King Palm Hemp Cones, Grape Swish, 1 1/4

Grape flavour is imitating a grape you have probably never eaten

Artificial grape flavour is built around a single compound called methyl anthranilate. It was isolated in the late nineteenth century, from what was sold at the time as orange blossom extract, and it has been the backbone of grape flavouring ever since.

What it smells and tastes of is the Concord grape. That is a specific North American variety, dark purple and thick skinned, and it is the fruit behind American grape soda, grape jelly and grape sweets.

It is not the fruit behind the seedless red and green grapes that fill British supermarket shelves. Those are mild, watery and faintly sweet. Concord is intense, musky and floral, and the two taste almost nothing alike.

Which explains the most common complaint about grape flavouring anywhere in the world outside North America. People say it tastes artificial. What they are usually detecting is that it does not resemble the only grapes they have eaten, and that is true, because it was never trying to.

There is a second layer to it. Even measured against a real Concord grape, methyl anthranilate is only part of the picture. It carries the bright floral top note and leaves behind the deeper, almost bready character the whole fruit has. That is why grape flavouring tends to read thin and sweet rather than rounded, in a cone as much as in a boiled sweet.

None of this makes it a worse flavour. It makes it a specific one, and if you have previously written off grape as fake, the more accurate description is that it is faithful to something you have not tried.

Why grape and not something else

Grape is to this category what mint is to chewing gum. It is the default, the one people picture first, and its dominance is not an accident of taste.

The association was built by flavoured tobacco cigarillos, which is where the modern blunt comes from. Grape was among the first and most widely sold of those flavours, it became the one everybody had tried, and the connection between grape and this format has outlived the products that made it. The word swish has been common slang for a blunt for decades for related reasons.

What makes this particular product interesting is that it delivers that flavour with none of the thing that established it. There is no tobacco leaf here and no nicotine. It is hemp paper with a corn husk tip, and the grape arrives from a capsule rather than from a cured tobacco wrapper.

So it is a flavour heritage separated from its origin. Whether that appeals depends entirely on whether it was the grape or the tobacco you were after.

The flavour sits in the filter, and King Palm sells two different grapes

The mechanism is the same across King Palm's flavoured hemp cones, and our Banana Foster listing goes through it properly. In short: the terpene capsule is sealed inside the corn husk filter rather than applied to the paper, you squeeze the filter to pop it, and if you never squeeze it you have a plain unflavoured cone.

One detail worth adding here. The brand describes the capsule as letting you increase the flavour as you like, which makes it closer to a dial than a switch. A light squeeze releases some, a firmer one releases more, and it is difficult to be precise about it either way.

The other thing to sort out before you buy is which grape you are looking at, because King Palm makes two and they are not the same product.

Grape Swish is this one, a 1 1/4 hemp cone. Grape HD is a separate flavour that runs across mini rolls, mini cones and single tubes. Search the brand name and grape together and you will be shown both, in formats that have little in common beyond the fruit.

The flavours are terpene-derived food-grade essential oils rather than anything pressed from grapes, chosen by the brand to sit alongside the aromatic compounds already present in dry herb. That is King Palm's stated intention rather than a result we have tested.

How it sits against the rest of the shelf, and who should skip it

Against its own sibling, Grape Swish is the sweeter and more confected of the two flavoured King Palm cones we stock. Banana Foster is built on a dessert, so it has caramel and brown sugar giving it some weight. Grape is a single bright note with nothing underneath it.

Against the rest of the shelf, the difference remains where the flavour lives. G-Rollz builds its terpene flavours into the cone itself, so they burn and you are committed. King Palm keeps its in the tip, so you are not.

There are no cannabinoids in this product. No CBD, nothing else. Hemp is the material the paper is made from rather than an active ingredient in it, which is why it sits in our rolling papers range rather than anywhere near the oils.

Now the cautions.

Skip these if you dislike sweet, one-note flavours, because that is exactly what grape flavouring is and no amount of terpene sourcing changes the shape of it.

Skip them if you were expecting King Palm's leaf wraps, which are a completely different product and the one the brand is actually known for.

Skip them if you want a long burn, because a 1 1/4 cone is the medium size and hemp paper goes faster than leaf.

And skip them if you have tried grape flavouring before and disliked it. Everything above explains why it tastes the way it does, but understanding the chemistry has never once made anybody enjoy a flavour they were not enjoying.