All Aboard the Terp Train: Dabbenport’s Purple Fork

Q: Two trains on the same track, traveling equal speeds in opposite directions, on a collision course with each other. One is loaded down with pure terps and the other is packed to capacity with THC. If they both leave their respective stations at the same time, when will they collide?

A: The moment you dab of anything from the unstoppable extract engineers at Dabbenport.

Dabbenport’s logo is a steam train, an apt symbol for both the power of their product and the speed and force of their organization’s rising profile. Since 2014, they’ve won at least eight awards, including “best wax” and “best oil” at the 2015 Dab Cup.

My personal award to them is for “best purple strain shatter” for their Purple Fork, a shockingly potent and delicious offering that vaporized my expectations before I even tasted it.

But first a word on purple; to my memory, the California Bay Area experienced “peak purple” around 2005: Purple Urkle, Grape Ape, Grand Daddy Purple – every dispensary and street corner was bursting with “grapes,” ripe for the picking and packing.

Other celebrity strains have taken center stage since purple’s pinnacle, but for many cannabis lovers, it’s still more than just a color, so it’s no surprise that extractors try to capture these cherished strains with their concentrates.

But there have been two primary obstacles to my enjoyment of shatters made from purple strains, the first being the darker, light-blocking hues you often see in the final product. Maybe that’s a petty gripe, but dabbing shatter is a sensory experience, and part of it (for me at least) is admiring the clarity.

The second obstacle is – and I know this is heresy in certain circles – I just don’t like “purple” that much. The flavor profiles are generally pleasant enough, but to my palate they tend to lack a sharp note, generally falling somewhere between sweet and bland, and the effects have a one-dimensional, sleepy feel.

But one whiff of the Purple Fork shatter blasted away my skepticism and piqued my curiosity. I smelled zesty spikes of pine and grapefruit I’d never even considered associating with purple.

And the clarity wasn’t just lighter than I expected, it was brighter and more luminescent than anything I’d dabbed in days. Even though my gram had been dropped onto the paper as a thick dollop rather than spread out into a wafer, its shiny, hard candy translucence bordered on transparent, like a thick, golden glass bead.

Still, it had enough give to allow snapping off a piece without cracking the rest of it, which I did, dispensing with my usual “exploratory” dab and jumping right into a generous glob.

As I touch my dab to the nail, a roaring freight train t-bones the couch I’m sitting on – slamming my mind through the wall and carrying it out into the sky with a shimmering shower of debris. It scrambles onto the speeding train like a cosmic hobo, riding the invisible rails of infinity contained in the spiraling trance of a single second, finally snapping back to my skull as I breathe out the same mouthwatering sharpness I smelled in the paper.

And then I take another dab.