Share This Article
We are in Barcelona for a round-up of the Summer Dab-a-Doo 2016, the hashish competition naturally born out of Mila Jansen’s 70th birthday bash in Amsterdam. Mila attends every Dab-a-Doo that takes place around the world (Amsterdam, Valencia, Rhode Island, London and the city of Santa Isabel in Uruguay) and, knowing the background of this event, Piff Advisor decided to go check this edition of the renown Hash Queen’s competition.
Mila Jansen is the founder of the infamous Pollinator Company, owner of the historical (and, sadly, now-closed) Pollinator shop in Amsterdam; she also currently runs the Hemp Hotel, one of the smallest hotels in Dam. Her story is quite known to many people in the cannabis industry and especially to hashish lovers and connoisseurs: Mila moved from England to the Netherlands when she was quite young but before establishing in Amsterdam she spent 14 years of her life traveling throughout India. There, she learned the art of hash-making from local traditional cannabis farmers and processors.
It was only when she returned to the Netherlands, since she did not find the available hash to be very satisfying, that she simply decided to employ her skills and start making her own. It’s good to point out that today, 22 years after the Pollinator machine was born, not many (if any) major upgrades were made to the core of dry-sifting extraction techniques, so in our eyes, she is a legend!
As we stepped inside the venue we met with Mila: she was personally handing out each judge pack, as a real old-school legend would do. She welcomed us in a calm and gentle tone, smiling at us with her deep, crystalline blue eyes. This gave us a chance to exchange a few moments with her during this quite busy moment. While puffing on an iceolator joint, she told me that she is of course very happy to be here in Barcelona again and that she’ll be in Naples in mid-October for the Canapa in Mostra expo (October 14-16, 2016) and on December 2nd she and the Pollinator Crew are going to bring the Dab-a-Doo competition to Kingston, Jamaica!(So my fellow stoners, if you’re planning a holiday this year, here’s a destination you might want to consider.)
Even though this is a smaller edition, 6 hours after the event had kicked off participants started crowding the place, and on Saturday evening both garden sofas & tables were packed with people of all ages from different countries, but we noticed in particular, the huge crowd from the UK.
No matter its smaller size, the first vibes you get is exactly what you’d expect from a Dab-a-Doo: great music, louder laughter, a relaxing and discreet atmosphere, and so many different smells and flavours mixing with each other, which makes any hash-lover feel immediately at home and excited to start sampling all the amazing resins and extracts.
The venue, NPK Club in Barcelona, also hosted the previous Spannabis 2016 edition of the Dab-a-Doo in March, and has been once more wisely picked with connoisseurs from throughout the world. Being a very open-space and one of the very few clubs in Barcelona that feature an inside garden, decorated with vine plants (whose sustaining structure is a water vaporizer that delicately refreshes the air during hot summer afternoons) gave plenty of space and light to glassblowers to work in the best possible conditions and also avoided the judges being placed in a ‘hotbox’ scenario.
The major difference from all the previous editions of Dab-a-Doo, was that this time, judges were given plenty of time to sample their resins and extracts, they were literally given a whole weekend rather than the usual ‘couple of hours’.
It started off on a sunny Friday afternoon, and the event continued until Sunday evening, when the award’s ceremony took place. During these 3 days, the glassblowing competition has been also constantly going on, giving participants the chance to have an insight on how their favourite rigs are crafted by each of these amazing artists.
Unfortunately, this year’s edition had way less competitors than average. Judges were handed their goodie bag and judge kit, delivering only 3 samples per category. Still, we like to be positive and we have to say, the first glance we had given to our solvent samples promised a proper stoner’s fri-high-day!
We spent the first night chilling out and going through all of the ‘solvent’ samples, and we can definitely say that our favourite was “Sample B” (the NL5 Haze Shatter by Anesthesia). It was a very smooth, with a very citric and orange taste, and rapidly delivered a strong and extensive high. This BHO came in a viscous but compact consistency, and looked correctly purged, with a golden sauce look and smelt exactly how it tasted.
Regarding the solventless category, which we deliberately confined to Saturday afternoon, the samples provided were an ice water extract, a dry-sift resin and a budder-ish red shaded hash, but in our humble opinion only the iceolator was actually impressive. The ice-o-lator packed a proper terpy punch and also showed remarkably clean trichomes and a very homogeneous texture after pressing. This Ice-o-lator was definitely Piff Advisor’s favourite solventless sample.
Counting of the votes started at 5 o’ clock on the Sunday evening, as the glassblowing competition kept going. The awards ceremony kicked off literally at 7:10 pm, hosted by Mila and the European Functional Flame Off crew: Mila awarded the Dab-a-Doo competing hash-makers as people cheered and applauded. Even though we did not completely agree on the solvent category judgement, the solventless outcomes reflected our opinions on this edition’s resins:
SOLVENTLESS CATEGORY Dab-a-Doo 2016
1st prize- Anesthesia Social Club by Mis Fores
2nd prize- the budder-like Bilbo G by No Joke Seeds
3rd prize- Sour Amnesia dry sift by Ben, a private competitor
SOLVENT CATEGORY Dab-a-Doo 2016
1st prize- Monsieur Deuwi & DRUiD Extracts with their collaboration Cassonade de Bilbo sugar wax
2nd prize- Anesthesia Social Club with their Northern Light #5 Haze shatter
3rd prize- The Plug BCN’s Super Silver BHO
This competition has really left us with great expectations on the upcoming cannabis and hash contests and more generally regarding the extract artists’ and hashmakers’ scene of Barcelona. This city has definitely got all the right numbers to quickly take over Amsterdam on the European cannabis scene.
If you’re in town next week guys, don’t miss The Elite Cup, it is surely going to be another amazing smoke up and competition!
Big up Piff Advisor for running the end of Summer Dab-a-doo feature in Barcelona in conjunction with ISMOKE this year. Feature Written by Luca Marani.