Heady Heads Pre-Roll Review: Blue Jamz and Versace
We don't give up shelf space at Highend very easily. There are a few outside brands we genuinely like, YGU Boyz being one of them, but generally, if something is going to sit in our shop, we want to understand why it's there.
Lately we've also been looking a little further from home. A lot of people walking through our doors are visiting Bangkok from the US and Canada, and every now and then we'll get someone looking for something that feels a little closer to what they're used to back home. That doesn't mean we're going to start importing something just because it has a California logo on it. We still have to like it.
That's how we ended up with Heady Heads.
First Impressions: The Heady Heads Pre-Rolls
Heady Heads comes out of California, and before we'd even smoked anything, there were a few things we liked about them. The presentation is really good. The products tell you what you're getting, the flower is strain-specific, and everything feels considered rather than thrown into some shiny packaging and called premium. Heady Heads describe themselves as a California brand going back to 2005, with a lot of emphasis on indoor flower and strain-specific products, which was part of what caught our attention in the first place.
But good design isn't enough. We love design at Highend, but we also believe design has to work. A pre-roll is something you're going to throw into your pocket or bag, and there are few things more annoying than finally reaching for it later and discovering that your beautiful joint has been flattened, bent or snapped in half. These packages feel like somebody actually carries the products they design. And thats is nice thing to notice:)
And we had two very different ones to test. On one side, the Heady Heads x Cookies Maywood, Blue Jamz Baby Pre-Rolls: fourteen little 0.5g pre-rolls, 7 grams in total. On the other, the Versace: three absolutely enormous 3.5g pre-rolls, 10.5 grams in one case.
Naturally, we tested and smoked both.
Fourteen Little Blue Gems
The Blue Jamz Babies come inside a sealed outer bag. Once you break that open, there's a surprisingly tiny cardboard box inside, actually smaller than a normal pack of cigarettes. Open it and everything is neatly arranged: seven little joints on top, a piece of branded paper separating them, seven more underneath. It's weirdly satisfying.
And this is where the packaging starts making sense. The box is small enough to disappear into a pocket, but sturdy enough that we wouldn't be worried about the little pre-rolls getting destroyed inside a bag. The joints themselves aren't trying to reinvent anything. They're 0.5g, neatly rolled, nicely finished and firm without feeling overpacked. Somewhere around the firmness of a cigarette, maybe a bit more dense.
So we lit one. And yes, we actually took our time lighting it properly. With any pre-roll, getting an even burn from the beginning saves you from spending the rest of the joint fighting one side of it.
First pull? Really nice. There was enough resistance in the draw that you could actually feel it, without having to fight for the smoke. It wasn't loose, it wasn't clogged, and it burned nicely all the way through our test.
Then there was the flavour. There's definitely something sweet happening here. We kept getting a slight Cookies association, although we'll admit that having "Cookies Maywood" written across the packaging might have gotten into our heads a little. What we didn't get was that really heavy earthy, gassy or skunky profile. Blue Gems came across much sweeter and softer to us.
And the further we got through it, the more the whole Baby concept started making sense.
Okay. We Get the Babies Now.
Fourteen tiny joints sounds a bit much until you smoke one. Then it starts making sense.
This isn't a joint you need to make an afternoon out of. You don't need your grinder, papers or anything else. You don't need to put half of it out and save it for later. Take one out. Smoke it. Done.
Even though it's only half a gram, the actual experience felt surprisingly complete, somewhere around the amount of time you'd spend on a normal smoke break. The flavour naturally faded a little as we got further through it. That's going to happen. Hot smoke has been travelling through that flower for the entire session. But it never suddenly became
unpleasant. Even around two-thirds through, the sweetness was still there, just quieter than those first few pulls at the start of the sesh.
Honestly, it's just a really nice little joint. And suddenly having fourteen of them in your pocket doesn't seem silly at all. If you used to carry a pack of ciggarettes around this will feel very familliar.
