The jar smells sweeter closed than it does once you break the buds apart. At first, you mostly get grape candy and that fake purple gummy smell. About ten seconds later, the backend starts turning creamy, sour, and weirdly funky, almost smelling fermented. Sour cream. Sugary dough. Fuel. Something slightly rotten underneath the sweetness that keeps pulling you back into the jar, even when your brain thinks it should stop smelling it.

One of our Durham budtenders described the Forbidden Gushers THCa strain as “dessert-shop gas,” which honestly sounded ridiculous until you actually opened the jar yourself.

Early on, the sweeter candy profile sat on top of everything. Two weeks later, the creamy gas side began overtaking the fruit. By the time this batch hit the shelf, the backend smelled almost fermented after breakdown. One of the trim room notes literally said “yogurt-covered fruit and propane,” which turned out to be weirdly accurate.

Forbidden Gushers THCa strain smokes dirtier than most candy-heavy flower

You know how some candy strains smell incredible for thirty seconds and then completely disappear halfway through the joint? Forbidden Gushers never really flattens out like that. The inhale stays sweeter at first. Grape gummies. Artificial fruit. Creamy candy notes. Then the exhale starts leaning harder into sour fuel and funky dough. The creamy gas side honestly gets louder the longer the session goes, especially through glass.

The second half of the joint tastes heavier than the first half. That was one of the first things everybody at Sherlocks kept saying after smoking it. Forbidden Gushers comes from Gushers-style genetics, so you still get the dense, frosty structure and loud, candy-forward terpene profile that made those cultivars popular in the first place. This cut just leans nastier underneath the sweetness. More sour cream funk. More gas. More weight behind the smoke. The resin texture stood out immediately, too. Sticky trim. Loud jars. Weird cure. Your fingers stick together after breakdown instead of getting dusty, which usually tells you the trichome heads survived the cure properly instead of drying out into powder.

One customer at our Wake Forest shop smelled the jar for maybe five seconds before saying, “Yeah, alright. This smells like somebody hid candy in a tire shop. Give me seven grams.” Honestly, that probably sold the Forbidden Gushers THCa strain better than anything else could have.

Sherlocks almost passed on this batch the first time it showed up

The funny part is, this was not even the loudest candy strain sitting on the intake table that day. Another Gushers cut smelled sweeter from farther away. Bigger candy nose. Cleaner fruit profile. Probably easier to sell, honestly. But once the flower started getting broken down, Forbidden Gushers completely changed the room.

The sweeter batch flattened out after ten minutes. Forbidden Gushers kept getting stranger the longer it sat open. The creamy sour gas side started overtaking the fruit. The grinder smell stayed on your hands afterward. Even the trim room smelled different once this batch was opened.

That was the batch Sherlocks ended up choosing. One of the intake notes said: “Less pretty. More memorable.” That ended up being exactly right.

The terpene profile keeps pulling you back into the jar

This batch tested high in Caryophyllene, Limonene, and Linalool, which tracks perfectly once you actually smoke it instead of just reading the COA.

The brighter candy smell comes first from Limonene. Then the Caryophyllene starts pushing peppery gas and funky backend notes into the smoke afterward. The Linalool smooths everything out and gives the exhale that creamy, almost dessert-like finish hanging around afterward.

The total terpene percentage also came in strong on the COA, which makes sense because this flower honestly got louder after breakdown instead of quieter.

During intake, these were the notes everybody at the shop kept circling back to:

• melted grape gummies
• sour cream and fuel
• sugary dough
• overripe berry funk
• “something rotten but weirdly sweet”

That last description kept coming up from completely different people. The best candy cultivars always carry something slightly ugly underneath the sweetness, or they end up smelling too clean and one-dimensional. Forbidden Gushers never smells clean. That is exactly why the jar keeps pulling you back in for another smell.

The high sneaks up on you while you are still paying attention to the flavor

The head change shows up first. You feel it behind your eyes within the first few pulls, but the heavier body side takes longer to catch up. Music sounds fuller. Conversations start drifting around longer than usual. You keep getting distracted halfway through thoughts because random details suddenly feel way more interesting than they should.

Then maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, the heavier body side starts settling into your shoulders and chest. This is where you accidentally oversmoke it the first time. Forbidden Gushers creeps more than it punches.

You keep taking another hit because the flavor keeps changing the whole session, then suddenly you realize you have spent twenty straight minutes staring at YouTube thumbnails without actually clicking anything. One of our staff members smoked this before reorganizing inventory in the back room and somehow spent almost an hour sitting cross-legged on the floor arguing about regional rap mixtapes instead of finishing the boxes in front of him.

Forbidden Gushers makes the most sense late at night

This does not really feel like a daytime flower unless your tolerance is extremely high. Forbidden Gushers work better once your day is over and your brain no longer needs to stay fully organized. The flavor keeps unfolding the entire session, which makes it dangerously easy to keep smoking longer than you planned.

At Sherlocks, the repeat buyers grabbing this batch mostly kept describing the same thing in different ways. You finish the session still thinking about how strange the flavor was. That usually means the strain did exactly what it was supposed to do.

In stock now at our Raleigh, Durham, and Wake Forest locations and ships nationwide.