We talk about terps all the time, but where did that phrase actually come from?
Blue River™ Terps originated as the world’s first cannabis-derived terpene company and is widely credited with popularizing the term “terps.” The family-run brand eventually went on to launch an entire lineup of solventless products — from the traditional old-school hash to the more unique Blue River™ Flan™, Cookies Mushroom Caps, and Rosin Popping Boba.
From there, Blue River™ evolved into adult-use retail with two locations in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. These stores provide “farm-to-table cannabis experiences” and were the first on the market to showcase exclusively solventless products on their shelves, including extracts, vapes, and edibles.
With a focus on supporting local craft cultivators and the legacy hash culture, Blue River™️ has earned 60 awards and global media recognition since its founding. The brand has also been featured in multiple publications and appeared on Vicelands’ Bong Appetit, Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson, and Snoop Dogg’s Gangsta Gaming League.
For this installment of the Hash Maker Q&A Series, we sat down with the brand’s Founder Tony Verzura, an 85x award-winning cannabis innovator and solventless pioneer. We also got to hear from Will, Partner and Head of Production with 20 years of cultivation and hash making under his belt. This one’s legendary, so let’s dive into the rivers!
How’d you get your start innovating in the cannabis industry?
I’ve been growing cannabis since ‘96 and got into the legal market in 2009. I had vertical grows, manufacturing and retails, in Denver and was working with a lot of different brands at the time. That was a very unique time between 2009 and 2014 when rosin didn’t quite really exist the way it does today, but hash certainly did and BHO was on the rise.
So I’ve been cultivating for a long time, running a lot of different varieties. Probably 500 different varieties I’ve watched go through every type of extraction process whether it was ethanol, CO2, butane, dry sift, or ice water extraction.
Then I went on to create and innovate some different types of methods, technologies, and apparatuses. I had my first set of cannabis patents in 2014 for utilizing cannabinoids and terpenes, both active and non-active in MCT oil. Before that, people hadn’t really done that. I also co-developed mushroom canna-caps for Cookies in an effort to further push the psychedelic conversation.
How did your passion for inventing and innovating lead to the start of the Blue River™ Terps brand?
I have always worked in the background helping to put on individuals or brands by collaborating on projects, with the goal of creating unique products that focused on specific delivery methods and effects. The early projects were more focused on genetics, cultivation, extracts, sublinguals, topicals, and capsules.
In 2014, I started to extract cannabis-derived terpenes from flower. The idea of extracting terpenes from flower spawned when I was a weekly guest on Hash Church. On one episode, Bubbleman challenged the panel and audience to figure out how to extract terpenes from the plant. So I went down the path of all the traditional ways of doing it with a lot of failed tech.
After winning a few High Times Cups and the Emerald Cup between 2014 and 2106, Blue River™️ helped popularize cannabis terpenes, actual real cannabis-derived terpenes, when we first started to ship them worldwide. That didn’t last very long, I think it was a two-year run. To this day, I still get a lot of people online who are like, “Oh, they were never real.” But they were real. Many vape businesses were adding back terpenes to their distillate products to make them taste and “feel” more authentic. At first, this was a better solution to non-cannabis derived terpenes but later on I kind of regretted introducing the idea or concept of “adding back” anything into the products.
From 2015 to 2018 we helped a lot of people in California utilize some of the tech to launch their own brands. I felt like the use of fake terpenes and flavor additives into extracts was just a no-no, because we just didn’t know what that was gonna do for our lungs. So I was a solution for a lot of solvent extractors where I provided real cannabis-derived terpenes that tasted like flower. Other people were doing cannabis-derived terpenes, but I’m not sure anyone was doing solventless, flower-based cannabis-derived terpenes on any kind of scale at that time.
That was a tech that moved in another direction. So Blue River™️ started to develop different types of sift extractors and tried to combine some different types of technologies to see if we could push the boundaries of solventless. There was a lot of different R&D, and implementation of that R&D and equipment, happening between 2015 and 2020. Just lots of different tech innovations and being able to see what products could be made.
Gold Drop & Blue River™️ discovered using CDT vs. solvents-based reactions could be used to isolate CBD. I even started to mechanically separate flower rosin, sift rosin, and live rosin into cannabinoids and terpenes and then use the terpenes themselves to further separate compounds in the actual extracts.
