Introducing the First Weed Beer That Won’t Keep You High For Hours

A new weed beer on the Canadian market claims to contain a ‘decelerant’—a compound that makes its effects fade fast—which has scientists puzzled. Province Brands, a startup in the infused beverage sector, announced their weed beer earlier this year, already unique among other THC-infused drinkables in that it is brewed entirely from the cannabis plant. Instead of barley, it contains the stems, stalks, and leaves of hemp plants, and each weed beer clocks in at 6.5 mg THC.

But that’s not their only differentiator in the already crowded weed beer market. The company also claims their brew contains mysterious accelerants and decelerants that would give it a much more rapid onset and sunset than traditional edible cannabis products, making it more like a regular beer. You drink one, you feel buzzed, the buzz fades, and you’re sober again. Indeed, they even bill their weed beer as “the alcohol killer.”

“The beer hits you very quickly, which is not common for a marijuana edible,” CEO Dooma Wendschuh told The Guardian. A recent article in the Toronto Star outlined the company’s plans to collaborate with Element GP, an Alberta cannabis oil producer, to create a different kind of cannabis edible. Element claims it has made a special cannabis oil for Province’s weed beer, one that will achieve the tight window of intoxication they’re looking for.

“With a lot of edibles in the food and beverage cannabis business, you might have a drink that you enjoy but you’ll only be able to drink one ounce of it and you’ll be screaming high for four hours. Whereas this is something that we don’t want to do,” Element CEO Christopher Lecky told the Star.

However, according to Inverse, some scientists are skeptical that that’s even a thing when it comes to pot. The special weed beer formula would work by speeding up the rate at which the THC in the beer is metabolized which, according to University of Washington Department of Pharmacy professor Gail Johnson, is tough to do.

“I can’t think of a way this would at all be possible,” she told Inverse. “The way this works is to increase the production of enzymes, and it takes days to do that.”

While there are some substances that are known to induce the type of enzyme production that would help your liver clear a drug—St. John’s wort, for one—Anderson told Inverse that she doesn’t know of any that have an acute effect, similar to what Element GP was talking about. One would need to be continuously taking those compounds to see a noticeable increase in drug metabolism.

But, as UC Irvine pharmokineticist Daniel Piomelli, PhD, told Inverse, “They may have patented or not, so the information may be completely inaccessible.”

His guess wasn’t too far off, it seems. Province Brands declined to respond to Inverse’s inquiry about their weed beer, but sent Herb the following statement, from CEO Dooma Wendschuh: