King Palm Hemp Cones, Banana Foster, 1 1/4

The flavour is in the mouthpiece, not in the paper

Flavoured rolling products almost all work the same way. The flavouring is sprayed onto or infused into the wrap during manufacture, which means it is part of what burns.

King Palm does it differently. The corn husk filter tip supplied with these cones has a small terpene capsule sealed inside it. You squeeze the filter between finger and thumb, the capsule pops, and the flavour is released into the mouthpiece you are drawing through.

The paper itself is left alone. Nothing has been sprayed on it, so the hemp cone is a plain hemp cone until you decide otherwise.

Two things follow from that, and neither is spelled out on any page currently selling these.

First, the flavour is not being combusted. It sits in the tip and you draw through it, which is a different thing from setting a flavoured paper alight.

Second, and more usefully, the flavour is optional. Leave the capsule unsqueezed and you have an unflavoured cone. Squeeze it halfway through and you change what you are doing partway. A sprayed paper gives you no such choice, and it means one box covers two preferences.

What Banana Foster is meant to taste of

The name is a real dessert rather than a made-up sweet-shop flavour, which is unusually specific for this category.

Bananas Foster is a New Orleans dish from the 1950s: bananas cooked in butter and brown sugar, flambéed with rum, and served over vanilla ice cream. What that means as a flavour profile is banana with caramel and a lot of brown sugar behind it, rather than the sharp synthetic banana of a foam sweet.

Retailers describe the capsule as a banana and caramel blend, which matches. Expect the caramel to be the more forward of the two, because caramel carries in a terpene blend more readily than fruit does.

Because the flavour arrives at the mouthpiece rather than through the burn, it reads more like a taste on the lips than a note in the smoke. It is also front-loaded: strongest immediately after the capsule pops and fading from there.

If sweet is not what you want, the same cone exists in other profiles, and the plain version has no capsule to pop at all.

This is not the King Palm product most people mean

King Palm built its name on something else entirely, and it is worth being clear about the difference before you buy.

The brand's signature product is a wrap made from Cordia leaf, picked from the tree and rolled with nothing added. One ingredient, no paper, no glue. That is what most people picture when they hear the name.

These are not that. They are hemp paper cones, a separate line the brand also makes, and they behave like paper because they are paper: thinner, faster burning, and without the slow, heavy character of a leaf wrap.

Neither is better. They are different formats for different occasions, and a leaf roll is a considerably bigger undertaking than a 1 1/4 cone. But if you came here because someone recommended King Palm and you were expecting leaf, this is the wrong product and you should look at the wraps instead.

What carries across from the leaf line is the filter. The corn husk tip is King Palm's own, and the brand's position is that it catches loose plant matter and oils without stripping out the aromatic compounds a paper filter would. That is the brand's account of it rather than something we have tested.

How many cones you actually get, and why we will not say

This needs stating plainly rather than buried, because the published counts for this exact product do not agree.

King Palm's own site sells the 1 1/4 hemp cones in packs of six. A major marketplace listing for this exact flavour and size also says six. One wholesaler's page title says six, while that same wholesaler's own web address for the same line says three. Another retailer describes it as three cones in a coffin box.

Our own record is not clean either. The product name we received says three, and the filename of the photograph supplied with it says six.

The likeliest explanation is that both are real: a coffin box of three and a pack of six are two different retail configurations of the same cone, sold into different markets. That would make neither figure wrong, just attached to the wrong listings in places.

Since we cannot confirm which configuration our boxes contain, we are not going to print a number. We have asked our distributor and will state it here when it is confirmed. In the meantime the packaging itself is the reliable source, and we would rather tell you that than pick the figure that reads better.

What is in these, and who should skip them

There are no cannabinoids in this product. Not CBD, not anything else. It is hemp paper with a corn husk filter and a terpene capsule, and the hemp here is a material rather than an active ingredient. It sits on our shelves because it is a hemp product, not because it is a CBD one.

That distinction matters for what you can expect from it. Our guide to UK CBD law covers where hemp as a fibre sits against hemp as a source of cannabinoids.

Now the cautions.

Skip these if you want the leaf wrap, as covered above.

Skip them if you dislike sweet flavours and want to be certain, because although the capsule is optional in principle, a capsule that gets squeezed accidentally in a pocket cannot be unsqueezed.

Skip them if you want a long, slow burn. A 1 1/4 cone is the medium size, closer to a standard cigarette length than to a king size, and hemp paper burns faster than leaf.

And skip them if you want a plain unflavoured cone as your everyday option, because a capsule you never intend to pop is dead weight in the box. The plain King Palm hemp cones exist for exactly that.