This further fueled my imagination of stabilizing cannabinoids and terpenes into multiple textures, unique blends, and hash art, and ultimately led me to designer dabs like Torrone, Pioca, and Flan. I refer to this as the “experimental era” but the support of many consumers helped fuel the evolution of where we ended up today. I started over with nothing in California and to this day I think about the thousands of people who supported the brand and without them, I would not be in the position I am today.
Long story short, I had a wide range of experience both personally as a patient and as somebody who started in the 90s as a grower, an extractor, an innovator who really helped push different elements. Some of those things have retracted, I would say a lot of those things. Things that we did then, we don’t do today. But it had to be done, we needed to push it, and we needed to see what could be done. Some of those things still hang around. You know, like that Blue River™ Flan™ that we created still is around today.
Speaking of the Flan™️, you have a super diverse lineup of solventless products from various consistencies of concentrates to forms of edibles such as gummies and syrups. Why is solventless at the center of everything you do?
In 2014, we were able to get a dabable product from hash (i.e. live rosin). With test results proving it was possible to further mechanically refine cuticle contamination resulting in higher THCa and a higher terpene content, it was time to compete with solvent extracts like live resin.
I am a purist at heart and value organic products over chemically extracted products. It comes down to unadulterated vs. adulterated. Even in the solventless category, we classify the adulterated products such as Flan “super concentrates.” The analogy I have always used upsets the solvent extractors but it still rings true for me personally. “Live rosin is like freshly squeezed orange juice and BHO is like Sunny D.” That is because live rosin is an unadulterated expression of the “fruit” or trichomes themselves and solvent extraction is the process of chemical dissolution that introduces or alters the natural compounds in the cannabis resin, or “fruit” itself.
And that pissed off a lot of BHO people but let’s think about it. Here’s the fruit. I’m just going to press it into a glass and it’s going to make freshly squeezed juice. Are you really ok with the idea of me running that same fruit through a hydrocarbon extractor and purging all the residual solvents back out of the juice prior to you drinking it? I personally am not ok with offering any products to customers that are not mechanically derived or authentic expressions of the plants.
Blue River™ has always been about solventless products for the people and will forever remain in that lane. The products you see on today’s menu haven’t been exposed to chemicals or solvents that have changed their chemical expression or characteristics, so they remain unadulterated. That was just something I gravitated towards when I initially started to create cannabis-derived terpenes and the ethos I personally live day-to-day.
What would you say is the biggest challenge to overcome when running a solventless-focused brand?
Scalability. I think solvent extractors have always had the biggest advantage in scalability because it’s low labor, high output, lower quality biomass, and they’re able to dominate the market with price points. They’ve also gotten very creative with marketing and have ways to disguise things as well, like using cured trim and CRC to create almost colorless distillates.
I feel customers are uneducated and don’t understand the difference between solvent based and non-solvent based products; however, I think this creates trust issues with consumers when they are educated on the difference. There are a ton of ways to kind of cheat your output if you’re a chemist and it is extremely hard to compete with a 20g vs. a 40g in an undereducated market. I will say, I am compassionate about people’s daily budget to access THC so I completely understand the need for a value line type of product and the reality that providing a high-quality premium product at below-market cost is just not sustainable.
Solventless is an unforgiving process. You’re really spotlighting the genetics, the execution of the cultivation team, and the skill level or experience of the extraction team. You’ve really got to be on all your T’s & Q’s to be able to execute it properly and deliver a product to the market for a reasonable price under a brand people can trust was done properly. To do it at scale is the biggest hurdle for all brands.
In the world of hash making we have hand paddle technique, semi-automation, and full automation systems. I have worked with several other competitor units over the years and personally fell in love with the Hashtek 85t. The Hashtek 85t for our crew, allows us to be in control of the quality and still scale the operations with less labor. It is not a fully automatic system and anyone who is just starting off I think needs to fully understand environmental conditions and how to harvest resin in order to fully appreciate the “why” behind the Hashtek system.
Since the entire process from A-Z is so unforgiving and it requires a large experience based mindset, one could have the best machine in the world and still not push out the results consumers demand in today’s market. Even if you are able to check all the boxes, you still need to understand how to productize and sell the products. So to answer the question, solventless has a higher entry level of skill and an even higher hurdle in gaining trust within the consumer market in order to sell a premium product for more than the value line of products that dominate today’s market.
Your products are available in over 150 licensed retailers in multiple states, and you also just opened your second retail store in Massachusetts. What’s been the biggest advantage of being vertically integrated?
