Berner pulled a strain back from the scrap pile, then stood on the Mary Jane Berlin floor with 80,000 people and felt something the weed business had misplaced somewhere along the way.
One of the loudest strains Berner is putting his name on this year almost didn’t make the cut. It got written off in selection as a throwaway. He pulled it back out just in time.
That is how Berner works. The best weed does not always survive the first cut, and the people worth betting on do not always look like the obvious choice either. He trusts instinct over paperwork, a way of thinking that runs against where the weed industry has been heading.
Blueberry Caviar, his newest collaboration with Jason Gellman of Ridgeline Farms and a recent High Times Strain of the Month, came out of that instinct. Gellman bred it by crossing his LANTZ with a terpy cut of Compound Genetics’ Grape Gas, and it has already turned up in New Mexico, California and beyond.
“It was actually a throwaway. We didn’t select that at first,” Berner says. He was back in Los Angeles, smoking through the box of cuts, when one number stopped him. “I’m like, ‘Jason, this number right here is going to be Blueberry Caviar.’” Nobody agreed. “No way, it’s not even a keeper,” Gellman argued. Berner shrugged. “Watch,” Berner answered. “And it was.”
He picks people the same way he pulls strains. “First thing, he’s a great guy. I look for good energy, just good people,” he says of Gellman. Someone who had been at it for generations and stayed humble, a small craft family Berner wanted to back.
The Test
That same instinct decides who Berner lets in. He describes the old version of the weed business as handshake-based: someone fronting someone else a ten-pack on trust, everybody squared up in a few days. What he watches for now is the opposite, the people he calls the “Chads,” who turn up with contracts and agendas and no feel for the plant. His filter for them is simple.
“I’d ask them what their goal is with the business,” he says. Then he hands them a joint. “If they can’t smoke one with me, if they can’t tell me what their agenda is, what their goals are in the weed space, if they don’t understand the community, they don’t understand the culture, they don’t understand the unity,” then he has his answer.
Berlin
That mix of people is what pulled Berner to Mary Jane Berlin, where he spent the weekend rolling two-gram joints of California flower packed with Lebanese hash, a habit from his late teens on trips to Amsterdam, chasing a strange, drifting high most people never look for. What got to him was the room. Tens of thousands of people from everywhere, breeders and doctors and growers and kids who just love to smoke, packed into one hall for the same plant.
“Berlin’s fucking insane,” he says. “I love to see everyone from all over the place coming into one place to boost each other on the weed business. It’s just cool to see so much unity. Everyone’s so excited. I kind of miss that excitement in the weed space.”
He can put a year on it. “It feels good, dude. What we used to have [in America] in, like, 2016.” Somewhere between then and now, the business changed on him, and Berlin gave the feeling back, a hall of people who showed up for nothing but the plant.
What Never Changed
Earlier this year, Berner published a book through Penguin Random House, in part to put his own account on the record about what happened with Cookies, the brand he built into one of the most recognizable names in weed. He does not walk through the specifics here, but he does not pretend it was painless.
“What I’ve been through is just mental torture, bro,” he says. He describes being hit from several directions at once, by people he had once trusted and looked up to, over a company he built that others wanted a piece of. The way back, he says, was to stop staring at the fight and start paying attention to the parts of this he still loves, connecting with people, sharing weed and standing in rooms like the one in Berlin.
The friendships came from the plant, too. He points to Wiz Khalifa, who has credited Berner with teaching him much of what he knows about flavor. “Wiz is my guy,” Berner says. “We bonded right away over weed, and that’s how some of my best friendships started.”
Ask Berner what he is proudest of, though, and for all of it, Cookies and the Forbes cover and the music, the answer is his family. He has an eighteen-year-old daughter in college and, with his wife Ashley, two babies back to back and a third on the way at the time of this interview. “Three babies in three years,” he says.
“Leave it at the office. That’s it. I smoke weed all day. When I get home, I’m with the family.”
Berner
On where cannabis is headed in the US, he keeps it short. “We need to legalize 100%,” he says. “It’s kind of goofy what’s happening.” Fewer taxes, sooner.
Then he disappears back into the 80,000 people who flew to Berlin for the one thing he has never lost the plot on. “We’re all here for one thing,” he says, “and that’s fucking weed.”
