine eighths from Ascend in Fairview Heights, IL in December of 2023. The eighths were plastic jars, and they weren’t especially fresh. The purchase was immediately on shaky ground. I opened one jar, which had a moisture pack in it. The bud was pretty dry. It didn’t have any bag appeal. I was not going to be giving Novarine as a gift but I would still try it out for myself.

Grassroots markets the Novarine as a sativa. The lineage is fuzzy. Best I’ve ever seen is that Novarine descends from the Thai landrace, or it’s something called Caprichosa Thai, the parents of which are a Thai sativa and an Afghani indica.

It’s never smoked like a straight sativa for me. But it doesn’t hit me like a heavy indica either. I don’t get a bite from Novarine, which is to say no head rush (like I would get from Sherb or Durban Poison, e.g.). I also have never been couch-locked by Novarine. Given this, I’d call Novarine a straight-up hybrid or maybe lean it 60/40 toward sativa.

I can remember burning a third-gram joint of Novarine outside a Petey concert in St. Louis at the end of February. I had been distracted by something going on next-door all day and the Novarine even-keeled me. That was the moment I woke up to Novarine. On other occasions, the smoke helped me get in touch with the emotion I have often been feeling below the surface. Getting a little weep-eyed, which I always welcome from a smoke.

I can smoke some Novarine, get a little weepy, get into my phone a bit, but then coherently send out some texts before getting into my notebooks and working on drafts of poems I have not yet finished. It’s one of those strains that plays out backwards: indica effects early on, then sativa effects later. I usually expect that sequence to be sativa first, indica later.

Writing this now about a year after I bought Novarine in 2023, I saw Grassroots drop some new flower in Sauget a couple weeks ago. There wasn’t any Novarine. I might have gotten some if I had seen it. There was some Peanut Butter Soufflé, some Kush Mints, and some Animal Mint Cake. I got the Animal Mint Cake. It, along with the Peanut Butter, was gone off that menu pretty quickly, so Grassroots seems still to have some attraction generally.