Most people choose rolling papers the way they choose matches. They take whatever sits by the register in a booklet whose color they recognize, and the decision is over faster than the joint is lit.

That is an odd habit for anyone who pays for good flower.

Paper is the one ingredient in a joint that nobody grew. It burns on every pull, first to last, and it reaches your palate whether you invited it or not. A cultivar that spent six weeks curing in glass deserves better than a sheet picked up by accident.

The guides that rank for this question share a structure. They sort papers by fiber, list the sizes in millimeters, and send beginners to wood pulp and experts to rice. We will cover that ground quickly. Then we want to show you a test none of them mention, one you can run at your own table in under a minute with a lighter and an empty sheet.

What the paper is made of

Four fibers account for nearly every booklet in a good shop.

Wood pulp is the old standard, and the cheapest. It is thick and forgiving in the hand, and it burns fast and hot. A fast paper runs ahead of the flower, which means you draw more smoke from the sheet and less from the cannabis you actually paid for.

Hemp sits in the middle. It is sturdy enough to roll without tearing and has a slight tooth that grips the flower. The taste is mild and a little grassy (some smokers enjoy that note; we find it crowds the delicate cultivars, the ones whose terpenes live up in the citrus and floral register).

Rice paper is the thinnest of the common types, close to translucent and close to tasteless, and it burns slowly. It is also slippery. Anyone who has tried to roll one with damp fingers on a humid August evening has watched it crease, then split along the crease.

Flax is the quiet one. It is thin like rice but handles more like wood pulp, and you will rarely see it outside a specialist shop.

Plenty of brands blend fibers now, and the booklet rarely tells you in what proportion.

White, brown, and the gum strip

An unbleached paper is brown because nobody whitened it. That is the whole difference. Zig-Zag, for one, says its white papers are whitened through an oxygenation process with no chlorine involved, and we know of no good evidence that a white sheet from a reputable maker smokes worse than a brown one. Buy brown because you like how it looks on the table. Leave the health claims on the packaging.

The gum strip deserves more of your attention than the color. Quality papers usually use gum arabic, a sap from acacia trees and the same adhesive people once licked on the back of postage stamps. It should taste of almost nothing. Cheaper booklets sometimes use sugar-based gums instead, and the flavored lines go much further, coating the whole sheet in fruit or candy that flattens a cultivar’s aroma before it has a chance to speak.

Paper also carries things you cannot see. Mineral fillers such as calcium carbonate give a sheet its opacity, and salts such as citrates are added to regulate how fast it burns, with more of them making a faster paper. None of this is printed on the booklet, which is the strongest argument for the test further down.

Size the paper to the flower

The 1 1/4 size, roughly 78 millimeters long, is the one most of us learned on. King slim runs closer to 110. A typical joint holds about half a gram.

The mistake we see most often at dinner parties is a long paper wrapped around too little flower and rolled loose to fill the length. Every pull then carries extra paper, and the loose pack canoes up one side before the joint has made it once around the table. For half a gram, use a 1 1/4. Keep the king slims for evenings with enough flower to fill one properly and enough guests to finish it.

Add a crutch. A rolled card tip keeps lips off the flower and stops the last centimeter from turning soggy and bitter.

The blank sheet test

This is the part the other guides skip, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

Take a single paper from the booklet. Roll it loosely into an empty tube, hold it over an ashtray, and light one end. Let it burn for a few seconds, blow it out, and smell both the smoke and the charred edge.

What you are smelling will sit underneath your flower for the full length of the joint. A good thin rice or hemp paper gives off something faint and dry, like a struck match once the sulfur has gone. Thick wood pulp smells like a burning receipt. Flavored papers smell like a candle shop on fire, which tells you everything.

Watch the burn as well. A clean paper burns along an even, unhurried line. A sheet that flares, or leaves a dark bead of melted gum along its seam, will do exactly the same thing with flower inside it.

If you want to be thorough about it, roll the same flower from the same jar in two different papers and pass them around side by side, tasting them the way we suggest in A Guide to Cannabis Tasting Notes. Moisture counts here too. Flower kept at the water activity craft growers aim for, roughly 0.55 to 0.62, burns evenly in almost any decent paper, while damp flower softens the sheet and the gum alike, and our guide on how to store cannabis flower explains how to hold that range at home.

A word on cones

A pre-rolled cone is a paper someone else chose for you, and our guide on how to judge a pre-roll covers everything else they chose.

Our position

We make pre-rolls ourselves, the Parlor Smokes in their book-jacket boxes in The Parlor, so we hold opinions about paper and have a reason to hold them.

Buy thin. Rice or a thin hemp suits most flower, white or brown as you prefer, with a plain gum arabic strip and no flavoring whatsoever. Keep a booklet of 1 1/4 in the drawer and reach for anything larger only when the flower and the company call for it. Run the blank sheet test on every new booklet before good flower goes anywhere near it. The right paper is the one you have forgotten by the second pull. If you can still taste it at the end, change it.

How to Choose Rolling Papers