The Piff is Sensi Seeds NL5 x The Seed Bank (Nevil’s) Haze A male. When it first started to get big in NYC it was called Bronx Golden Haze, Frankie’s, The Church, & Puday. It was also really big with the Cubans in Miami hence the Cuban Black Haze name. Bronx Golden Haze is really hard to find these days, but while Piff really hit its stride in NYC, the Cubans were distributing it all up and down I-95, & eventually the Black Haze name started to stick in NYC. Uptown NYC Haze or Uptown Black Haze is usually what’s it’s called now.
The Dominicans in Spanish Harlem are more responsible than anyone for its existing today. They held it tight and grew it constantly since 1990. But nobody is more responsible for getting it back out there than Piff Coast Farms after it became hard to find sometime around 2007-2010.
For several years it wasn’t as easy to come by, but it’s definitely back. JJ’s best contribution is the Chem Haze aka Black C Haze (Black Haze x Chem D/O Hqze) & his Black Haze Bx. There’s some decent phenos in his Piff Haze (Black Piff x NYC Haze) & NYC Haze (Black Haze x Black A5 Piff), but IMHO the Nigerian and Mango A5 terps detract from the basement chem frankincense church terps that Piff lovers love so much. His Uptown Brown & Hazelnut Piff are garbage.
If you can’t snap up a clone from Piff Coast Seeds, grab some of the beans off his website. There’s several that look promising, but for a sure thing I’d recommend Holy Communion (Piff S2 x Harlem Dreams) or the Harlem Dreams S1 (Uptown NYC Haze #3 x Blue Dream). His Blackline Haze is supposedly as well. I’d love to know if Bronx Goldie is actually the Bronx Golden Haze since I’d heard rhe NYC Golden Haze was extinct. Definitely interested in finding out more about his Paterson Piff (Ah P town …). Fort Collins Cough is an unknown quantity, but Cough is Professor P’s NL5/Haze. Still, apparently Piff Coast resurrected the Uptown NYC Haze & his Uptown Piff #3 breeder’s cut from the Piff S2 so if you want to get as close to the original Piff from the seeds he had available right now Holy Communion is your best bet.
I just snapped up the Harlem Dreams S1 & Holy Communion & look forward to growing them out. As for Top Dawg’s gear, the Chem Haze is definitely the hotness, since DC was recently blessed with a small batch of primo, Dorsia grown Pineapple Piff (Pineapple Thai x Chem Haze) that had perfect church basement chem frankincense terps.
If I didn’t know it was Pineapple Piff, I would have thought it was straight up Piff from the terps, the look of the buds, & the quality of the high. This recent version of Pineapple Piff is amazing. The high is exactly what it should be.
Piff doesn’t look like modern hybrids in the same way that Haze doesn’t look like modern hybrids. But that doesn’t mean that because it isn’t covered in resin rails that it’s weaksauce.
There’s nothing out there with the same intense euphoria and psychedelic high of Original Haze - & Piff is absolutely the way to go for getting close to that phenomenal Haze high without spending 20+ weeks flowering out O Haze beans, only for 3/10 of the plants at most to be exceptional. That’s the problem with the O Haze. The really killer phenos aren’t very common, & there’ll be just as many trash plants. For the most part, 6/10-7/10 Haze females will only be decent at best.
But if you do get a really killer Purple or Green O Haze pheno, it’ll be the some of the best herb you’ll ever smoke. It just doesn’t have the look of modern hybrids. No dripping with crystals, & you won’t get any kind of extract yield if you try and wash it or press it. And despite only topping out at 15%-18% THC, it’ll still give your brain a thorough thrashing.
When dealing with landrace or classic sativas that were most popular in the 60s, 70s, & 80s, you can’t judge their quality by the way they look at all. Take Barney’s Dr. Grinspoon for example.
It flowers like other cannabis maybe only about 10% of the time. Usually, it’ll grow flowers that look like strings of pearls, it’s calyxs are so spread out. Yet it’s genetics are priceless, and it’s high is phenomenal, due to the presence of H.O.G., Chocolate Thai, & genuine Panama Red in its genetics. Just like Haze is so amazing thanks to the Santa Marta Colombian Gold & other Colombian & sativa landrace genetics in it. H.O.G. Or Highland Oaxacan Gold is almost certainly extinct - a living specimen hasn’t been confirmed in 20 years. And Dr. Grinspoon’s strands of widely spaced out calyxs? You need a powerful loupe or camera zoom to see the trichomes. Same with Haze. Same with Piff. They’re there, but they’re extremely small, relative to what people are used to seeing these days.
