Hash Malana Elephant

Malana, the village this hash is named for, lies in India’s Himachal Pradesh, and Wikipedia says it is best known for a hash called Malana Cream. Hash Malana Elephant is sold under the village’s name.

A village apart in the Parvati Valley

Malana is the only settlement of the Malana Nala, a side valley branching off the Parvati Valley to the north-east of the Kullu Valley, and it stands on a remote plateau beside the torrential Malana river. Wikipedia describes strict local customs: outsiders must not touch anything in the village, people and temples included, and money is set down on the ground when paying so that nobody touches. Residents speak Kanashi, a language only they understand, with roughly 1,700 speakers.

Weaving hemp into baskets, ropes and slippers was the village’s traditional livelihood. Wikipedia says Malana drew recreational drug tourism from the 1980s and that visitors may now stay only outside the village, in cafes. Sensi Seeds calls Malana the epicentre of charas culture, an ancient settlement whose people deliberately keep apart from the outside world; they once traded wool for things they could not make, and now trade a special kind of charas known as Malana Cream.

How Malana Cream is rubbed

Wikipedia says Malana Cream comes from cannabis grown in the Parvati Valley and is made by repeatedly rubbing live flowers between the hands, which draws out resin and builds a sticky layer of hashish across the palm; it regards the result as high-purity. Sensi Seeds’ general account of charas-making fits that description: it starts with buds on living plants stripped of their big leaves, and gentle rolling between the palms leaves the hands coated in dark, glossy resin, which is scraped away in curls and shaped into balls or fingers. It is slow work, as about eight hours of rubbing yields seven to eight grams by Sensi Seeds’ estimate.

Because Malana Cream blends many different phenotypes, Sensi Seeds says, its layers of flavour differ from one tola to the next, like a fruit salad set beside a single fruit. A tola, the traditional unit for charas, is 11.7 g by its figure.

Two Health Canada cautions

New or occasional users are better off avoiding hash, in Health Canada‘s view, because extracts like it are high in THC, and its lower-risk guidelines call for at least 6 hours between using cannabis and driving. Our how-to on smoking hash walks through the usual tools, bongs and vaporizers among them.