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As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire syst

As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system. When you grow a plant, you get free energy from the sun. The cost savings are hard to beat. Nicotine extracts aren't made from yeast either. That should be a big warning flag for the business sides of these cool projects.

cf498 8y ago
That only holds true for the legal market though?
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  Depends, greenhouses are pretty common too, but yes, in general, you wouldn't want someone seeing what you're growing. I find it unlikely though that these funded startups are targeting the underground market.
sandworm101 8y ago
How much is grown in actual sunlight? Isnt most all of it in greenhouses under lamps?
- inuhj 8y ago
  Mixed lighting greenhouses are common because you have a better final product, more control over the environment, and less risk of contamination from nearby farms that are using banned pesticides. There is still quite a bit of sungrown but it requires the right climate. Typically sungrown is only suitable for manufactured products.
  - dumbfoundded 8y ago
    As it becomes more regulated, I personally see this as less of an issue for quality. That being said, growing with yeast is only good for manufactured products.
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  A lot of the market is shifting over to outdoor. Quality is slightly worse but so much cheaper. If you're talking about manufactured products that the yeast would compete with, it's pretty much all outdoor.
mozey 8y ago
You can't grow yeast with sunlight?
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  Yeast doesn't photosynthesize. You can use solar power, but then you have big capital costs.
RachelF 8y ago
Two years back they synthesized the both halves of the steps for creating morphine using yeast. If you feed the yeast sugar, which is made from sunlight it will be worth it if the yields are high enough.
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  Yeah but then you're growing and refining a plant to avoid growing and refining a plant. The article said it needs to improve 100x. I'm not sure if that's reflective of today's or future prices as they continue to rapidly drop. It's certainly not impossible. I think it's just unlikely given the similarity between the tobacco and cannabis industries from a supply chain perspective.
  - jcims 8y ago
    Yes but at this point sugar is far more industrialized than cannabis. Sugar is ~$.15/lb wholesale (or less).
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules. Additionally, cannabis tends to be extraordinarily easy to grow, and THC extraordinarily easy to extract. Cannabis already is grown at industrial scale, all that’s missing is a few large scale certified extraction facilities. Tasmanian Alkaloids, the worlds largest supplier of thebaine, may well be ready to scale up rapidly.[1] 1. https://www.examiner.com.au/story/5150473/tas-alks-considers-expansion-through-medicinal-cannabis-exports/ https://www.examiner.com.au/story/5150473/tas-alks-considers...
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules. Which we can already guesstimate to be not that much.
rajacombinator 8y ago
What would be some good (economically viable) applications of this tech?
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  I'm not sure. I'd produce something you cannot grow with a plant that grows so easily they call it weed. I think it's a cool technology, they just chose an interesting target b/c of the hype about the industry.
adrianN 8y ago
I'm no expert in this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the energy costs could be outweighed by less land use and less labor.
- cannabisfarmer 8y ago
  Labor required in cannabis is almost negligible. You just need labor to harvest it!
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  Land is pretty cheap. The kind of stuff used in manufacturing is what they call biomass. Basically they just chop down and grind the whole plant with a tractor. Planting will get automated too. Plant genetics are also improving. The result is that the cost of hemp/cannabis is rapidly dropping. These new startups will have to surpass a moving target. I'm not saying it's impossible but I doubt it.
aaron695 8y ago
50 cents of sugar produces 23 litres of beer. Energy costs are ~zero. Maybe you are thinking of hemp.
willvarfar 8y ago
My understanding of illicit cannabis production is only from films like "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" but it seems to be heat lamps in basements and caravans etc. And the impression the news gives me is that UK Police regularly use heat cameras from helicopters and analysis of electricity bills to find illegal growers. Would this approach allow test-tube illegal cultivation with a much less detectable footprint?
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  I was thinking this’ll take prison hooch to the next level
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ataturk 8y ago
  I think you will find that they actualy don't do much with helicopters at all. Helicopters are extremely expensive to operate and using them for fishing expeditions probably isn't done. Oh, THEY SAY it is done, but that is a lie. What they are really doing is monitoring all communications and when someone pops on their radar, if they wish to proceed with the case, they concoct what is known as a "parallel construction" and then at that point, yes, they might do a flyover with an infra-red camera to obtain evidence. But in court it's all wink-wink "routine flyover" because they don't want everyone to know that the West is now an Orwellian Police State (TM) with all the bells and whistles. You simply have no idea how far gone we are.
- sorryforthethro 8y ago
  This is somewhat outdated, LEDs are now powerful enough and emit much less heat.
rcxdude 8y ago
Making compounds with GM yeast tends to be a lot more efficient than growing whatever the original gene came from because the modified yeast tends to dedicate a lot more of its output to making whatever you've spliced in.
klmr 8y ago
> When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system The “entire system” is a vat with yeast in it. For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants. Secondly, the energy you provide to the system, in brewing, is just sugar, which is incredibly cheap. In fact, given that this works well, at large scale, for beer brewing (i.e. ethanol production), why do you think it wouldn’t work well for THC production? In fact, energy consumption in commercial (especially illicit) cannabis production is a nontrivial cost factor.
- mrfusion 8y ago
  How does yeast get amino acids? How does it get nitrogen for that matter? Doesn’t it need those to grow? Seems like we just give it sugar.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    The THC molecule is made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and it seems to be true for all cannabinoids. So if we can extract the cannabinoids but leave the rest of the organic compounds (big "if", I know), one could theoretically recycle the other required nutrients. In which case a steady supply of sugar might indeed be enough for the most part. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid
  - dekhn 8y ago
    minimal media is sugar + some salts that provide Nitrogen and a few other essentials.
  - klmr 8y ago
    You’re right. The parent comment focussed specifically on energy, so I did as well. But obviously both cannabis plants and yeast need other nutrients. That said, a minimal yeast broth is extremely simple.
- cma 8y ago
  > For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants. You have to account for the land use by the sugarcane (no idea how things would net out).
snarfy 8y ago
> Nicotine extracts They are not extracts. The nicotine in vape juice is 100% synthetic.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  That depends; some actually do use natural nicotine (especially those made by tobacco companies, for obvious reasons).
vanderZwan 8y ago
So this accidentally made me go down a speculative rabbit hole... Cannabis is apparently a C3 plant[0]. It's also not a perennial. So while you have a point, there is still room for improving efficiency. I tried looking up what the current status with genetically modifying plants with high photosynthetic efficiency was. First thing I found was... tobacco[1]. Yeah, that's not all that useful. More generally, I wonder if there might be some kind of "holy grail" easy-to-grow, easy to genetically modify plant out there that could be a perfect template for photosynthetic production of all kinds of organic compounds. I know people have been trying to modify algea and cyanobacteria to make synthetic biofuels directly for ages, for example. Sadly the Wiki page on photosynthetic efficiency remains fairly superficial[2], and the C3, C4 and CAM pathway articles, while a tempting rabbit hole, don't seem to help much either[3][4][5]. Also, we all know monocrop farming is not going to be sustainable: the simplicity of it makes it easier to "optimize" for farming machines, but at the cost of soil degradation, while also being more prone to diseases and weather disasters. Plus, with current improvements in automation the optimization advantage is shrinking rapidly. Could agroforestry, like the kind advocated by Geoff Lawton[6] or Willie Smits[7][8][9] be combined with this? The benefit/problem with agroforestry is that it has many different kinds of complex yields. All useful, but perhaps not so flexible. However, Smits suggests an economy based on the sugar palm as a source of bioethanol: > And Smits said that he discovered that because of the [black sugar palm]'s special leaf structure, its year-round production and extremely efficient photosynthesis, the yield of ethanol from the sugar palm was far greater than the biofuel output from other feedstocks in use around the world. Smits says that his process can produce 19 tons (6,300 gallons/24,000 liters) of ethanol per hectare annually. That's a staggering output-to-land area ratio compared to corn, the favored ethanol crop of the United States, at 3.3 tons (1,100 gallons/4,200 liters) per hectare, by most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture yield figures. It also far outshines Brazil's sugarcane; output was assumed to be 4.5 tons (1,500 gallons/5,700 liters) per hectare in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's recent lifecycle analysis of renewable fuels. [A hectare is 2.5 acres.] Keep in mind that once a tree has grown it requires less energy and material to maintain. Non-perennial plants have to grow every year, which comes with large energy and material overheads (both from the plants itself and from the labour involved). That makes the claim more plausable. (Cool little tangent: looking for more information on this Arenga Pinnata the first thing I came across was its listing as an invasive species on BioNET-EAFRINET, a knowledge database run by Kenyan and Ugandan research institutes[10]. This is the kind of work that never reaches the Western media, and I would guess it's partially because it does not fit our existing narrative biases that are still very much stuck in colonial times) Now, bioethanol is a fuel source for cars, but sugar is a fuel source for living things. So why not use that as a form of "energy currency" for biohacking? It would have the benefit of increased flexibility. Imagine having a food forest centered around sugar palms, like Smits suggests, with a few genetic modifications for even higher energy yields, and with a lab nearby that can grow the more complex organic compounds with simpler but easier to genetically modify life-forms, like yeast. The sugar palm provides a steady source of biofuel, while the yeast (or whatever) being cultivated can be changed quickly to meet shifting market demands. Anyway, this is all just speculation, and perhaps the losses of energy involved are so great it would not work out. OTOH, going the agroforestry route yields so many other integrated benefits like local climate control, CO2 sinks and a fresh water supply in the groundwater that I expect it will be a net win when viewed holistically. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/63ybgx/c3_and_c4_plants/ https://old.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/63ybgx/c3_and_c4_pl... [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism [6] https://www.discoverpermaculture.com/video-1-pdc-2019 https://www.discoverpermaculture.com/video-1-pdc-2019 [7] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/06/110623-tapergie-sugar-palm-biofuel/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/06/1106... [8] https://vimeo.com/8724530 https://vimeo.com/8724530 [9] https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest/ https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest... [10] https://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/weeds/key/weeds/Media/Html/Arenga_pinnata_(Black_Sugar_Palm).htm https://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/weeds/key/wee...
douglaswlance 8y ago
If somebody will pay for it, someone else will make it. And there are plenty of people who will buy weed beer.
coldtea 8y ago
>As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system. When you grow a plant, you get free energy from the sun. The cost savings are hard to beat. It's not like beer or cheese has a profit problem...
bpp 8y ago
Roughly 1/3 of cannabis is grown inside [1], primarily for reasons of quality control. I'd actually expect this number to grow as the legal market expands and tighter control is needed to keep up with regulations. Which is to say that I'm sure there's a market for this. [1] https://sweatingthebigstuff.com/percentage-medical-cannabis-grown-indoors/ https://sweatingthebigstuff.com/percentage-medical-cannabis-...
justtopost 8y ago
You are clearly not in the brewing industry. Pot gorwes could olnly dream of this level of efficiency.
schwartzworld 8y ago
Much cannabis is grown indoors where you also have to "provide the energy for the entire system".