And Then There's This Thing.
Now for the reason we really wanted to do this test. The Versace. Three hand-rolled 3.5g pre-rolls in one hard case, 10.5 grams total.
The case itself feels substantial. There's a button-operated closure and a big rubber freshness seal around the inside. Open it and you're immediately looking at three huge wooden mouthpieces. Not paper tips. Actual wooden tips, Heady Heads branding engraved into them, with a metal screen inside.
You pull one out and there really isn't a sophisticated way of putting this: it feels like a bazooka. A slightly awkward bazooka.
Our first thought was actually that the wooden tip looked a little short for the ridiculous amount of joint attached to it. Holding a fresh 3.5g pre-roll between your index and middle finger feels strangely unbalanced. There's so much weight extending beyond such a short mouthpiece that it naturally wants to tip forward in your hand.
But we'll come back to that. First we had to light the thing.
Lighting 3.5 Grams Is a Small Event in Itself
This was easily the trickiest part. Heady Heads actually prints lighting instructions on the packaging, and after doing it ourselves, we understand why. There's simply a lot of surface area at the end of this thing.
We decided to burn away the twisted paper crown first rather than letting that become the starting point for an uneven burn. From there, it took a little patience to get the whole face lit evenly. This isn't the joint where you want to stick a lighter underneath, take a massive pull and hope for the best.
Once we had it going properly, though, something happened that neither of us really expected. It was incredibly smooth.
Wait. Why Is This So Smooth?
We were smoking the Versace between two people, taking proper pulls from it, and neither of us coughed. Not once. That genuinely surprised us. A 3.5g pre-roll looks intimidating. It's chunky, slightly ridiculous to hold and there's enough flower in one joint to normally make us expect the experience to get pretty heavy on the throat. It didn't.
The flavour stayed pleasant for much longer than we expected too. Of course it softened as we worked our way through 3.5 grams. There's no magic happening here. But it didn't disappear, and more importantly, the smoke didn't turn into something we were simply trying to finish because we'd already committed ourselves. We actually enjoyed smoking it. Pretty much all of it.
Pretty Much.
Remember that wooden tip? Our suspicion wasn't completely wrong.
Interestingly, the handling actually gets better as you smoke. The fresh joint feels front-heavy because you've got 3.5 grams hanging off a relatively short wooden mouthpiece. As the joint gets shorter and lighter, that balance becomes increasingly natural.
Then you reach the very end. Once we got to roughly the final half-centimeter before the wooden tip, the smoke finally became noticeably harsher and the short mouthpiece became awkward again for a different reason: your fingers are now very close to the hot end.
If we could change one thing about the Versace, we'd simply make that wooden tip a little longer. That's entirely our personal take, and someone else might not care at all. But with such a big pre-roll, we think a little extra length would improve both the balance when it's completely fresh and those final few pulls at the end.
And honestly, the fact that we're talking about the last half-centimeter says quite a lot. Everything before it was surprisingly pleasant.
So, Did Heady Heads Earn the Shelf Space?
That's really what we wanted to find out. We already liked Heady Heads before this test. We liked the presentation. We liked how much thought had gone into protecting the product. We liked having something from California on our shelves that could offer a familiar option to some of the international smokers who come through Highend.
But nice packaging will only get you as far as the counter. Eventually, somebody has to smoke what's inside. So we did.
The Babies surprised us by making the 0.5g format feel genuinely useful rather than gimmicky. They're small, convenient, nicely packed, and the Blue Gems we tried had a sweet, pleasant smoke that suited the format really well.
The 3.5g Versace surprised us for almost the opposite reason. It looks like the gimmick. It's enormous. It feels like a bazooka. Lighting it properly takes some patience and, yes, we'd personally make that wooden tip longer. Then you actually smoke it. And somehow the ridiculous one turned out to be remarkably smooth almost all the way to the end.
So yeah. We get it. They can keep the shelf space:)
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