Professor Herb Hemp Briquette Hash 3.5g, Bubba Gum OG

Taking the name apart

Bubba Gum OG looks like a single variety written down. It is not, and there is no reading of it that resolves to one thing.

Bubble Gum is a genuinely documented variety with an unusually well recorded history. It was grown in Indiana in the United States, the genetics travelled to New England and then to the Netherlands, where three different breeders each stabilised a slightly different selection from it. It was released in 1994 and picked up Cannabis Cup placings across the mid-1990s and again in 1999. Strain databases list Bubba Gum as an alias for exactly this variety, so on that reading the name is simply an alternative spelling of a thirty-year-old classic.

But Bubba also reads as Bubba Kush, which is a completely separate variety with no relationship to Bubble Gum at all. And OG points at the OG Kush family, a third lineage again. Three names, three unrelated origins, one product title.

Two things need saying plainly here. The first is that the awards and the history above belong to the cannabis variety and to the 1990s. They have nothing to do with this product, we are not claiming them for it, and we mention them only because they are why the name carries the weight it does. The second is more useful: none of those three lineages describe what is in this pack.

The manufacturer answers it in five words

For all the ambiguity in the name, the brand's own flavour description is not ambiguous at all. It reads, in full: sweet bubble gum with terpenes.

Bubble gum, two words, lower case, no OG and no Kush. That is the confectionery. It is a description of a sweet, and it is the closest thing to a straight answer anywhere on this product.

It also fits the ingredients, which are hemp biomass, terpenes and flavourings. The base material is Italian industrial hemp pollen and it is the same base in every flavour in the range. What changes between the fourteen ribbons is the terpene and flavour profile added to it, so the name on the front tells you what it will taste of and nothing about which plant the material came from.

So the honest summary is this. If you came to Bubba Gum OG expecting the 1994 variety, or the Kush lineages the rest of the name gestures at, this is not that. If you came expecting it to taste of bubblegum, it does, and the maker says so.

What it is like out of the pot

The flavour is unmistakably sweet shop rather than fruit bowl. It leads with the pink, slightly artificial bubblegum note that everybody recognises, the one that sits somewhere between strawberry and something that does not exist in nature, and it is applied generously. There is a faint sherbet edge behind it.

Underneath, the hemp is straightforwardly present. A 3.5g pressed block of pollen has a green, resinous, faintly peppery character of its own, and the infusion sits on top of that rather than replacing it. The combination is closer to a sweet handed to you in a garden centre than to a boiled sweet in a tin, and how much you enjoy it depends almost entirely on how you feel about that contrast.

Against the rest of the range it is one of the most forward flavours in the range. Wedding Cake is sweet in a soft, doughy, vanilla way; this one is sharper, brighter and more obviously candied. If you find synthetic sweet flavours cloying, pick a different ribbon, and if you actively like them this is the strongest expression of that in the range.

The material itself is a firm, dense, granular slab with rounded corners, the same physical form as every other flavour. The aroma is strong through the pot and stronger out of it.

Bubba Gum is not Bubble hash, and both are on this site

This one causes real confusion, and Professor Herb causes it themselves. The same brand sells Bubba Gum in the briquette range and a Bubble Hash in its 2g solid extract range. The names are one letter apart and they mean entirely different things.

Bubba Gum is a flavour. It describes an aroma profile added to pressed hemp pollen and tells you nothing about how the material was made.

Bubble hash is a method. It is ice-water extraction, where the plant material is agitated in freezing water so the resin heads snap off and sink, then filtered through a stack of progressively finer mesh bags. The bags are the bubble bags the technique is named after. It is a mechanical separation with no solvent involved, and because it isolates resin rather than pressing whole material it produces a far more concentrated result. That is why Euphoria's Bubble grade tests so much higher than its Moroccan, which we have set out in full on the Moroccan hash page.

So if you are choosing between them: one is a briquette that tastes of sweets, the other is a grade of extract. Check the weight and the wording on the pack rather than the syllables. The briquettes are 3.5g, the solid extracts are 2g.

Two things the packaging gives away

The card carries a tagline under the ribbon reading, your day is about to get a whole lot better. On the Wedding Cake card that scans as a wedding-day joke and it is quite a good one. It is printed identically on this card, where it means nothing at all, which tells you it is standard artwork reused across the range rather than a line written for any particular flavour.

The second is smaller but worth knowing if you shop on photographs. The bare briquette shot the brand publishes for this flavour is the same photograph it publishes for the others. There is no visual difference between the flavours in the material itself, so nothing is lost by that, but it does mean the product picture cannot tell you which one you are looking at. Only the ribbon on the card does.

The card also carries a HIGH STRENGTH flash and the 175mg figure appears in the listing text. We have set out what that works out at, and what it does and does not distinguish, on the Wedding Cake page rather than repeating the arithmetic here.

One data note, since it affects finding things on this site

Our supplier feed handled this flavour and the last one in opposite ways. On the Wedding Cake listing the flavour was recorded in the product data but missing from the title. On this one it is in the title but the flavour field arrived empty. Same range, same supplier, same import.

It has no effect on what you receive. It does mean any filter on this site that reads the flavour field may not show this product under bubblegum, so if you are browsing by flavour and cannot find it, that is why. Both faults have been logged for the catalogue to fix at source, and we do not edit the underlying product records by hand because they are rebuilt from the supplier feed each time it refreshes.

Who should skip this one

If sweet synthetic flavours are not for you, this is the least suitable flavour in the range. It commits completely and there is no restraint in it.

If you want something ready to use as it comes, a briquette is the wrong format. It is a solid block and it has to be broken down first. The brand's loose Premium Hemp Blend is the same material at the same concentration in a form that needs no preparation.

If you were drawn in by the strain name and wanted the genetics behind it, this will disappoint you, and we would rather say so before you buy than after.

If discretion matters, this is a strongly scented product and the bubblegum makes it more noticeable rather than less.

Over-18s only. This is not a food and it is not a medicine, and nothing here should be read as suggesting otherwise.