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As the 21st century reefer revolution continues to transform the planet, weed wizards around the world keep coming up with new, innovative ways to get high. What a time to be alive and smoking!

“Terp sauce” is trending pretty damn hard these days — and for a good reason. It’s a sticky, texturized cannabis concentrate that not only catapults you into space, but it also offers a spectrum of taste on par with the complexity of wine. 

This goopy concentrate looks like crystalized honey to the eye. It’s composition is similar to a blend of brown sugar and warm butter. Except, this THC concentrate is translucent and generally boasts hues of amber. It also doesn’t taste like brown-sugar butter, either. Rather, it’s loaded with terpenes, so it packs a saucy punch that often leaves stoners drooling — and wanting more.

But, before you smoke down a whole jar of terp sauce, understand it’s strong stuff! It’s best to know what you’re getting into. So, read on before buckling-in for blast off.

What Exactly Is Terp Sauce?

Terp sauce is a high-impact, delectably aromatic cannabis concentrate that’s also known as a high terpene full-spectrum extract (HTFSE). The key component of sauce is its abundance in terpenes, or essential oils that give the plant its distinct pungent aromas ranging from gasoline to lavender to cheese to lemon zest. But more on that later.

Often, when cannabis is converted into a concentrate, varying levels of terpenes are diminished — even eliminated — in the process. The purpose of making terp sauce, then, is to isolate terpenes for inclusion and to amplify their presence in the final mix. The result is a full-spectrum concentrate without fats, lipids, waxes, and other possible determinants to your intoxication experience.

Ultimately, the goal of smoking terp sauce is to give your taste buds a clean, sensuous experience rich with flavor. Obviously, yes — we smoke concentrates to get high, too. Duh! But, there’s so much more to terp sauce — and all concentrates, for that matter — than getting blitzed out the skull.

What Are Terpenes?

As you can probably tell from the previous sections, it’s hard to talk about sauce without acknowledging the powerful presence of terpenes. Terps are the essence, or soul, of cannabis. They are organic plant compounds that give cannabis its flavors and scents. 

But they’re not only found in cannabis. In fact, they’re found in every single plant, fruit, and vegetable on the planet. Lemons and pine trees, for instance, are two other species that have high-terpene content. Interestingly, these two terpene profiles are also present in the cannabis plant. 

Additionally, the terpenes in cannabis are believed to interact with THC to define the type of high you’ll experience. This general phenomenon is known as the “entourage effect” theory. It plays a part in determining if a strain is going to make you feel buzzed and alert or chilled out and relaxed. But, more importantly, the entourage effect is crucial in understanding why pot is medicinal. In short, when cannabis is consumed the cannabinoids, flavinoids, and terpenes in the plant act in symphony, ultimately allowing the plant to have greater therapeutic value. This theory, then, suggests that consuming isolated cannabinoids does not have the same medicinal effects as when all the compounds of the plants are ingested.

Concentrates have always been one of the best medical cannabis products on the market. Terpenes are a big reason why sauce and other extracts are an excellent product for relief from pain, anxiety, stress, and more. 

Why Is It Called “Sauce”?

The term “sauce” arises from the extract’s texturized consistency. The sauce can vary in thickness from loose and syrupy to as dense as honey and molasses. Most commonly, terp sauce resembles delicious fruit jam laden with grains of sugar. 

Other monikers bestowed upon this mouth-watering blend include “herbal sauce,” “weed sauce,” or, with increasing commonality, just plain old “sauce.”

How Is Terp Sauce Made?

The initial process of creating terp sauce is the same as most other extracts. It begins with refrigerating or freezing a live cannabis plant. Pressurized extraction then separates out the live resin, usually with an element such as butane hash oil (BHO), in order to focus on only terpenes and desirable cannabinoids.

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After living through four months of death and disruption caused by the COVID-19 crisis, last year’s outbreak of vaping-related lung illness (EVALI) feels like it was a decade ago. 

Starting at the end of last summer, doctors across the US began reporting strange cases of a mysterious lung illness that eventually killed 68 people and sickened around 3,000 more. Researchers never figured out exactly what was responsible for this sudden outbreak, but conclusive reports linked most cases of the illness to illegal cannabis vapes. Federal health officials now believe the illness was caused by toxins or additives contained in illicit market weed vapes, but a small number of state-legal cannabis products were also linked to EVALI cases.

Last September, as the death toll began to rise, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency and temporarily banned the sale of all vaping products, including both tobacco and cannabis products. Between September 25 and December 12, the date the ban was lifted, the state confiscated over 619,000 vaping products and placed them in quarantine. 