cf498 8y ago

That only holds true for the legal market though?

dumbfoundded 8y ago
Depends, greenhouses are pretty common too, but yes, in general, you wouldn't want someone seeing what you're growing. I find it unlikely though that these funded startups are targeting the underground market.

sandworm101 8y ago

How much is grown in actual sunlight? Isnt most all of it in greenhouses under lamps?

inuhj 8y ago
Mixed lighting greenhouses are common because you have a better final product, more control over the environment, and less risk of contamination from nearby farms that are using banned pesticides. There is still quite a bit of sungrown but it requires the right climate. Typically sungrown is only suitable for manufactured products.
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  As it becomes more regulated, I personally see this as less of an issue for quality. That being said, growing with yeast is only good for manufactured products.
dumbfoundded 8y ago
A lot of the market is shifting over to outdoor. Quality is slightly worse but so much cheaper. If you're talking about manufactured products that the yeast would compete with, it's pretty much all outdoor.

mozey 8y ago

You can't grow yeast with sunlight?

dumbfoundded 8y ago
Yeast doesn't photosynthesize. You can use solar power, but then you have big capital costs.

RachelF 8y ago

Two years back they synthesized the both halves of the steps for creating morphine using yeast. If you feed the yeast sugar, which is made from sunlight it will be worth it if the yields are high enough.

dumbfoundded 8y ago
Yeah but then you're growing and refining a plant to avoid growing and refining a plant. The article said it needs to improve 100x. I'm not sure if that's reflective of today's or future prices as they continue to rapidly drop. It's certainly not impossible. I think it's just unlikely given the similarity between the tobacco and cannabis industries from a supply chain perspective.
- jcims 8y ago
  Yes but at this point sugar is far more industrialized than cannabis. Sugar is ~$.15/lb wholesale (or less).
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules. Additionally, cannabis tends to be extraordinarily easy to grow, and THC extraordinarily easy to extract. Cannabis already is grown at industrial scale, all that’s missing is a few large scale certified extraction facilities. Tasmanian Alkaloids, the worlds largest supplier of thebaine, may well be ready to scale up rapidly.[1] 1. https://www.examiner.com.au/story/5150473/tas-alks-considers-expansion-through-medicinal-cannabis-exports/ https://www.examiner.com.au/story/5150473/tas-alks-considers...
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Which is meaningless unless we know how much sugar is required to produce a given dollar value of usable THC etc molecules. Which we can already guesstimate to be not that much.