For a while we were in an in-between period — we were like a tech company and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. We were always dependent on distributors, middlemen, and other parameters that we couldn’t control until we opened our own stores. And I think that’s the main difference between vertical and not.
Each market is a little different, so the opportunities and advantages of being vertically integrated or not can be dependent on where you’re located and who you’re working with. But vertical, you’re in control of your destiny. When you’re not vertically integrated, you don’t have that complete control but that doesn’t mean you can’t work with other people and see success.
So I think what our brand is going to do a lot more in 2024 is becoming a production house for collaborations. Take what we do and spotlight some of those other great farmers on our shelves that are killing it in just flower. Then kind of come behind them and say, “Hey, let’s complete the catalog for you. How can we help you? What can we do for you?” I think that’s the cool part.
I would say this time next year, we’ll be back to having a manufacturing facility that is not just doing our own products, but it’ll be heavy on helping others too. With or without our name on it. Just because I feel like the movement itself is at a growth rate and it’s a good time to really push that, and you guys help with that with the equipment.
How do you stay true to your roots as a solventless-focused brand while running a retail store?
You’ve got to make numbers work as a solventless company. Bringing what our vision and ethos are into that can make it a little bit difficult. I think a lot of people are scared to do that, to open up a retail store and say we’re only going to sell hash and rosin based extracts, vape, edibles, and infused pre-rolls.
But we don’t just stock every single rosin vape — if a rosin vape was done with say “natural diamonds” and add backs of terpenes, it’s not on our shelf. There isn’t some corporation saying, “Hey, you’ve got to sell solvent products in the store.”
Everyone on our team is on the same page. We try everything and find the best stuff to cut through all the bullshit. It’s a challenge, you gotta be really on it and you’ve gotta put a line in the sand. We’ve done that. But I think our brand has got to a point where we’ve developed a niche and people do come out and seek us out. Our numbers are not like other places. In Massachusetts, to put it in perspective, 6% of the market is rosin or hash. In our store, it’s over 50% of sales. It’s a totally different scenario.
You’ve said your stores are designed to provide “farm-to-table cannabis experiences.” What does that mean to you?
It has a few different parts, but it all starts with the farms. Spotlighting the different flower and farms that are out there. It’s not just about us and our extracts anymore, but really Blue River™ farm-to-table is about how we can help the general market find different flowers and tiers for them because everyone’s on a different budget.
We really try to seek out growers who have been doing this for a while and support smaller craft operations that are maybe 2,500 – 5,000 square feet, not more. We also try to keep prices very competitive, so in that farm-to-table approach, I have a freshness policy. When we hit the 30, 60, and 90-day mark we’ll do price reductions. And we usually don’t ever get to the 60 days.
For example with rosin, after 30 days, being just 30 days on the shelf, I’m going to move it from $60 to $50. At 45 days, I might go crazy, like if there are 50 units left, we’re gonna go to $40. When you go into the grocery store, you may see specials on bananas on avocados. As consumers you don’t really even realize it — it’s not like it’s a special offer, it’s just grocery stores trying to move the older stuff so they can keep inventory fresh. So part of farm-to-table means you have to keep your menu fresh every week. You got to evaluate it, you got to keep it fresh, and you’ve got to curate a menu of products that your customers want.
When I think of farm-to-table, I also think of a single source. Extracts that are made in the same facility with the same people who are actually overseeing the growing and creating the extracts. And in a truly farm-to-table cannabis model, you should be able to get a pre-roll, a jar of flower, a jar of rosin, an edible, a vape — all solventless and starting from the same starting single source batch. They’re all just different expressions of the single source. So farm to farm-to-table for us is being able to create multiple craft products from the same single source batch.
Basically, when I think of farm-to-table, and I grew up in the Midwest on a farm, I think of keeping it fresh, keeping it organic-based, keeping it unadulterated, good nutrients, good inputs, good ingredients. Even down to the gummies and the syrups we make, we do real fruit, use real organic sugar if we’re going to use sugar. All of the ingredients that go into all of your products — where are you getting them from? Are they coming from reputable farms? All of that thought has to go into it.
Speaking of keeping menus fresh, how do you put together your menu?
Every year we discuss what the menu is going to be and sit down to look at: What are we going to keep? What are we going to discontinue? Last year I started organizing the product catalogs by year on the website, and I’m going to leave it up there just so people can see the progression.