The seizure of these products was a major financial blow to the state’s adult-use industry, which is still in its early days. Ellen Rosenfeld, president of CommCan, a company that produces and sells both medical and adult-use pot products, told Cannabis Business Times that state regulators currently have 35,000 of her company’s vaping products in quarantine. These products, which could be sold for a total of $2.4 million, are currently nearing the end of their expiration dates. And that’s just one of the many legal weed vape producers in the state.

The state tested samples of each product for vitamin E acetate, an additive linked to the illness, and also tested the products for heavy metal contamination. Independent testing labs did not find vitamin E in any of the quarantined products. The tests did, however, find that many of the seized vape carts contained impermissible levels of lead, which can release toxic fumes when heated. But after an additional round of testing, the results came back completely different.

“Our testing that we’ve conducted as a commission did not detect any vitamin E acetate, which is obviously a good sign and encouraging news, but we did identify some pretty concerning levels of lead,” said Shawn Collins, executive director of the state Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) to Cannabis Business Times. “Upon retest though, the results are a little all over the map. Where something that might have failed for lead – and failing for us would be above 500 parts per billion –  didn’t fail the second round. So, it’s sort of a hit or miss environment.”

“There were really concerning levels of lead and that’s what prompted us, we better try to wrap our heads around this,” Collins explained. “It’s annoying; we went looking for [the presence of] vitamin E acetate and stumbled upon another concern.” In one particular case, Collins said that the initial test found a lead concentration of 27,000 ppb — far above the 500 ppb allowed under state law. But, a second test of that same sample could not detect the presence of lead at all.

Now, seven months later, the state is wondering what to do with the millions of dollars’ worth of weed products they seized. The CCC recently posted an online question soliciting public feedback on what to do with these confiscated products. 

“Continuing to restrict the sale of the quarantined vaping cartridges is a financial burden on licensees and creates a potential risk of diversion,” the CCC wrote. “Before making a dispositive decision regarding cannabis vaporizer products subject to quarantine, the Commission invites public comment regarding the question of what, if any, conditions would allow for the retesting and safe sale of vaporizer products that were prohibited for sale or subjected to quarantine.”

“We haven’t come up with an answer or a solution, so the idea behind [the public comment period] is, let’s ask a question and see what we can get for answers and figure out what ultimately to do with this inventory,” said Collins to Cannabis Business Times. “Sometimes the answers take time. …We’ve worked through this with the industry as cooperatively as we can, but we’ve been searching for some of those answers that just haven’t appeared.”

Collins suggested that the state could retest and sell these vapes, allow the cannabis oil in the vape carts to be reprocessed and resold, or simply destroy all seized products. The CCC will continue hearing public comments through today, and after considering these comments, will make a final decision on the matter.

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Edibles were not included in the state’s original medical cannabis law.

Colorado’s cannabis sales surpassed $192 million this past May, setting a new record for the highest one-month cash haul since the state legalized weed in 2014, according to The Denver Post.

Both medical marijuana dispensaries and recreational pot shops reported record sales of more than $42 million and nearly $150 million, respectively. The new numbers represent a 29 percent rise over sales in April and a 32 percent increase over May 2019.

So far in 2020, Colorado outlets have sold more than $779 million in legal weed, generating over $167 million in taxes and fees for the state. “It’s beginning to look like cannabis is anti-recession or at least COVID-recession resistant,” said Roy Bingham, executive chairman of BDS Analytics data firm, in response to Colorado’s spiking numbers.

Bingham said he believes pandemic factors, such as people having more free time and staying home more, may have contributed to the increase. Additionally, cannabis consumers are also buying more each time they go to the dispensary, Bingham explained. This bulk-buying trend started in March when Colorado went under a statewide stay-at-home order. “Everyone has perhaps become more used to consuming a little more.”

The onset of COVID and shelter-in-place orders set in March also impacted the types of products consumers and patients bought. For instance, flower sales went down while edibles sales skyrocketed. Those numbers are starting to even out again, however, as flower sales are rebounding. This is likely caused by a drop in price. According to BDS Analytics’ data, buds were selling for $4.37 per gram in May, down from about $4.71 per gram in January. 

Liz Connors, director of analytics for Headset, a data firm that looks at cannabis consumer trends, said cannabis sales are likely to continue surging in June and July, driven by an uptick in tourism.

Colorado dispensaries, like many legal dispensaries around the country, were deemed “essential” at the onset of quarantine. Thus far, monthly cannabis sales in 2020 have consistently outpaced 2019, which was the highest grossing year on record. As of last December, Colorado sold $7.79 billion in legal weed. Now, with cannabis sales seeing new all-time highs, the Centennial State is on track to surpass December’s figure. 

If 2020’s spectacular growth in sales is any indication, its that cannabis is the perfect crutch to get us through the chaos of a pandemic — hopefully it’ll also help us stay sane through the upcoming election, too. 

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