Old School Blues

As many of you will know by now, we at Mephisto love a passion project, and Old School Blues is the ultimate mesh of passion projects. Old School Haze is a strain we’ve worked with before, helping us create our Old School Mango Haze, and it is a strain like few others.

For those of you not up to speed with the Old School Haze lore, I would suggest checking out our interview with the creator of the strain, Karel, here.

For our Old School Blues, we decided to get the insights of Karel’s son and our friend Kees, now the custodian of the Old School Haze cut and one of the brains behind the reinvention of Super Sativa Seed Club, and primary hash maker for the first legal project in the Netherlands. You can check out our interview with him here.

Livers is a strain we at Mephisto are still in love with, now going on 25 years since we first sampled it in our hometown of Sheffield. Also known as Blues, Pukkas, UK Blues, Sheffield Blues or Sheffield Livers, she started life, as far as we know, as a Skunk #1 cross, the same as Old School Haze. We say ‘as far as we know’ because Livers has long been a bit of a mysterious strain, with the story and history behind it being mostly anecdotal. We were lucky enough to get our hands on a cutting of ‘The Blues’, a sister cutting of ‘The Livers’, way back before the farm was even a distant dream. Our first autoflower cross of this cutting, some 4 generations later, became Auto Blues.

When we finally acquired a cutting of ‘The Livers’, we outcrossed it to our Auto Blues to create Auto Livers, which was a big improvement of the Auto Blues, but we wanted to refine it and improve upon it even further, crossing it again to the Auto Livers, and working it back to auto in the subsequent four generations. Crossing with Auto Livers now at F4 to create our Livers BX1 strain, a strain that encompasses over 10 years of work and is what got us started with Mephisto Genetics in the first place.

So with you all caught up with the lore of a combined 50+ years of work from Super Sativa Seed Club and Mephisto Genetics, let’s get on to why we love Old School Blues. Put simply, we wanted to create a homozygous variety of an autoflowering haze. We knew as soon as we were allowed to sample Old School Haze at a BBQ at Karel’s house that we wanted to work the strain into autoflowering format. The shared heritage of the Old School Haze and our Livers BX1 kindled the shared nostalgia trip we absolutely love when hunting for new strains.

Old School Blues encompasses all of the challenges and rewards of an Old School Haze plant, only wrapped into the experience of an autoflower. She grows tall and bushy with longer inter-nodal spacing and branches that are long and extending, requiring support in late flower to hold the bud weight, however, she is more than controllable by even a mildly green-thumbed grower.

We recommend training, as these plants can easily overgrow a tent if left to her own devices. She produces a high amount of foliage, so we would also recommend keeping on top of that with regular defoliation. She can also be a thirsty girl, so make sure to keep on top of your watering schedule if you’re hand-watering, looking for signs of dehydration whilst making sure she doesn’t drown.

She, like most strains, does best starting in light soil with very few introductory NPKs, a soil too rich can cause early and irreversible stunting.

She can take on a bluish hue during veg and into flower. In late flower, she senesces hard, with purple stems and leaf rusting, she is particularly photogenic.

I know it all sounds like hard work, but believe me when I say that you will be more than rewarded. One of our highest-yielding strains to date, Old School Blues rewards you not just with weight, but with quality too. She comes with a pure, classic haze profile; piney, but with floral and fruity hints thrown in too. Smoking will give you an electrifying, energetic buzz, almost a replacement for your morning coffee, giving you the get-up-and-go most of us need and crave in the mornings. She’s also powerful and has a high ceiling, so be careful when sharing your stash with the uninitiated. 

There are a few good reasons that most dispensaries don’t offer heavy sativa or haze-based strains; be that grow time or grow difficulty, with other strains available that increase turnaround time and profit for growers. However, with the work we’ve done creating our autoflowering Old School Blues, we can now offer a genuine shortcut to a legit haze/sativa experience in a fraction of the time.