rajacombinator 8y ago

What would be some good (economically viable) applications of this tech?

dumbfoundded 8y ago
I'm not sure. I'd produce something you cannot grow with a plant that grows so easily they call it weed. I think it's a cool technology, they just chose an interesting target b/c of the hype about the industry.

adrianN 8y ago

I'm no expert in this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the energy costs could be outweighed by less land use and less labor.

cannabisfarmer 8y ago
Labor required in cannabis is almost negligible. You just need labor to harvest it!
dumbfoundded 8y ago
Land is pretty cheap. The kind of stuff used in manufacturing is what they call biomass. Basically they just chop down and grind the whole plant with a tractor. Planting will get automated too. Plant genetics are also improving. The result is that the cost of hemp/cannabis is rapidly dropping. These new startups will have to surpass a moving target. I'm not saying it's impossible but I doubt it.

aaron695 8y ago

50 cents of sugar produces 23 litres of beer. Energy costs are ~zero. Maybe you are thinking of hemp.

willvarfar 8y ago

My understanding of illicit cannabis production is only from films like "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" but it seems to be heat lamps in basements and caravans etc. And the impression the news gives me is that UK Police regularly use heat cameras from helicopters and analysis of electricity bills to find illegal growers. Would this approach allow test-tube illegal cultivation with a much less detectable footprint?

quickthrower2 8y ago
I was thinking this’ll take prison hooch to the next level
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ataturk 8y ago
I think you will find that they actualy don't do much with helicopters at all. Helicopters are extremely expensive to operate and using them for fishing expeditions probably isn't done. Oh, THEY SAY it is done, but that is a lie. What they are really doing is monitoring all communications and when someone pops on their radar, if they wish to proceed with the case, they concoct what is known as a "parallel construction" and then at that point, yes, they might do a flyover with an infra-red camera to obtain evidence. But in court it's all wink-wink "routine flyover" because they don't want everyone to know that the West is now an Orwellian Police State (TM) with all the bells and whistles. You simply have no idea how far gone we are.
sorryforthethro 8y ago
This is somewhat outdated, LEDs are now powerful enough and emit much less heat.

rcxdude 8y ago

Making compounds with GM yeast tends to be a lot more efficient than growing whatever the original gene came from because the modified yeast tends to dedicate a lot more of its output to making whatever you've spliced in.

klmr 8y ago

> When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system The “entire system” is a vat with yeast in it. For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants. Secondly, the energy you provide to the system, in brewing, is just sugar, which is incredibly cheap. In fact, given that this works well, at large scale, for beer brewing (i.e. ethanol production), why do you think it wouldn’t work well for THC production? In fact, energy consumption in commercial (especially illicit) cannabis production is a nontrivial cost factor.

mrfusion 8y ago
How does yeast get amino acids? How does it get nitrogen for that matter? Doesn’t it need those to grow? Seems like we just give it sugar.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  The THC molecule is made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and it seems to be true for all cannabinoids. So if we can extract the cannabinoids but leave the rest of the organic compounds (big "if", I know), one could theoretically recycle the other required nutrients. In which case a steady supply of sugar might indeed be enough for the most part. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid
- dekhn 8y ago
  minimal media is sugar + some salts that provide Nitrogen and a few other essentials.
- klmr 8y ago
  You’re right. The parent comment focussed specifically on energy, so I did as well. But obviously both cannabis plants and yeast need other nutrients. That said, a minimal yeast broth is extremely simple.
cma 8y ago
> For starters, that’s a much more space efficient way of growing something than in plants. You have to account for the land use by the sugarcane (no idea how things would net out).

snarfy 8y ago

> Nicotine extracts They are not extracts. The nicotine in vape juice is 100% synthetic.

rsynnott 8y ago
That depends; some actually do use natural nicotine (especially those made by tobacco companies, for obvious reasons).

