Cannabis Strain Families Explained
Nearly every strain on a modern menu descends from seven families: Chem and Diesel, OG Kush, Skunk, Haze, the Afghan and Northern Lights line, Cookies (GSC) with its dessert offspring, and the fruit-forward Candy family led by Zkittlez. Learn to recognize each one by its smell (Chem and OG reek of fuel, Haze of incense and citrus peel) and a menu of forty invented names becomes a handful of real choices. For a slow evening with company we lean toward Haze and the old Chem cuts; Cookies descendants are the safest buy and the quickest to bore you.
By Eleanore Editorial, editors of the eleanore guides to cannabis craft · Published
You are at the counter. The menu board behind the budtender lists Permanent Marker, Apple Fritter, Lemon Cherry Gelato, Runtz Cake and something called Gary Payton, each with a THC number beside it and nothing else, and the person behind you in line has started sighing. You point at the one with the nicest name.
Most people do. It is a bad system.
Strain names are marketing, and new ones are coined faster than anyone can taste them. Families move slowly. The cultivars on that board, all five of them, sit within two or three crosses of a few plants that were found and cloned between roughly 1970 and 2015, and each of those plants left a smell on its descendants that you can learn in an afternoon. Once you know it, the name on the jar matters much less than the nose coming out of it.
What we mean by a family
A family here is a founding cultivar, or a small cluster of them, whose descendants share a recognizable aroma and growth habit. It is a working category, used by growers and buyers, and it has no botanical standing. Our guide to landrace strains covers the older, regional varieties these families were built from; the breeding shorthand you will see on seed packs (F1, BX, S1) is explained in cannabis phenotypes explained.
Lineage records in cannabis are mostly oral history. For decades the plants were bred in closets and renamed whenever it helped a sale, so treat every origin story below as the version most growers repeat, which is different from a proven fact.
The seven cannabis strain families compared
Descendants listed are the cultivars most often traced to each family. Plenty of modern strains belong to two families at once.
| Family | Where and when | Nose | Famous descendants | Best for | Key trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chem and Diesel | Chemdawg, early 1990s; Sour Diesel on the East Coast soon after | Gasoline, struck match, sour lemon, a little garlic | Chem ’91, Chem D, Sour Diesel, Stardawg | People who like their cannabis to smell like cannabis | Loud enough to fill a car; no subtlety at the table |
| OG Kush | Florida, then Los Angeles in the mid-1990s | Lemon peel, pine, fuel, wet earth | SFV OG, Tahoe OG, Fire OG, and half of GSC | A late, quiet evening at home | Heavy; many cuts are clone-only and easy to counterfeit |
| Skunk | Skunk #1, California in the 1970s, refined in the Netherlands | Sweet musk, overripe fruit, the skunk note itself when fresh | Super Skunk, UK Cheese, countless commercial hybrids | Learning what a stable, old-school hybrid tastes like | Rarely sold under its own name now; hard to find a true line |
| Haze | Santa Cruz, around 1970, from tropical landraces | Incense, citrus peel, white pepper, sandalwood | Super Silver Haze, Amnesia Haze, Jack Herer, Neville’s Haze | Daytime, conversation, a long walk | Flowers for three months or more, so growers rush or skip it |
| Afghan and Northern Lights | Hindu Kush landraces; Northern Lights in the Pacific Northwest, 1970s to 1980s | Hash, sandalwood, dark honey, damp cellar | Northern Lights #5, Hash Plant, Purple Kush, Master Kush | Hash lovers and anyone who wants a short, mellow session | Mild aroma by modern standards; looks plain in the jar |
| Cookies (GSC) | San Francisco Bay Area, around 2010, OG Kush crossed with Durban Poison | Sweet dough, mint, cocoa, a fuel finish | Sunset Sherbet, Gelato, Wedding Cake, Runtz | Consistency; the easiest family to buy well | Most of the menu is now this family, and it starts to taste the same |
| Candy and Zkittlez | Mendocino and Humboldt, mid-2010s | Grape soda, tropical fruit, sugared berries | Zkittlez, Runtz (with Gelato), many fruit-named crosses | Guests who say they do not like the smell of weed | Aroma fades quickly in storage; often low on complexity |
Chem and OG: the gasoline line
By the most repeated account, Chemdawg grew from seeds found in a bag of flower bought at a Grateful Dead show in 1991. The year survives in the name Chem ’91. Sour Diesel appeared on the East Coast a few years later, and OG Kush, which reached Los Angeles from Florida in the mid-1990s, is usually traced to the same plant.
You can smell the connection. All three carry a sharp petrol note, sometimes with sour lemon over the top and a faint, slightly savory garlic underneath, and that note is the clearest family signature in cannabis. A good OG cut in a well-cured jar smells like a lemon squeezed over a hot engine block.
The trouble with OG is counterfeiting. The famous cuts were clone-only for years, which means the name was easy to borrow and the plant was not, and a great deal of what is sold as OG today is a seed-grown cousin.
Skunk and the Afghan line
Skunk #1 combined Colombian Gold, Acapulco Gold and an Afghani in 1970s California, and it was among the first hybrids stable enough to come up true from seed. Breeders took it to the Netherlands, where it became a parent to a remarkable share of what followed. The UK strain Cheese, a Skunk selection kept alive as a clone through the 1990s, still smells faintly of a cheese board left out too long, which its fans consider the point.
