Terpene Library

Crack black peppercorns and lean over the grinder — that hot, dry bite in your nose is caryophyllene. It's in cloves, cinnamon, oregano and basil: the spice-rack terpene. In cannabis it's why some strains smell less like fruit and more like something cooking.

Nerolidol is bark and blossom at the same time. It's in neroli — orange blossom — as well as jasmine, ginger and lemongrass, and it smells like fresh-cut wood with something floral behind it. In cannabis it usually works as a background note, giving depth rather than character.

Camphene smells like a damp forest floor: fir needles, wet wood, a trace of camphor underneath. It gets confused with myrcene constantly, and honestly the two are easy to mix up in a jar — camphene is the colder, sharper of the pair.

If you've smelled a fresh hop flower, you've smelled humulene. It's named after *Humulus lupulus*, the hop vine, and it's a good part of why cannabis and beer smell like cousins. Sage and ginseng carry it as well. In a jar it's dry, woody and a little bitter.

Ocimene is the sweet, almost tropical note in mint, basil and parsley — and in orchids, which is the tell. It's a smell plants make to be attractive. In cannabis it reads sweet and green at once, sitting on top of a profile rather than underneath it.

Walk into a pine forest and the first thing that hits you is pinene. It's the most common terpene in the natural world — not just conifers but rosemary, basil, dill, parsley. In a jar it reads sharp and green, the smell of something just cut.

Valencene is named after the Valencia orange, and that is exactly what it smells like — sweet orange, not the sharp lemon of limonene. Tangerines and grapefruit carry it too. In a jar it's the difference between citrus that smells like fruit and citrus that smells like cleaning product.