vanderZwan 8y ago

So this accidentally made me go down a speculative rabbit hole... Cannabis is apparently a C3 plant[0]. It's also not a perennial. So while you have a point, there is still room for improving efficiency. I tried looking up what the current status with genetically modifying plants with high photosynthetic efficiency was. First thing I found was... tobacco[1]. Yeah, that's not all that useful. More generally, I wonder if there might be some kind of "holy grail" easy-to-grow, easy to genetically modify plant out there that could be a perfect template for photosynthetic production of all kinds of organic compounds. I know people have been trying to modify algea and cyanobacteria to make synthetic biofuels directly for ages, for example. Sadly the Wiki page on photosynthetic efficiency remains fairly superficial[2], and the C3, C4 and CAM pathway articles, while a tempting rabbit hole, don't seem to help much either[3][4][5]. Also, we all know monocrop farming is not going to be sustainable: the simplicity of it makes it easier to "optimize" for farming machines, but at the cost of soil degradation, while also being more prone to diseases and weather disasters. Plus, with current improvements in automation the optimization advantage is shrinking rapidly. Could agroforestry, like the kind advocated by Geoff Lawton[6] or Willie Smits[7][8][9] be combined with this? The benefit/problem with agroforestry is that it has many different kinds of complex yields. All useful, but perhaps not so flexible. However, Smits suggests an economy based on the sugar palm as a source of bioethanol: > And Smits said that he discovered that because of the [black sugar palm]'s special leaf structure, its year-round production and extremely efficient photosynthesis, the yield of ethanol from the sugar palm was far greater than the biofuel output from other feedstocks in use around the world. Smits says that his process can produce 19 tons (6,300 gallons/24,000 liters) of ethanol per hectare annually. That's a staggering output-to-land area ratio compared to corn, the favored ethanol crop of the United States, at 3.3 tons (1,100 gallons/4,200 liters) per hectare, by most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture yield figures. It also far outshines Brazil's sugarcane; output was assumed to be 4.5 tons (1,500 gallons/5,700 liters) per hectare in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's recent lifecycle analysis of renewable fuels. [A hectare is 2.5 acres.] Keep in mind that once a tree has grown it requires less energy and material to maintain. Non-perennial plants have to grow every year, which comes with large energy and material overheads (both from the plants itself and from the labour involved). That makes the claim more plausable. (Cool little tangent: looking for more information on this Arenga Pinnata the first thing I came across was its listing as an invasive species on BioNET-EAFRINET, a knowledge database run by Kenyan and Ugandan research institutes[10]. This is the kind of work that never reaches the Western media, and I would guess it's partially because it does not fit our existing narrative biases that are still very much stuck in colonial times) Now, bioethanol is a fuel source for cars, but sugar is a fuel source for living things. So why not use that as a form of "energy currency" for biohacking? It would have the benefit of increased flexibility. Imagine having a food forest centered around sugar palms, like Smits suggests, with a few genetic modifications for even higher energy yields, and with a lab nearby that can grow the more complex organic compounds with simpler but easier to genetically modify life-forms, like yeast. The sugar palm provides a steady source of biofuel, while the yeast (or whatever) being cultivated can be changed quickly to meet shifting market demands. Anyway, this is all just speculation, and perhaps the losses of energy involved are so great it would not work out. OTOH, going the agroforestry route yields so many other integrated benefits like local climate control, CO2 sinks and a fresh water supply in the groundwater that I expect it will be a net win when viewed holistically. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/63ybgx/c3_and_c4_plants/ https://old.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/63ybgx/c3_and_c4_pl... [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism [6] https://www.discoverpermaculture.com/video-1-pdc-2019 https://www.discoverpermaculture.com/video-1-pdc-2019 [7] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/06/110623-tapergie-sugar-palm-biofuel/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/06/1106... [8] https://vimeo.com/8724530 https://vimeo.com/8724530 [9] https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest/ https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest... [10] https://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/weeds/key/weeds/Media/Html/Arenga_pinnata_(Black_Sugar_Palm).htm https://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/weeds/key/wee...

douglaswlance 8y ago

If somebody will pay for it, someone else will make it. And there are plenty of people who will buy weed beer.

coldtea 8y ago

>As someone in this industry, I doubt this will become a reality. The real problem is cost. When you use yeast, you have to supply the energy for the entire system. When you grow a plant, you get free energy from the sun. The cost savings are hard to beat. It's not like beer or cheese has a profit problem...

bpp 8y ago

Roughly 1/3 of cannabis is grown inside [1], primarily for reasons of quality control. I'd actually expect this number to grow as the legal market expands and tighter control is needed to keep up with regulations. Which is to say that I'm sure there's a market for this. [1] https://sweatingthebigstuff.com/percentage-medical-cannabis-grown-indoors/ https://sweatingthebigstuff.com/percentage-medical-cannabis-...

justtopost 8y ago

You are clearly not in the brewing industry. Pot gorwes could olnly dream of this level of efficiency.

schwartzworld 8y ago

Much cannabis is grown indoors where you also have to "provide the energy for the entire system".