We've come a long way from the days when Moroccan dry sift dominated the global hash scene. Today there are all kinds of varieties, from old school staples like temple balls, to cold cured rosin, to machines that use static electricity to collect trichome heads. Who would have thought we would see entire fields of outdoor plants harvested and thrown in freezers?
While the world's appetite for extracts seems endless, what does a global cannabis economy mean for the hash of the Emerald Triangle?
It's no secret that today the hills of Northern California are creating some of the best material on the planet. To understand where we're headed, let's start at the beginning, eight hundred years ago, on a mountain on the other side of the world.
1200 AD: the garden
It's late fall, high in the Hindu Kush. The air is thin and smells like cold stone and goat. On a terrace of rocky dirt above the village, the cannabis has gone gold and purple in the cold nights. Picture a farmer from the mountains of what's now northern Afghanistan walking the row. He doesn't cut any plants. He rubs the tops between his hands.
By the end of the row his palms are coated in a dark crust that smells like pine pitch and pepper. He works it off with his thumbnail, kneads it and rolls it again. By sundown he's holding a small black lump. A whole day's labor, and it fits in his hand.
That hand-rubbed temple ball is called charas, and it's still made this way today.
The road
Far to the east, a merchant named Rustam is a couple of months into a roughly 4,000-mile journey along what we now call the Silk Road. He set out from China with a caravan hundreds of camels long, loaded with silk, porcelain and paper bound for the markets of the west.
About every day's ride there's a caravanserai, a walled roadside inn where traders from Persia, India, Armenia and China swap news, prices and rumors over the fire in half a dozen languages. There are bandits, sandstorms, and a tax collector at every city gate. Every middleman takes his cut, and every one of them is betting the goods will be worth more at the next stop. Rustam is betting on the same thing, and the goods he's after are waiting at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains.
1200 AD: Cairo and Damascus
At the other end of the road, bustling metropolises are waiting on him. Cities like Cairo and Damascus are some of the biggest and oldest in the world, their markets packed shoulder to shoulder with spice sellers, coppersmiths and water carriers, as the call to prayer rolls over the rooftops five times a day. These are cities that have fallen in love with hashish. Traveling Sufi mystics helped spread it through the region in the 1100s, and by now it's being sold openly in the markets.
Sufis take it as part of their devotions, well-off and educated people treat it as a pastime, and religious scholars argue over whether it should be allowed at all.
For the next several hundred years, the map didn't change much. Hash kept coming out of the mountains, and the cities at the end of the road kept buying it.
The modern trade
Then in the 1960s a new kind of traveler showed up. Enter the hippies. In Morocco's Rif mountains, farmers had grown cannabis for centuries but only smoked it as kif, a mix of chopped flower and tobacco packed into a long pipe called a sebsi. That changed when backpackers of the European counterculture made it to the Rif on the Hippie Trail. Many had already been through Afghanistan and India, where they learned to sieve resin from dried plants. Sure enough, by the late 1960s Morocco was creating hash for export.
When war cut off trade from Lebanon and Afghanistan, Morocco had a geographical advantage, sitting right across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. By the early 1990s, the Moroccan "soap bar" had a near monopoly in Western Europe. It was cheap, it was everywhere, and it shaped the taste of an entire continent. Where America became a flower culture, Europe grew up rolling hash into joints with tobacco.
Today Morocco is still Europe's largest hash supplier. Its farmers are growing a lot of the same cultivars we are, on dry mountainsides with rough roads and little rain, creating hash that blows most of America's out of the water. But the map is shifting again. Since 2018, one origin keeps showing up in Europe's seizures: North America. And the name they put on it is California.
The global stage
The same way the world consumes American music, movies, and clothing, they want our weed. At events like Spannabis and Mary Jane Berlin, the global weed world is coming together, collabing, and finding ways to start the new Silk Road together.
Back in the hills
Which brings us home, where it doesn't feel like we're winning anything. About half of Humboldt's farms have closed since 2021, and in October 2025 the county cut its cultivation tax to zero just to keep people in the game.
While the demand for flower continues to decrease, concentrates continue to grow in popularity. Welcome fresh frozen. All over the hills we have crews racing to beat the early morning light as the harvest goes straight into a freezer.
Our niche is the quality, the precision, the expertise, and of course the beautiful sun. Few places can grow outdoor like us, and California is readying itself to lead the world in hash production.
Like Rustam, someone will always be waiting at the bottom of the hill. Our role is to make sure the cities at the end of the road know exactly where it came from.