Fleur du Mal is releasing a backcross of the original Sweet Tooth #4 today.
This is the famed and now abandoned line of potent, fruity indicas that Spice of Life’s Breeder Steve worked for nearly a decade from the late 90’s to 2005. Known for massive fist-sized buds thickly encrusted with trichomes, Sweet Tooth almost single-handedly jumpstarted the ice hash movement in the 1990s. It remains one of the best yielding strains for hash making around.
Sweet Tooth is a cross of a Northern Lights #2 clone widely circulated around Vancouver, British Columbia and the U.S. Northwest in the 1990s called Sweet Pink Grapefruit, and an early release of DJ Short’s original Blueberry. The line was backcrossed three times by the time Spice of Life released #4, making this the F4 generation. As such, expect general consistency of expression around two basic phenotypes: a thick-stemmed, columnar style dominated by a single large primary cola, and another more bushier habit sporting six to 10 ice cream cone-shaped buds. Maturation time is around 60-65 days from 12/12, late September to early October outside in most temperate zones.
Both phenos have their attractions. The single column pheno is capable of producing truly massive main colas of the 2-liter bottle size, but bring with it the typical issues with pythium mold that comes with large bud structures. The bushy type is probably a better overall yielder of top-grade buds, and is much less prone to mold.
For those who’ve grown up in the Diesel/OG era, Sweet Tooth will be very different indica experience. The taste is, as the name suggests, sweet and fruity, without a trace of fuel or acridness. The head, while definitely strongly indica-based and full-body, is decidedly more cerebral than today’s typical couch-lock Afghani hybrids. There’s a symphony playing in the dream….
I consider this an interim release in a longer term project to create the next generation of Sweet Tooth, #5. On the advice of Breeder Steve (who’s now working with South American mountain sativas in Colombia), I am creating several sibling lines of Sweet Tooth and its parental stock to try to improve and preserve the strain. To that end I’ve collected versions of Sweet Pink Grapefruit in clone and seed form, and paired them with an original Blueberry female one generation removed from DJ’s original release in 1996. Over the next year I’ll be growing out the lines and evaluating the best specimens for introduction into the Sweet Tooth #5 project. A limited group of testers will be helping with this evaluation process.
This bx release is a selective cross-pollination of the two best and most representative females with the most robust, best structured and most aromatic male out of two dozen seeds acquired in 2004, when Spice of Life was based in Switzerland. I made the decision to release this accession based on the number of requests I and others have received over the years for a re-release of the strain, and after confirming with Breeder Steve that he was no longer working with the line. While this project falls within the heirloom category of FDM offerings, I look at the Sweet Tooth #5 project as an interpretative venture seeking to take the line to the next level, my offering of an improved version of Steve’s seminal work that preserves the essence and character of the strain. I hope everyone enjoys it.
-b420