First in Before They Had Names — a series where we take the old words growers used for smell, one at a time, and go all the way down.
The most famous smell in cannabis isn't a terpene
This one still does my head in.
Skunk. The smell the whole plant got nicknamed after. The one that got half my mates caught over the years — travelled through walls, through double-bagged jars, through the boot of a car. For a long time it was the benchmark. If it stank the house out, it was good gear.
It isn't a terpene. Never was.
And nobody could actually prove what it was until 2021.
Sit with that for a second. Growers spent forty-odd years naming that smell, chasing it, selecting for it, breeding toward it and sometimes away from it — while a terpene panel physically could not see the thing they were chasing. Not "didn't think to look". Could not see it.
Forty years. No lab, no numbers, just noses. That's fucking remarkable when you actually stop and think about it.
So this isn't me claiming the nose got there first. The nose demonstrably got there first. This is the receipt.
Where the word comes from
Skunk #1. Sacred Seed Co, California, late 1970s. Afghani over Acapulco Gold and Colombian Gold.
That cross matters more than people give it credit for. You're taking an Afghan indica and putting it over two landrace sativas shaped by completely different climates on the other side of the world. Shuffle the deck that hard and every now and again you deal a hand nobody's seen before. Skunk was one of those hands.
What the word meant at the time was specific: pungent, sour, sulphurous, a bit sweet-rotten. Loud in a way that was genuinely a liability.
Sam the Skunkman — David Watson — is the bloke who carried it from California to the Netherlands, and he's on record saying early Skunk #1 was extremely skunky, and that he deliberately selected later generations toward sweeter, more commercial expressions. Remember that. It comes back at the end.
And while we're here: Roadkill Skunk. I love the legend as much as anyone, but let's be straight — it's oral history, not an authenticated cut. The honest version is that some early Skunk #1 expressions were so offensively skunky that growers later reached for that name to describe them. Good story. Just not paperwork.
What it actually is
Here's the science, and it's worth getting right.
In late 2021, Iain Oswald and a team at Abstrax Tech published work in ACS Omega. They used two-dimensional gas chromatography with sulphur-specific detection — gear well beyond anything a standard terpene panel runs — and went hunting for sulphur compounds nobody had catalogued in cannabis.
They found a whole new family of them: prenylated volatile sulphur compounds. The standout was 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which you'll see called VSC3 or prenylthiol. It was the most abundant VSC in exactly the plants a sensory panel scored as the most pungent.
Then they proved it. They took VSC3, added it to a blend of ten other major cannabis aroma compounds — and the mix smelled like cannabis. They rebuilt the smell from the molecule up.
It works at vanishingly small concentrations. A tiny amount dominates the entire profile, which is precisely why no terpene number on a certificate can predict it.
And it's the same broad chemical family that gives garlic, hops and skunked beer their punch. Structurally close to what an actual skunk sprays at you, too.
Meanwhile the terpenes in a skunky plant — myrcene, caryophyllene, humulene — are the background music. Good music. But not one of them is the skunk.
What this means for your grow
This is the part I reckon every grower should know, and almost nobody talks about.
The same work tracked those sulphur compounds through the whole grow. They climbed hard at the end of flower, peaked during the cure — then dropped off substantially after about ten days of storage.
So, practically:
- The loudest your weed will ever smell is fresh out of a proper cure. That's not nostalgia, that's a measurable peak.
- Thiols are fragile. Heat, oxygen and UV knock them about. Cool, dark, airtight — and stop cracking the jar every time someone walks in to show it off.
- Don't save your loudest jar for a special occasion. The special occasion is now. The chemistry says so.
- A COA won't help you here. Sulphur compounds aren't on a standard terpene panel. Two plants can post nearly identical numbers and smell nothing alike. Your nose is reading something the certificate never printed — back it.
That last one's the bit I'd tattoo on people. If you'd been selecting purely off panels, you'd have binned the best skunk you ever grew.
So did we breed it out?
Honest answer: a bit of both, deliberate and accidental.
Watson steered Skunk #1 toward sweeter himself, and said so. And the market has rewarded sweet, fruity, dessert profiles hard for twenty years straight. Breed toward what sells, generation after generation, and the loud sulphur end quietly goes missing. Nobody decided to kill it. It just stopped getting picked.
Whether it's recoverable is a genuine breeding question, and one I think about more than is probably healthy. If VSC production varies that much between cultivars, then in principle you could select back toward it. You'd just need growers who still want it.
Which is really what this whole series is about.
The names arrived late, and they arrived from outside. The knowledge was already here — in the hands and the noses of growers who never saw a chromatograph in their lives.
— WildRoo
Listen to the episode — Before They Had Names, Episode 1: Skunk
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Source: Oswald et al. (2021), "Identification of a New Family of Prenylated Volatile Sulfur Compounds in Cannabis Revealed by Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography", ACS Omega.