Medical marijuana dispensary review: Bud Cellar on Santa Fe has bud, but no cellar

Given the cellar part of the name Bud Cellar (and my stoned imagination), I had grand visions of the shop. I imagined being led down a spiral staircase to a dank, stone-walled, dimly lit basement filled with chilled, curing jars of cannabis sitting next to aging cheeses and expensive wines. No such luck.

Bud Cellar

Location: 1450 S. Santa Fe Dr. (unit 102)
Hours: Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Phone: 303-777-6644
Website: www.budcellar.com
Owner: Ray Aguilar
Opened: January 2011
Raw marijuana price range: $35 to $50 per eighth.
Other types of medicine: edibles, hash, BHO, tincture
Handicap accessible? yes

The shop is in a newish strip center off Santa Fe, surrounded by quick eateries and a liquor store. There's still a few vacant storefronts, so parking wasn't an issue even during rush hour. Employees should probably change the dispensaries carbon filters, because the smell of fresh cannabis being grown did more to lead me to the shop's back-corner location than the huge "Bud Cellar" sign hanging over the liquor store did.

A woman greeted me from behind the glass, took my card and handed me a clipboard of paperwork to fill out. The small waiting area was bare bones, with earthy matte blue and green paint on the walls and a small flat screen rotating images of herb in one corner. The only thing that didn't work was the loud, smooth saxophone jazz playing overhead; it was like Kenny G playing on the far side of the room. The Bud Cellar's obviously going for an upscale feel, but you can still be classy while listening to KBCO.

I wrapped up the paperwork quickly and was buzzed through. The shop is all on ground level; it's well lit and features walls painted the same earthy blue as the waiting room. Stained concrete floors and minimal artwork on the walls give it a contemporary/industrial look. Behind the bud bar, several thousand watts of light poured out of an open doorway, illuminating the chest-high ganja plants responsible for stinking up the rest of the shopping center.

The custom wood bar has three glass display areas, two filled top to bottom with the shop's regular herb in jars and one with edibles, pipes and tinctures. Bud Cellar had a wide range of prices from $35 to $55, with members paying about $5 per eighth less than nonmembers. Prices were displayed on two flat screen TVs hung behind the bar, although my budtender made sure to tell me the price breakdown of every strain she showed me. The herb is kept in pop-top mason jars, so what you see is what you get. There was also strain-specific and micron-specific bubble hash selling for $25 a gram and one type of BHO earwax selling for $50 a gram.

The shop set aside separate rooms for "primo" grade herb as well as lower-shelf strains just to the left and the right of the bud bar. The idea, I guess, is to offer a sit-down, private consultation over the choicest nugs. But this must have sounded better in planning than execution, because the "Primo Room" was dark and closed off and all of the $50 to $55 top-shelf strains were out on the counter. Everything I saw, including the cucumber-green Pickle, was decent but no better quality than the regular strains; if anything, they'd been cured for a few more days. Fifty dollars I could pay, but I wouldn't spend $55 on any of the strains given the market out there right now. Unlike the top-shelf strains, the bottom shelf did not make the move to the main counter, but were kept in their own room. I didn't really venture over to see them until after I made my selection from the main counter. Even then, I only got a look at the leafy Triple Diesel selling for $35 an eighth at member prices.

For the most part, the strain selection was average -- with decent Blueberry, Island Sweet Skunk, Sour Diesel and several OG cuts. Everything looked like well-grown, warehouse-quality smoke, albeit without the super-distinct strain smells I hope for. What did catch my eye were the more unique strains they had, including several landrace strains -- ones that have grown naturally, without much human interbreeding. Back in the "old days," when marijuana in the U.S. was largely imported, locations stood in for strain names. But these days, with so much interbreeding of strains to create perfect indoor plants, you just don't see shops carrying true Cambodian, Mexican and Thai genetics of the sort Bud Cellar claims. The reality, is seeds from these strains are available online from breeders, and it's hard to guarantee their authenticity. But still, it's cool to see something different on a clinic's shelves.

Page down to see what old-school smoke William took home this week.