Apartment 113 Cannabis & Psychedelics Industry Podcast

Episode 246 is the 44th episode of Season 4. Today we're joined by Hilary Brown, the Director of Research and Development at SōRSE Technology, which makes water-soluble cannabis emulsions for beverages and edibles. She came up through pastry kitchens and ran her own chocolate company. When Washington legalized, people went looking for chocolatiers, and that is how she ended up in cannabis. She formulated edibles for a Seattle producer, where she helped build the Mr. Moxey's mints line. She joined SōRSE in 2019, where she and her team put the emulsions into finished products and test how they hold up. In this one, Hilary tells us how chocolate brought her into cannabis. She was doing the chocolates for a restaurant group's pop-up, and a couple of weeks later the chefs showed up at the kitchen with distillate to see what would happen. "Everybody got way too high." She started her first cannabis job with a $50,000 tempering machine nobody had used yet, and took it apart to find out how much chocolate stayed stuck inside. She walks us through how she builds a product, starting from a flavor she finds interesting and then finding the form that carries it best. She explains why cannabis flavors run a step behind the rest of the food world. She tells us to taste with other people so you end up with the same words for a strawberry. We wrap up with her culinary trick for truly smelling a sample. Connect with Hilary on LinkedIn and learn more at sorsetech.com. Enjoy the show! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

Episode 245 is the 43rd episode of Season 4. Today we're joined by Lance DiMaria, better known as Breeder Piff, the founder of Piff Coast Farms, a New York seed brand built around the East Coast haze lines. He started as a hobby grower on the forums, gave seeds to his friends and went full time in 2020. He says he holds more than 250 mothers and runs his cuts in facilities in New York and New Jersey for the legal market. He also puts on PiffCon, the haze competition and convention he started in New York. In this one, Piff tells us what haze means in New York. Most of the world knows the terpinolene hazes, and the Piff is a different plant that smells like the incense they light in church. He ordered all the hazes he could find from the seed banks and kept getting terpinolene. He went to the neighborhoods it came from and tracked it back to the growers. A friend gave him his first Cuban Black Haze clone and he built his library from there. He crossed it to Blue Dream to make Harlem Dreams, the plant a lot of his later work runs through. Now he is hunting a Piff that finishes in 55 to 63 days for the commercial market. "It's all about the hunt, man." He tells us how PiffCon grew from a breeder meetup of about 300 people into a convention that now draws thousands. We wrap up with his low-trellis tips for home growers and where to catch him this fall and at PiffMas in December. Connect with Breeder Piff on Instagram at @piffcoastfarms and find the seeds at piffcoastfarms.com. Enjoy the show! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

Episode 244 is the 42nd episode of Season 4. We're joined on this one by Matt Jerome, from Meristem Cannabis Consulting and Founding Contributor of the Connoisseurship Roadshow, and we're running through September's cannabis and psychedelic headlines. We start in the Netherlands, where ten cities now have coffeeshops selling only regulated cannabis from licensed growers. Customers say the quality is better, and the growers could not make enough hash. We stay in Europe for Ireland, where the neurologists who prescribe under the medical program say they want to use cannabis in their practice and that the path for patients is still hard to follow. Missouri held its third microbusiness license lottery this month, and we walk through how the program got here and the new rules that came out of the first two rounds as well as my attempt win each lottery along the way. We get into the $61.5 million award two investors won against Cookies. We talk about the dispute over Sherbinskis and ask whether the person is the brand. We turn to a museum guide on how the art world decides whether a painting is legitimate and we try its five steps on cannabis flower. We look at an entomology lab's five-year count of the insects living on outdoor cannabis and hemp. We wrap up with a nurse practitioner's guide for parents on what party substances do in the brain and when to call 911. Connect with Matt Jerome on LinkedIn and learn more at meristemcannabis.com. Read the party substance saftey guide at npfady.com. Sit down, roll one up and enjoy the ride. IG: apt_113 apt113.com

Episode 243 is the 41st episode of Season 4. Today we're joined by Victoria Cvitanovic, an attorney and data privacy officer at Rudick Law Group, where she started the firm's psychedelics practice. She practiced law in Louisiana for ten years, most of that time as a prosecutor, before moving into healthcare and tech law. A back injury brought her to psychedelic-assisted therapy, and her first ketamine session left her curious to explore and support the space. She lives in Santa Fe now and represents ketamine clinics, cannabis doctors and psychedelics operators. In this one, Victoria tells us how she built a psychedelics law practice. She started in the courthouse believing in progressive prosecution and kept seeing people on the docket who she thought should have been patients. She left to learn how money, technology and healthcare work. Then a client called and told her to try psychedelic-assisted therapy, and her priest followed up with the question that changed her mind. “Are psychedelics about connection or escapism?” She gives us her read on Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, and we wrap up with a few reading recommendations including translated literature and The Rose of Paracelsus. Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn, follow her on Instagram at @victoria_verified and learn more at rudicklawgroup.com. Enjoy the show! IG: apt_113 apt113.com

Episode 242 is the 40th episode of Season 4. Today we're joined by Zina Brown, the writer and director of The Faerie Rings, a live-action feature film he describes as a fairytale about the war on drugs, somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and 1984. He is a New York director who came up making music videos and moved into short films, including Dreams of the Last Butterflies, which screened at festivals around the world and picked up a run of awards. He has worked with plant medicines for most of his adult life and sees the film as a way of giving back to them. The screenplay has won 17 awards across 55 festivals, including Best Screenplay in Mexico City, Vienna, Kyiv, Amsterdam and San Antonio, and the film recently secured its first investment. In this one, Zina tells us the story of The Faerie Rings. Simon is a young artist living in a grimmer version of America run by three overlords called the Truthsetters, and the one thing they cannot control is a ring of mushrooms said to grow deep in the forest. He finds the last one, steps inside and meets the cannabis, mushroom and ayahuasca faeries, who Zina is quick to say are not the Disney kind. We talk about how the script grew from a short into a feature and how many of its turns came to him in the middle of a ceremony. He tells us about the Shipibo tradition he sits with and why he thinks a hopeful story about resisting tyranny matters right now. He also gets into the real cannabis faerie costume his partner Madeline Bell made out of silk leaves. We close on where the film stands now that producer Gavin J. Behrman is on board and the first investment is in. Connect with Zina on Instagram at @zinarcotics and see the concept art at thefaerierings.com. Enjoy the show! IG: apt_113 apt113.com