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At Spannabis we had a sit down with Thomas from Serious Seeds to talk about their seed bank, their strains and what the future holds for Serious Seeds.
Serious Seeds a is highly praised cannabis seed company from The Netherlands. They exist already since the nineties and have been shot to stardom by the creation of the world famous cannabis strain AK-47.
AK-47 has been copied a lot, but the one and only original AK-47 comes from Serious Seeds. At Spannabis we had a sit down with Thomas from Serious Seeds to talk about their seed bank, their strains and what the future holds for Serious Seeds.
Interview transcript:
Renzo: Hi Thomas, how are you doing?
Thomas: Really good, we are here at Spannabis, and it’s always nice to welcome people like CannaConnection at our stand.
Renzo: It’s good to be here for us as well, I am happy that we’ve got a moment to sit down and to see what you guys are up to, but also to share with the people who you guys are in general. You have been around for a very long time and maybe you can introduce Serious Seeds and tell us about your business or rather philosophy.
Thomas: Sure. We (Serious Seeds) were established in 1994 already so we are more than 20 years on the seed market and were one of the first seed companies out there and when Simon created the AK-47 in 1994 he immediately won a high times cannabis cup and until this day it still one of the strongest strains around.
With this we won so many awards and did so many crosses that this propelled Simon and us into cannabis fame. Our credo is quality over quantity. We don’t have many strains, only 15 but each single one of them is unique and is an award winner and that is what we are very proud of.
Renzo: Your genetics is one of the ground works of the cannabis seed market, you don’t work with other people’s names, other people’s genetics, and it’s pure Serious Seeds right?
Thomas: Every single one of our strains has been bred and created by us and some by Magus Genetics because we fused with this Dutch seedbank, but we only work with our original strains and we definitely don’t copycat other names because we get copycatted all the time and it’s the most horrible thing that can happen to you. But on the other hand it’s also a feeling of honor; with people copying you, you know you’ve made it.
I mean our AK-47, we hardly can produce enough seeds to fulfill our retail demand, for a year we have been sold out in shops but now we are very happy to announce that we’ve had a very successful harvest so within two weeks we will deliver a lot of AK-47 feminized seeds to the world. We grew some bud of it as you can see here. This is our staple strain, have a smell… It is a very sweet phenotype, very potent and it has so many crystals here, it’s really white.
Renzo: Yeah that looks really good.
Thomas: Let’s make a close up
Renzo: I don’t know if you can see this guys, but this is the real deal, the real AK-47, the original one. Ak-47, as you say, originally it comes from you guys. We see it in a lot of other seed banks, but in the end, the real genetics is yours right?
Thomas: We created the AK-47 and even have a trademark on that name since the nineties. It was registered in the Benelux and is now registered world wide, but still you can’t go to court because you hardly have a chance, because it’s cannabis seeds. Al those Spanish companies started with those strains, crossed our strains and created their whole empires around it.
And it is OK when you cross a strain and name it as something new, but if you again sell it as AK-47 although it is a back cross or crossed into something else then it’s pure fraud, that’s how we see it. So if you want to grow the original AK-47, you have to grow the Serious Seeds AK-47, that’s for sure.
Renzo: And for the newbies, everybody probably knows the name, AK-47, if you go to Amsterdam to smoke as a tourist, you can’t miss it. But what is so special about AK-47, what does it contain, is it a Sativa or an indica for instance.
Thomas: The special thing about it is that it is a Sativa dominant plant, from the Sativa grow structure, but it carries one of the strongest Indica punches there is. The first puff will make you creative and active in your brain, but the second punch will knock you off of your feet. And that’s how it got named in 1994.
People in the coffeeshops in Amsterdam would smoke a joint of AK-47 and then would fall of the barstool. Other Dutch smokers would say “oh my god, it looks like he got hit by an AK-47!” and that’s how the name started to propel. Not out of violence, but from people getting knocked out because it’s so potent to smoke.
Untill this day I use it as a medicine for my back pain because it’s so strong if you let her go instead of 9 weeks, what we recommend, 10½ to get the nice amber trichomes. Then she is the perfect pain remedy. I come home with chronic backpain from my hernia, I take one single bong hit from AK-47, all my back pain is gone and falls off and then I feel very relaxed. I can only strongly recommend trying it.
