St. Louis Blog

This product comes from Greg Perez, the ex-chef and owner at the now-shuttered Grateful Inn, formerly located on Manchester Road in Maplewood. Since the restaurant, which featured several hemp-based dishes on the menu, closed in March of last year, Perez has focused on expanding his salad dressing business.

For the uninitiated, hemp is a cousin of cannabis sativa (aka: marijuana, pot, cheeba, etc.) but it contains no THC, the psychoactive ingredient responsible for giggling, the munchies, and a fondness for the band Phish. 

But while hemp oil doesn't get you high, it's impossible not to associate the stuff with its reefer relative. So after whipping up a salad of spring greens, grated carrots, black olives and red onions for the vinaigrette and chopping up some carrots and celery for dipping in the ranch, we enlisted a trio of local stoners to put the product to the ultimate taste test.

The typical Monday morning here at Gut Check International Headquarters goes something like this: Stumble into office, clutching thermos of coffee. Check voice mail, bracing self for angry messages from recently reviewed restaurateurs. Open the Morning Brew e-mail account. Remind self, after skimming another half-dozen links to stories about the horror film The Midnight Meat Train, to delete Google News Alert for "meat."

This Monday, I noticed even before I could set my bag down and hang my jacket on the cubicle divider, would be different. On my desk sat two bottles of beer.

The beers were from Michelob: the Honey Wheat and the Hop Hound Amber Wheat (pictured above, with my cat Franklin in the background). These are two of the four seasonal wheat beers Michelob is releasing this spring. I received a colorful sheet with tasting notes for all four beers -- the Shock Top Belgian White and the Dunkel Weisse are the other two -- but only two to try.

I guess the Belgians are still cutting costs.

The temptation to crack open one or both of the beers right then was overwhelming. Not only was it nearly time for our weekly staff meeting -- best experienced buzzed, but usually attended under the influence of nothing but stale bagels -- but a high-school student was shadowing one of my colleagues, and I couldn't think of a better introduction to contemporary journalism than for her to see me guzzling a beer before ten in the morning.

Instead, I waited until yesterday evening to open one.