Pincanna offers truly top-shelf products at accessible price points

One of the perks of being City Pulse’s Lansterdam columnist is getting to try free dope from local shops and growers. The Lansing area is lucky to have some of the best options in the state, and it’s always nice to see what new products the different businesses have coming down the pipeline. For instance, Pincanna is releasing a new infused roasted-almond snack under its Funky Extracts edible line. I’ll review that product in a future article about non-gummy edible options in the area, but for now, I’d like to discuss some of the concentrates that were selected for me when I stopped by Pincanna’s retail location in East Lansing to pick up the almonds. To say the products blew me away is an understatement.

When I arrived at the shop, I was greeted by an impressive staff with a real passion for cannabis and a deep knowledge of Pincanna’s in-house products, as well as the handful of curated brands outside the Pincanna family. My budtender, Elijah, was a fellow hash head with an exemplary knowledge of cannabis products and customer service. I asked him to pick out one of the shop’s top-shelf offerings and one of its more economical live resin baller buckets so I could determine the quality at both the high and low ends. For the top-shelf item, he recommended a 2-gram jar of SuperBoof live hash rosin, sold under Pincanna’s in-house brand Head Stash Hash. For the live resin, he suggested a 3.5-gram baller jar of Clemendo, a strain produced in collaboration with top-tier Michigan cultivator Peninsula Gardens.

I often ask dispensary employees for their recommendations, and the results can be hit or miss. But Elijah knocked it out of the park. I have long admired Pincanna, which hails from the state’s gray-market days, when it sold products at many of Lansing’s caregiver-run provisioning centers.

I’ll be honest: My expectations are never very high when it comes to recreational hash rosin. The process of turning cannabis flower into hash is much less straightforward than blasting a hydrocarbon like butane through it to make live or cured resin. Different genetics yield drastically different results, and companies need to be dialed in and using cannabis that’s explicitly selected or bred to be made into solventless products. Rosin needs to be extracted from fresh plants and processed using water and agitation, freeze dryers and heat and pressure in the form of a rosin press. There’s a lot more to the process, but it’s apples and oranges compared to hydrocarbon extractions, which are much more forgiving of deficiencies in the quality of cultivation.

Pincanna really impressed me with its Head Stash Hash rosin. For one, the quality is top-tier as far as hash goes in the legal dope game. The funky citrus taste is hard not to enjoy, and it produces a very enjoyable high. In addition, at $49 for a 2-gram jar, it’s sold at the same price as lower quality solventless products and even some solvent options at other dispensaries. Unlike most hash rosin at this price point, the SuperBoof in my jar has a nice light color and is the perfect consistency for dabbing.

The live resin also blew me away with its quality and value for the consumer. The terpene-rich concentrate has the consistency of a batter or sauce. It’s a little messier than the typical live resin, but it offers an amazing mix of terpenes and cannabinoids, as well as a light and pleasant citrus taste. Clemendo is a pretty good strain to extract, and the folks at Pincanna and Peninsula Gardens have their version dialed in just right. Most impressive is the $45 price tag.

You really can’t go wrong with picking either of these items up, and it says something about how quickly the industry is entering maturity that a consumer can walk into the store and leave with 5.5 grams of pretty top-notch concentrates for around $100.

I look forward to seeing Pincanna and other local producers continue to dial in their processes and bring more top-self options to consumers at price points people can afford. Even as the corporate giants aim to consolidate Michigan’s legal dope game, consumers’ tastes and price expectations are driving the market and, in the case of Pincanna, allowing some smaller operators to build their brands and grab market shares with products that meet both demands.