You can go look at our product catalog from 2023 compared to 2024. Totally different packaging, different look, different jars, different devices annually. I think this just keeps it fresh. Maybe similar to how it’s done in the design world, you know, where Chanel or Gucci or somebody will have seasonal one-offs.
When collaborating with cultivators, what are you looking for in starting material?
At the end of the day, we’re focused on the resin gland. What kind of resin gland do I have? What’s the range? Are we seeing heads that fall in a 70 and 90 and 120? Of the head structure, what does the actual skin around the trichrome head look like?
Comparing it to grapes or oranges, it’s like the peel that’s around the fruit. Trichome heads may differ greatly from an indoor LED, highly controlled grow in Massachusetts vs. outdoor, hoop house, or light assisted green houses. That amount of thickness, just like in grapes, will change if the light source (i.e. LED vs sun) changes intensity based on the time of day. The really neat thing with LED system these days is one can program the lighting intensity to simulate sun rises, sun sets, or even shade coverage due to cloud formations by controlling light intensity in any row.
Tell me about the Hashtek unit you’re running and how it’s set up in your lab!
Will: We have the 85t which is in a controlled room. We’re definitely a proponent of controlling all your environments and washing in a room that’s 35 – 40 degrees.
Tony: The system itself and the productivity of it is just next level. With other machines there is a lot of stop and go, stop and go that hinders productivity. The Hashtek captures the best of the traditional methodology. And when I say traditional I mean hand paddling. If you’re going to do what we call “naked wash” and hand-paddle flower, the heads fall down. This particular machine being top-down mimics hand paddling with semi-automation that we can control.
Can the machine run 15,000 grams? Yeah, but we’re more in the 8,000-10,000 gram range for a reason. We want to be able to run much smaller batches and mimic the hand-washing application. It’s a beefy industrial machine with a control point panel and a tremendous amount of thought went into it.
We’ve seen other machines work well in other applications. I think it’s like pots and pans for a chef. Are you copper-clad? Are you cooking on gas? It’s about preferences. But when it comes to being able to run smaller batches and still be efficient, and have that quality there, the Hashtek has been the one for us.
Any favorite features or tips for using the machine?
Will: One of my favorite parts of the machine is its ability to hold temperature. With every other system, you constantly have to add ice once you get to the later washes. With this, we’re not seeing that. I also love the fact that there are two temperature monitoring points in the vessel. You really can see if your temp is rising then adjust very quickly as opposed to having to pull out a temp gun or some other measurement. In addition, the floating ring in the collection vessel allows for the bags to not touch the sides and a skilled collector can really utilize this feature to target six-star resin.
Tony: Yeah, I agree. The holding of temps means less ice and the floating ring on the collection vessel is clutch! In the past, all your bags would be touching the side of the collection vessel. I’m not really sure why it took 20 years to implement a floating ring for this application but kudos to the person who thought about it at Hashtek. Once you see the Hashtek in action, you’re going to say, “This was designed for a hash makers by hash makers.” I’m not even sure how you go back.
We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with edibles on the blog lately. You do a solventless gummy — can you reveal your preferred rosin decarb temperature?
Will: 204! The rest, you’ll have to figure out.
Tony: I would say there’s a little bit of math that changes. The volume of the rosin and the volume of the jar matters as well. But yeah, 204 is our general go-to.
Will: Yeah, and a lot of it depends on how fast you want to go. Some people are trying to rush it. I look at it as not being in a rush to do it, but more to preserve every single thing I can while still accomplishing the job.
With all the awards and accolades you’ve earned throughout your career, are there any that have really stuck out to you?
Ironically, the first CBD concentrate award I won with Hight Times when I was in a wheelchair. I had blown out my knee and had some complications. Ringo, a grower from California, gave a buddy of mine Sour Tsunami Seeds and we had a certain percentage of getting the higher CBD over the THC. We grew it out, and we made some oil. It was a 3:1 CBD to THC. That helped a lot of people and changed everything when you started to see the ratio base with CBD and THC. So that changed a lot for me and impacted the rest of my career even though it wasn’t a solventless award.
Then after all this time, I would say an accolade that really was awesome was the the Forbes 42. Just them recognizing us, we didn’t solicit it or do anything. They recognized us as a top 42 company in the US, even though they kind of thought our Blue River™ Flan™ was a dessert. Which I can’t blame them. I tried to explain it to the writer…they were like, “This is a solventless company, and they specialize in flan dessert!”
