How to Train Your Palate Like a Hash Flight Competitor

At the Hash Flight Tournament, competitors smelled each sample blind, tasted it, and matched it to a cultivar on their Flight Manifest. One wrong answer and they were out. Nobody walks in with that kind of palate. It is trained, one tasting at a time.

Start with your nose

Aroma comes first. At the tournament, every sample started with a blind smell before a single taste. Do the same: smell before you taste, and give each sample your full attention.

Taste low and slow

High heat flattens flavor. Low-temperature dabs bring out the aroma and flavor that set one cultivar apart from the next. Our guide to low-temperature dabs covers the basics.

Taste side by side

A single sample tells you what you like. Several samples, tasted in a row, teach you to tell them apart. That is the idea behind Hash Flight: a guided flight of five low-temperature dabs from one featured brand, with a hash connoisseur, our Captain, walking guests through each cultivar.

Name what you taste

Give each sample words: citrus, pine, gas, sweet, earthy. They do not need to be right, they need to be yours. Over time, the words become a map.

Write it down

Competitors wrote their answers on paper. Keep your own notes: the brand, the cultivar, its genetics and what you noticed. Notes turn a good night into training.

Learn from people who taste for a living

Dan Braunstein, one of the producers behind Hash Flight, judged concentrates at the 2024 California State Fair cannabis competition, and has also judged at Cannifest. The fastest way to train your palate is to taste with people who have done it for years, and ask them questions.

Take a seat

Read how the Hash Flight Tournament worked, explore our hash tasting experiences in Los Angeles, or find the next flight on thehashflight.com.