Mirth Provisions in Longview has solved the mystery of why the company’s marijuana-infused sodas were exploding after delivery to some stores in late September.
It was the second time owner Adam Stites had an issue with carbonation in his widely publicized Legal line of products.
The first time, in early September, the problems were caused by a shipment of the wrong bottle types to Stites’ facility in Longview, he said.
The second time, after Stites had rebottled the products and made a few deliveries to stores, he got a new array of reports that the sodas were popping tops or exploding. He recalled the sodas from shelves in Vancouver, but he wasn’t able to pick the sodas up from Top Shelf, a store in Bellingham, right away.
“The sodas were off the shelf immediately” in Vancouver stores, Stites said in an email to The Columbian. “I personally retrieved the Vancouver shipments, but, due to the distance, and the fact that Top Shelf’s owner took his truck and was out of town, we weren’t able to send a driver to pull all product from Top Shelf in Bellingham until Monday. There are still a few more cases which are at the deep on the bottom of the tool chest (that Top Shelf used to store the sodas in) which we are going to remove on Saturday.”
After looking into the issue over the past week, he found out what caused the problem.
“We been working closely with our lab and we’ve identified the cause as excess yeast in that batch,” Stites said. “We’ve modified our manufacturing processes to completely eliminate that yeast. We’ve made several test batches with the new processes and they are testing with zero yeast.”
Yeast can cause carbon dioxide to build up, which in turn can create pressure in a bottle that can lead to an explosion.
The Associated Press today reported that several of the sodas had exploded at Top Shelf Cannabis in Bellingham before Stites could pick them up.
In that story, the manager of Top Shelf Cannabis, Zach Henifin, told KOMO “It sounded like a shotgun going off.” The story also said that no one was injured.
Stites said he’s confident the issues have been resolved, but he wants to do more testing before bringing Legal out to stores again.
“We want to do two more accelerated shelf life/microbial tests (based on our new process) which will probably take a week,” he said. “Then after that about a week until we’re in stores.”
