So, while other areas/dates may be applicable, this is where/when my experience came from.
Now to the point of the post - Who can tell me what strain, kind bud, was?
For a while I wrote it off as just a generic label for anything grown indoor/maybe hydroponically, but the terps and appearance were always so consistent, that I don’t think that is correct. If anyone can help me narrow this down, so that I can grow it for myself, I would love you forever.
Kind bud in the late nineties was usually bud that was generally a grade. Not mids, sometimes hydro. But a lot of my old head friends always referred to multiple strains as the kind. Hence I always, say stay kind. Just my take. Although I think it refers to the buds quality.
Yeah it’s generally used as a term describing the quality/grade of the smoke. Although I remember my buddy who I got great bud from once telling me the “kind” he had was a Hawaiian strain. I’m not from the Northeast but figured I’d drop my $ 0.02 since I’m here putzing around 
In the Philly area we had shwag, mids, high mids, and kind, most of the time, but the kind bud was always pretty consistent. (we also occasionally got things like blueberry, which was on par with the kind bud, but not the same terps and such)
As an example, I never had any skunky kind bud. I hesitate to describe it, because its been so long, and I’m bad at it, but my best recollection is that it was always the same minty-piney smell
Just with my experiences I have had atleast 50 different buds that have been described as kind bud… it was basically letting us know it was the dank around often called dro by these odd people lol. I’m assuming that meant hydro, or I guess alluding to better than in dirt… multiple people have told me this to, it in my case had always been the quality of the buds. The pine bud you speak of hit the PnW Hard in the nineties, we just called it pine bud. Very light and super piney.
Ah… kind bud…
That was the term used for top notch weed. No seed crap. Followed by middies and shwag
I can go back to the seventies and we were getting Gold bud, not sure if it was acopulco or not, and Red bud. I cant say if it was oxacan red but they all had seeds back then. We didn’t care either. Just pull out your pack of papers and clean the seeds out, roll one up and remember you always missed one that popped and burned a hole in your shirt😂 brick weed too and we smoked it. I remember the first time I saw seedless weed, it came from Hawaii in a big garbage bag in bag and surrounded with baby powder in a giant box. They dumped it on a bunch of newspapers and there were still live bugs crawling around. Ahhh the good ole days.
Just echoing the sentiment here: KB isn’t a strain it’s a quality nomenclature.
Shwag, beasters, mids, mersh, dro, kb etc.
Did you have a primary dealer? He may have been getting it from somebody who was monocropping, hence the same strain was classified as KB every time he sold it.
Kind Bud was what youngsters call Exotic today at least i think… Its changed so much, KB, Dank 50/100. Not good Mids, Regs, swag, downtown brown frown. Then you had the inbetweeners Beasters.
I have been down this road and done the research. Kind Bud was most likely not always the same strain, but OG Kush was most likely the most prevalent in the northeast US and what most of us thought of when we thought of Kind Bud.
It is at least the closest I’ve gotten and I’ve spent a reasonable mount of time reading and asking. I’ve gotten OGK that took me back from a single hit. If I’m wrong I’m definitely open to being corrected. I’ve heard Sour Diesel theorized but the KB I got didn’t have that gas smell.
Just to add some people are saying it was just top shelf and all called the same thing which is definitely correct to a degree, but in my area in Jersey Hydro was advertised as such (in Philly it came in bubble bags), elthough we didn’t realize that Hydro was what it is and assumed it was a strain in itself. Chocolate Thai, Northern Lights, Skunk, Purple Haze, etc to a degree were recognized as what they were and never (near me) sold as KB. There was also “Sensimilla” which we thought was a strain at the time that grew seedless, which is weird because all the top shelf stuff - KB, NL, PH, etc was seedless too and we never put it together.
Well called the top notch weed Kind bud, it wasnt the strain, just top quality bud.
I grew up outside of a little hippy town. Loved all the dank homegrown floating around.
Homegrown may have been the only thing we didn’t see come through where I was. My focus when trying to figure it out was my exact area also so I don’t know that it extends to the entire northeast. It would make sense that whatever came through here had quite a spread.
My favorite bud from the late 90’s was the outdoor in NY that was dark green laden in golden crystals and had an amazing lemon pine smell. We think it was from the Natives up north. Also there was the berry(jerry berry ?) that was quite nice. Taking me back down memory lane
I thought I read somewhere, the Hawaiian surfers, would call the best buds, DaKine, or Dakin, and over time became kind bud.
I was in the panhandle of wv, near DC & Baltimore
I think the most popular strain around me at the time was Purple McNasty
Not sure how far the distribution would extend. Most likely the stuff I was seeing was coming in through Philly or NYC. I imagine DC or Baltimore would have been a hub of it’s own that didn’t need to rely on Philly or NYC so it could have been a completely different market. It amazes me that I’ve yet to find someone who ran it back then to ask and confirm or deny things about the trade back then.
We had many different “kind bud” roll through here in southern maine back when I started smoking in 99. It was almost always different. But we had these mids that weren’t very seedy, dense deep green nugs (packed but not brick) that smelled like some kitchen herbs. I miss that stuff, if it wasn’t solid buds I would of though I got oregano or something. This was before Beasters flooded our market.
Those mids are what I miss also. Try something with some cbd too cause it feels more like the weed back in the day imo.