HARVEST 2019
And the End of Our Product Batches
Words: mills
Photos: Reid Glaze

 

I met Scott Cusak on an airplane. My most common commute is a mid-morning Southwest Airlines Flight from Austin, Texas to colorful Denver, Colorado. After three years of commuting it’s an automatic experience. I seek solace in my headphones and the keyboard of my laptop. Rarely bothered, I sink into cheap vinyl by the window, transforming an uncomfortable space into my two hour office as we sail over snow capped peaks. Sometime in late Spring, Scott Cusak invited himself into my office. 

Scott, too, was an A-List preferred member of Southwest, racking up points on the same commute. He was friendly, offering his free Wi-Fi into my noise-cancelling headphones and eventually boasting joyfully about his hemp business to an oblivious flight attendant. I piqued with interest, and after the flight attendant finished asking the common cannabis business questions, I politely introduced myself:

“You grow hemp?”



What follows is a 6 month experiment into cultivating quality cannabis genetics, and, as of Thursday, harvesting those genetics. Not only did Scott and his team “grow hemp,” but their understanding of plant cultivation far surpassed my own. We shared a common goal in efficacious product, and I spent more time listening than teaching. Despite my experience, and my ego, it always serves me more to listen than to speak.




The result is an almost offensive amount of pungent terpenes on surreal purple and gold buds. Early testing confirms hypotheses as the plants are rich in CBD, CBG, and vital ancillary cannabinoids. The plant is as intended and in abundance. 

The importance of a chance, thirty-thousand feet up encounter goes well beyond one season’s harvest. Since MINERAL’s conception, we’ve believed that the plant is the benefit. We’ve bottled our product in Batches for consistency and bioavailability. As we grew, batches got bigger, and the time between them grew longer. The demand for our product controlled the amount created. Then Batches became more consistent and we got closer to a series of hemp genetics ideal for the individual formulations.


In October, we will release the Fall / Winter collection of MINERAL formulations. The genetics for each will be detailed as we understand them, the people that grew them. Going forward, we will release two distinct Batches of product per year, Fall / Winter and Spring / Summer, restocking formulations based off demand.