Some landrace sativas have more prominent trichomes, but for the most part, they’re nearly impossible to see with the naked eye. And just like most legendary, heady landrace sativas, Piff has fairly loose flowers. It’s not as loose as most landrace sativas, but it’ll never be dense or sparkling.
Yet most people that get to experience genuine Piff will fondly recall it as one of the best, if not the best, smoke of their lives. Piff takes half the time to flower as O Haze & is much more consistent.
Back when Haze was bred, hybrids were a new thing (it predates Sacred Seeds’ Skunk #1 (Afghani x Acapulco Gold) x (Santa Marta Colombian Gold), which is widely considered the first well bred hybrid in cannabis history. It was certainly the first to be inbred sufficiently to produce consistent results in terms of its effects, as well as its structure, quality, yield, appearance, Haze is and was legendary, but its not a well bred cultivar & is anything but consistent. Legendary breeders like Nevil, Shantibaba, Flying Dutchman, Sam the Skunkman, DJ Short, SSSC, Sensi Seeds, etc. didn’t take more than 5-10 years after Skunk #1 was perfected in the late 1970s to figure out how to stabilize cannabis traits, what traits to look for to pheno hunt the best breeding plants - both male & female - to get their chosen parental cultivars under control in order to ensure that certain traits were properly inherited by the offspring & preserved within the line.
Our generation of breeders and growers, working in the 2020s with very little risk to our freedom or our livelihoods, are all literally standing on the shoulders of giants who refused to just stand by & do nothing as nearly all the landrace strains in North America & Europe, as well as so many landraces in developing countries, were systematically eradicated by so many ridiculously shortsighted people. They gathered together as many genetics as they could find & moved their grow spaces indoors, in order to better hide their operations & to protect what little genetic diversity still existed in cannabis plants - but, unfortunately, not fast enough to prevent the targeted genocide & wholesale, senseless destruction of over 3/4 of the cannabis varieties worldwide. The heros of 20th century cannabis preservation are mostly nameless - & many of them were busted & spent or are still spending their lives behind bars, yet each & every single person who grew cannabis before 1996 risked their freedoms, properties, & their families in order to preserve what few cannabis genetics still remained, & taught themselves how to grow, breed, & to adapt their techniques, methods, grow mediums, & technologies to allow for the light, water, & nutrient hungry, rapidly growing annual to thrive indoors.
In the US, most of us that are growing and breeding now, in late 2023, don’t have to worry about going to prison or having our homes or farms seized for cultivating cannabis on the premises, but that’s really only been the case for 11 years - with the exception of dedicated medical cannabis grows - & the first of those were only established after Election Day, 1996, when California became the first state to pass a voter referendum that would allow cannabis cultivation, possession, & use for medicinal purposes.
Most of the world still restricts the cultivation & use of cannabis for any reason, as so 1/3 of the states in the US (mostly in the South - private prisons don’t want to lose the 65% of prisoners that were arrested & charged with a non-violent drug offense, & southern cops don’t want to lose their catch-all, blanket excuse that they “smell marijuana,” in order to justify a warrantless search of whatever car or home, as well as their power to stop and search whoever they feel like searching at any time they want to do so).
But that convenient excuse will be gone soon as the racist & classicist draconian criminalization of otherwise peaceful citizens in the name of their war on drugs is slowly but surely going the way of the dinosaur. We’ve come so far in such a relatively short amount of time, & the winds are finally shifting away from the inequities inherent in the enforcement of our national drug laws, & as more people learn about rhe racism & greed that lie behind the origins of the war on drugs, that has been the single greatest travesty in our nation’s history, & that has been the cause of more social injustices & ruined lives than anything else in our nation’s history, & that we have had to endure now for nearly a century.
The truth of the war on our own people. An awareness of what is actually right & wrong, & anger at those who have exploited so many unfortunate people for so long, either to enrich themselves or to keep minorities down, under the paradigm of our sham drug war, is actually changing people’s minds & their perceptions & understanding at a rapid pace. It’s only a matter of time now. And not much at that.