But she is not for the faint hearted, so if you are a beginning smoker or beginning grower and you like flavors more, then I would recommend the Bubble Gum which is one of our other very famous strains. With this strain we also entered this year in the Cannabis Champions Cup.
The Bubble Gum has this very unique, sugary-sweet smell to it. Smell it, it’s like Bazooka Joe Chewing gum with a strawberry sweet taste. For me this is a good daytime smoke, which you can smoke during the day. An uplifting high and still keeps you functioning but has a very unique taste to it.
Then the third thing on the very other side of the spectrum, we have Serious Kush, which is OG Kush crossed with the White Russian. Look, those nugs are dense and hard, you can’t even push and dent it, and they grow like a rock. Very strong Kush flavour to it, dense, dank and it has a much better grow structure than the original OG Kush because we crossed it with the White Russian and now it makes huge big cola’s.
That’s what we wanted to achieve; to have the OG Kush dankness in there, but with the White Russian grow structure. Now it is the Serious Kush, very nice for Kush lovers.
Renzo: How old is the Kush strain that you have? The AK-47 is 90’s but…
Thomas: Exactly, the AK-47 and the Bubble Gum are both classics from the 90’s, more than 20 years old, but the Serious Kush is brand new, it’s our latest development and was released last October (2016), so it’s only 5 months old.
Renzo: 5 months, ok, but the OG Kush, the Bubble Gum has also got some part Kush or not?
Thomas: OG Kush is legendary in the United States and it’s a clone only plant so we were gifted a clone from a Colorado dispensary owner who got the original from California. And as I said it created a whole new Kush-culture this original Kush strain.
It’s very potent, very smell, lots of crystals but the downside is that every good OG Kush-cut, has very little yield, popcorn nuggets and we wanted to change that and give people a bigger yield. And that’s why we crossed it into the White Russian.
Renzo: Ok cool. And you guys also work a lot with CBD nowadays right?
Thomas: Yes. Since the medical movement demands CBD, we work together with the CBD Crew from Spain. Shanti Baba, the world known authority on CBD breeding. We crossed our Chronic into his Remedy and we ended up with the CBD Chronic.
The CBD Chronic, what’s so special about it is that it has everything that the pharmaceutical companies try to achieve; it has a 1:1 ratio of THC and CBD. Because this is what patients want, they don’t want any psychoactive effect. We have created this in the plant.
The CBD Chronic grows with a 1:1 ratio, or 4:4, 5:5or 6:6 percent, THC to CBD, so you don’t have to blend any medicine anymore and you can smoke it right away or use it for extraction and you get the perfect medicine for patients who don’t want to get stoned or high from their medicine.
Renzo: You said yourself before that you smoke a bong-hit everyday for your chronic back pain. What makes you decide not to choose for the CBD strains, but to stick with the AK-47?
Thomas: I smoke since 20 years and have been a recreational smoker long before I became a medical smoker so I like the side effects and actually getting a pleasant feeling, a high or a stoned, from my medicine. Instead of getting sick and nausea from taking for instance a cough medicine, here you get happy and euphoric of it.
Personally I love THC. It has the same medical affects as the CBD has, ánd it gets me high and stoned so for me it is a win-win situation to actually smoke a high THC strain instead of a high CBD strain.
Renzo: When it comes to CBD, do you have more believe in smoking CBD or going for oil? A lot of people prefer oil tincture and stuff nowadays.
Thomas: The effect is the same, but if you smoke it you have an immediate effect. When it goes trough the lungs it goes directly into your blood and you feel it right away. While everything you take orally has to go trough your digestive system and it needs at least half an hour to take effect.
Unless what you have in your mouth, over your mucous membrane it goes a little bit quicker, but in general smoking and edibles have the same effect. But the effect comes quicker with smoking and that’s why personally I prefer smoking…
I want to thank you guys for having been here with us at our stand. Check out our strains at our website at seriousseeds.com and go and check all the cannabis info at CannaConnection, those guys are cool. Thanks a lot.
Renzo: Thank you Thomas.
