Arete “THCA Hemp”
GG4 (Gorilla Glue #4), 7 g / $64.99
Packaged 5/30/2025
Purchased 5/29/2025
This weed was way better than I expected.
I searched Google™ for “THCA Hemp” and bought at least one product from every brand on the first page of results. These purchases included two flower products from Arete. Arête is French for “Stop.” I don’t know if that linguistic observation is connected with this brand.
The website was designed to look like one from a dispensary, and so was the package. This is internet weed at its finest. The flower came in a heat-sealed zipper bag with bright pink artwork to advertise the strain. A large sticker on the package displays the strain name, lot number, packaging date, and THC%. I ordered this weed from the Arete website on 5/31/25; the label says it was packaged on 5/30/25.
It smelled right from the moment I opened it: a blend of terps with that “spicy solvent” smell that evokes glue, with chemically and gassy tones. The flower itself was a bit sticky, with some flex, and not brittle at all. It appeared to be as fresh as the label suggested.
The smoke tasted rich and imparted a euphoric, stoney high. It gave me the “creative munchies:” I decorated a frozen pizza with everything in my fridge.
Unlike many products from the “hemp space,” this package had a QR-link to an organized website where COAs could be located by batch number. While my label said the product was packaged on 5/30, I found a COA that purports to come from SC Labs with several dates on it. At the top, it said it was issued on 5/28/25, but the file name contains “3-28-25,” and the dates collected and dates received are “3/25/2025.” Above the results of the cannabinoid measurements is the date “3/28/2025.” The moisture analysis is dated “4/01/2025.” There is a note at the bottom, “Reason for Amendment: Order Detail Information Change Sample serving mass provided by client.” So when was this tested, and how? Why does it say, “Not a Regulatory Hemp Lab Test Report?”
Label contents TAC: 25.6% D9-THC: “<LOQ” THCA: 24.7% | “THCA Flower mode” TAC: 23.4% D9-THC: 1.1% THCA: 21.4% CBCA: 0.96% | “Plant mode” TAC: 25.3% D9-THC: 1.1% THCA: 22.7% CBCA: 0.92% CBGA: 0.58% |
When I tested this flower myself using the LightLab 3 HS Cannabis Analyzer from Orange Photonics, I got results that are typical for high THC-type cannabis, and quite similar to the labeled THCA%. I used two modes again, “Plant” and “THCA Flower/Sprayed.” The difference between these is the concentration of the solution that gets injected into the LightLab, and the sensitivity with which certain compounds are measured. “THCA Flower/Sprayed” offers more sensitive detection of some cannabinoids and measurement of synthetic ones not included in the regular “Plant” run.
So what happened here, and was the COA provided by Arete even from SC Labs in California? The package containing the Arete flower shipped from North
Carolina. The moisture analysis from the COA is helpful here, because the result is 79.3%. Cured cannabis flower has about 5-10% moisture by mass (about 6% is the mode in Massachusetts), so this moisture analysis is from uncured flower. The cannabinoid analyses were supposedly provided on a dry-weight basis. This suggests a test long before harvest, before flowering even began.
But then why was the COA “amended” two months later to change a “serving mass?” Why would SC Labs use a method to measure D9-THC which has a limit of quantification (LOQ) higher than the 0.3% threshold that this vendor claims defines the product as hemp? Why does the QR code on the COA itself take me to a page which says that the owner marked the results of this test “private?” Why does the COA report no testing for contaminants such as microbes, pesticides, and heavy metals?
There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about this product. I don’t like it when so many details don’t add up, so I don’t plan to purchase more from Arete. Those who are tempted by the apparent convenience and value of THCA hemp should ask themselves why the vendors would conceal so much if it were all good.