Northern Lights came out of the Pacific Northwest, built mostly on Afghan stock, and leans the other way, toward hash and dark honey. Neither family is fashionable. Both are in the background of nearly everything, and the skunk note itself, the sulfur compound that gives cannabis its oldest reputation, is strongest in the plants that kept the most of that early lineage.
Haze, the one worth rescuing
Haze was built in Santa Cruz around 1970 from Colombian, Mexican, Thai and South Indian seed, and it behaves like the tropical plants it came from. It grows tall, it stretches, and it can take twelve weeks or longer to finish flowering indoors, while most hybrids are done in eight or nine. The aroma rewards the wait: incense, citrus peel, white pepper, a dry woody finish closer to a cedar closet than a candy shop. Its effect is lighter and more talkative than the heavy hybrids, which is why it suits a dinner table.
That twelve-week flower is the whole problem. A grower who gives a room to Haze loses close to one harvest a year compared with a neighbor running Cookies crosses, and very few can afford that, so most Haze on California menus is a faster cross wearing the old name. Super Silver Haze and Amnesia Haze, both made famous in Amsterdam coffee shops in the late 1990s and 2000s, are the descendants most often found. When you meet a farm still growing a long-flowering Haze outdoors, buy it. We think it is the most interesting family in cannabis and the one most likely to disappear from shelves within a decade.
Cookies and the dessert menu
Girl Scout Cookies, a cross of OG Kush and Durban Poison from the Bay Area around 2010, is the most successful cannabis family of the last fifteen years. Its children, Sunset Sherbet and Gelato chief among them, produced Wedding Cake and Runtz and most of the dessert names on the board, and they are good plants, dense and resinous and unusually consistent from grower to grower. The nose is sweet dough and mint with a fuel edge borrowed from OG.
Our complaint is volume. When eight jars out of ten on a menu are Cookies crosses with new names, the menu looks like variety and tastes like one family. Buy a Gelato from a careful grower and you will enjoy it. Buy four and you will wonder why your cannabis all smells like a bakery.
Candy
Zkittlez, bred in Mendocino and Humboldt from Grape Ape, Grapefruit and an undisclosed third parent, won at the Emerald Cup in the middle of the 2010s and set off the fruit craze that Runtz carried into every dispensary in Los Angeles.
Where each family fits (and where it does not)
Chem and OG belong to the experienced smoker who wants the classic flavor, ideally at home. They do not belong in a shared space with people who dislike the smell of cannabis; nothing in the plant is louder.
Haze fits a long lunch, or a dinner where the conversation is the main course. It is the wrong choice for anyone already anxious, since its lift is bright and quick.
The Afghan line is for hash lovers and late, short sessions. It will disappoint anyone shopping for a big nose.
Cookies wins on reliability. If you have one jar to buy in an unfamiliar shop, a Cookies cross from a decent grower is the least risky choice on the menu, and we would say so even though it is not the family we love.
Candy is the friendliest family for guests who are new or wary, and the least rewarding for a connoisseur after the first few minutes.
A note on our own smokes. The Parlor Smokes from The Parlor blend sun-grown flower with botanicals at about 2.5% THC, and the botanicals are a large part of the flavor, so they are the wrong way to study a family. To taste a lineage clearly, buy whole flower from a named farm and smoke it straight; our guide to cannabis tasting notes gives you the words for what you find.
How to use this at the counter
Ask for the lineage before the name. A good shop will know the two parents, and from the table above you will know roughly what to expect. Then ask to smell the jar. If the shop says the cultivar is a Haze cross and it smells of grape candy, believe your nose; the label has drifted, as labels do, and the certificate of analysis will tell you more about the terpenes than the name ever could.
Families outlast names. Learn the seven and the sighing in line stops being your problem.
Frequently asked questions
What are the main cannabis strain families?
Most cultivars on a modern menu descend from seven families: Chem and Diesel, OG Kush, Skunk, Haze, the Afghan and Northern Lights line, Cookies (GSC) and its dessert offspring such as Gelato, and the fruit-forward Candy family led by Zkittlez. Many modern strains are crosses of two or three of these.
How can I tell which family a strain belongs to?
Smell it. Fuel and sour lemon point to Chem or OG Kush, incense and citrus peel point to Haze, hash and sandalwood point to the Afghan line, sweet dough and mint point to Cookies, and grape or tropical candy points to Zkittlez. Then ask the shop for the stated lineage and see whether it agrees with your nose.
Is OG Kush related to Chemdawg?
Most accounts trace OG Kush, along with Sour Diesel, back to Chemdawg in the early 1990s, and the shared gasoline note supports the story. The record is folklore rather than paperwork, because breeding at the time happened outside the law and few growers kept written notes.
What is the Cookies or GSC family?
Girl Scout Cookies, now usually sold as GSC, came out of the San Francisco Bay Area around 2010 as a cross of OG Kush and Durban Poison. Its descendants, including Sunset Sherbet, Gelato, Wedding Cake and Runtz, make up a large share of what California dispensaries sell today.
Why is Haze hard to find?
Haze descends from tropical landraces and can take twelve weeks or more to flower indoors, against eight or nine for most hybrids. That costs a grower nearly a full extra harvest each year, so many producers sell Haze crosses that finish faster and keep only part of the original aroma.