How to improve sense of smell? (was 'How to smell better?')

No I don’t have a body odour issue but I do really battle to categorize smells of some buds. With my current setup I’m able to run quite a few strains in a perpetual grow. Nice variety of smells going down but it’s really hard for me to describe them. When I check info on a strain it will list possible “smells” but even that doesn’t always help.
I also find it tricky to know if the listed smell is an actual smell from nature or a food / beverage product?
Anyone know if there’s a way to improve your smell knowledge?

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Take a moment with your strain. A real moment. Open the jar and take a really deep sniff. Write down what comes to you. You’ll be surprised how accurate you might be if you were look it up later online. Do the same thing with the smoke. Write it down.

The best thing I can tell you, I think, is to do this on one strain at a time. Your smell receptors get overloaded with more than one thing. Other disciplines use smelling coffee as a way to clear the palate but I haven’t tried it myself.

All the best.

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Another thing to do would be to go find some of the smells commonly found in cannabis, and familiarize yourself with them, separate from your buds. But do it with a friend and try to keep it somewhat anonymous. Get 4 or 5 fruits- pineapple, lemon, grape, etc. Put them in cups and try to ID/notice them in depth individually by having your friend set it up, and smell them w your eyes closed. Then do it with some of the harder to ID smells- not sure I want to condone smelling deeply chemicals/fuels so I wont make that same recommendation but hopefully you get the point.

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I’ve smelled a cactus & honeysuckle blossom & immediate thought was “TITTIES”. :neutral_face: :bikini:

:evergreen_tree:

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Try to take the jar of cured product somewhere other than where you live.

I’ve noticed that when I bring a friend a jar, when we open the jar I’m always shocked how much it smells.

Maybe it’s because my whole house smells like weed :joy: I dunno but maybe my nose filters it out in my house because it’s a default smell or something (I hope not…). Just something to consider.

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I agree with the ‘cured jar’ approach, that works well.

Where I have ‘a smell gap’ is on stem rubs; “creamy floor wax” does not fit any terpenes profile I can think of… :thinking: :biohazard:

Cheers
G

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Thanks peoples, all very helpful.

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Many breweries have sensory panels to help describe taste, smells, and other attributes of a specific beer. Look up how some of these places run their programs and translate to cannabis. Im sure much of the information translates over.

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Great topic I’m paying attention nooby! I too suffer from poor sniffing/describing ability. Some people are really good at interpreting smells. I’m somewhat limited too I’ve smelled that one before and damn that stinks. I’m amazed at some folks described smells. Like @OniTenshu can really describe a strain😀.

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Hey. There are aroma kits to help one’s awareness of aromas and smells. Wine testers and perfume creators use such kits to train their nose and broaden their awareness of smells. As a chef it is something that I have been used to and you have a smell bank in your brain. We can image a certain smell by thinking of certain ingredients.
It’s funny. Lately I’ve been more aware of certain aromas and smells that make me go" humm that reminds me of weed". when it’s the other way really, the aromas I can’t identify in the weed later are revealed while doing something else like garlic, cedar, 2stroke petrol. Interesting really. My memories have always been triggered by smells and sounds or images.

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Actually your brain gets used to a certain smell after 20 min and just blocks it out. :wink::+1::poop:

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The terpenes & esters in cannabis are fascinating things. What’s amazing to me is how smells that would normally repulse a person or indicate it has past it’s expiration date ie gassy/rotten fruit/cheese etc let you know it’s top shelf flower

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:joy: …so I had my dad smell one of my bags after curing & figured I chose the most appealing one… “That smells BAD!”
:confused: WTF. Dude. Whatever! It smells GREAT to me! :joy:

:evergreen_tree:

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If I were to describe how I got where I am now it’s mostly practice. When I smell something I ask myself exactly what it is. Not just that I’m smelling something like fried food in the air. I ask myself exactly what food, oil used, and if I can smell any what seasonings are in the air.

I do this for everything around me, always. I enjoy finding new smells and tastes. The key is definitely cleaning your nose and palette of anything that is overwhelming or cloying.

You want to get familiar with a smell or taste as isolated as possible. It will help later when you’re trying to isolate multiple smells at once.

I did it the slow and trial and error way. I can use what I learned from that to help other people to get something similar. honestly you never know who has an innate skill for it and never had the right method to find out.

While that may sound strange at first think if it like a learned skill. You can have an innate ability for blacksmithing, but you’d never know if you only tried in a diy situation. The skillset is more about certain movements than anything else and you never know if you have the ability to have the specific touch tight away without the correct material to work with. If you try an advanced method before you understand the basics it usually becomes overwhelming. Not impossible, but definitely annoying when it’s overwhelming for sure. Of course my point is like with blacksmithing you can do it with just about anything by technicality, but there are grades to the work you can do depending on many factors. Some of which are temperature, consistency in temperature regulation, materials used in the mix, how refined the metal is, and how much processing is needed to refine it if possible while smithing.

If it sounds complicated it is. If it sounds simple it’s because it also is. It depends on how you look at it. It seems complicated because it’s wordy, but it’s really just a few key things when you break it down. The reason it’s still complicated of course is making sure you keep temperature constant. It’s the complicated part as that is entirely dependant on the ability of the forge to retain heat and how much energy is needed to maintain it.

The reason I bring that up sounds strange, but think about it this way. Just like blacksmithing anyone can do it. Some people have an innate skill for it and others have to learn it the hard way. I’m somewhere in-between where I had to learn the hard way despite having an innate ability to smell everything around me with little ability for nose blindness. It can get very overwhelming and learning these skills may have been my coping mechanism to focus my sense of smell on specific things around me rather than the whole. Similar to when I was a kid and still on the island and when I would get cold I’d focus on the sunlight on my skin. No matter the time of year if there was sunlight I could focus on the heat from the sun alone. Though my body fat is naturally below 1% essentially my body is in permanent ketosis. I’ve had all the tests and there’s apparently no form of high metabolism I have, yet I can’t do anything for that, so I’ve worked around it to keep the feeling of being warm at least I’m my head. Crazy I know, but at least that’s something I can control with my body.

Also relevant as thanks to the lack of control there I’ve learned to find ways to control other aspects of my body and senses.

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:sweat_smile: I’ll trust you there :wave: :joy:

…but I edited your thread title to make us dirty hippies look a bit smarter. :tophat: :face_with_monocle: :nose: :rose:

:v:

:evergreen_tree:

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Thanks, couldn’t help myself with the dad joke…and I dont even have kids. sigh

Thanks for the feedback, all of it’s been helpful. I feel like I need a weed guru to sit down with and play a game of smell this bud. Sun Valley sent me some buds a while back and after smelling them and then asking him what the smells where like to him, helped loads and I could connect the terminology to the smell.

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I would say just take deep whiffs of everything in life, it will expand your knowlege of smells and dont forget that you can get 10 different pineapple smells from a single pineapple so its never accurate.

Edit: dont sniff powdered things An keep yourself and your nose clean.

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wear a blindfold and earplugs for a month,

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In my experience getting the same strains/phenotypes time after time helped me hone my palette to be able to name a strain by smell/taste…only works if I’ve smoked it before

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That sounds super fun