  Inside the Long Strange Trip to Make (Legal) Jerry Garcia-Branded Weed On a crisp February night inside a rambling old house in Oakland, a half dozen Deadheads pass a pipe and ponder the question: If Jerry Garcia were a kind of weed, what would the high feel like? After a pull from a tall glass bong, a bearded young guy to my right says a buzz evoking the late singer of the Grateful Dead "would be one where you're getting very giggly and, like, definitely not one where you're, like, a caveman sitting in a chair."
The group nods. Jazz plays from a nearby Bluetooth speaker. Thai takeout steams from our plates. A life-size replica of Han Solo frozen in a carbonite block from The Empire Strikes Back leans in the corner. Across the table, a woman with long gray hair agrees. "My ideal strain for the Jerry Garcia vibe," she says, "would be an uplifting, creative one that helps you get in the zone and find your groove." Then the pipe makes the rounds again.
This is no ordinary group of Deadheads. The man with the beard is Jerry's nephew, Reuben Garcia, a weed grower himself. The gray-haired woman, who bears a striking resemblance to Jerry, is his 45-year-old daughter, Trixie. And this is no ordinary late-night, East Bay, marijuana mind game. Trixie and her reclusive family are coming out of the shadows to make a Jerry Garcia cannabis collection arriving November 20th.
It comes as the legal cannabis industry is booming in the U.S., projected to reach $80 billion by 2030. In November, voters in four states cast their ballots to legalize recreational marijuana, bringing the total number of states with legal weed to twelve. And the Garcia family is entering an increasingly crowded arena of celebrity weed brands: Willie Nelson, Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg, Seth Rogen, Francis Ford Coppola, Hunter S. Thompson. The difference is Jerry, a cultural icon who built one of the most successful and longest-running musical acts in American history—a band whose fanbase is synonymous with hippy culture and, by extension, smoking pot. Generations of Talmudic fans have filled their ears and eyes and brains with the music and face and folklore of Jerry and the Dead for more than half a century.
When I met with them in February—before the onset of the pandemic—the Garcias had finally found a cannabis producer they liked, but had only nine months to create the brand, breed the genetics, grow the weed, and set up distribution, all without alienating generations of diehard fans. They wanted to launch the brand this year, which would have been the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jerry's death. The pressure is not insignificant. But no one is more cognizant of this than his family. "We've always wanted to do this," Annabelle Garcia, Trixie's older sister tells me, "but we kind of felt like we needed to let the industry go through its changes and legal system to come around." Trixie, who serves as the president of the Jerry Garcia estate, says it's fulfilling her dad's dream. "This is exactly the kind of thing he would want to be behind," she says, taking a puff, "cannabis as a connection to reality, the real reality and not the fake reality that we are all part of, just like his music."   Shop the Best of Todd Snyder's Black Friday Sale Right Now Fresh off a collaboration with American icon L.L.Bean, Todd Snyder's wares have never looked better. Yes, there are turtlenecks aplenty, but the brand's also slashing prices on a whole lot of fall-ready fare so good even salty Uncle Brett can't hide his interest. Oh, a raglan sleeve topcoat in a wonderfully autumnal glen plaid? Don't mind if I do! Especially when discounts start at 20 percent off purchases above $200 and only go up from there (not including select items and, sadly, the aforementioned Bean collection). So starting right now, head on over to the Todd Snyder site armed with the code BlackFridayVIP and then make like it's Election Day: get in, get out, and walk away with no small sense of civic pride—or at least, like, a few tangible goods no one will dispute the validity of.
 The Best New Restaurants in America, 2020 Yes, we did it. We put together an Esquire Best New Restaurants list in the middle of a pandemic. Esquire's Jeff Gordinier and Kevin Sintumuang spent the last year looking for the people and places that restored us. If there's a unifying theme in our list, something that all of our picks have in common, it would be the stubborn survival of community in the face of what can only be called an existential threat. It's an understatement to say that 2020 was different. But if we learned one thing this year, while trapped at home for weeks with tins of tuna and bags of dried beans, slowly being driven nuts by the monotonous, Groundhog Day–like grind, it's this: We need restaurants more than ever. Our celebration of these 23 restaurants is an expression of support—love, really—for the chefs and bartenders and servers and dishwashers and maître d's who are fighting that fight every day.  The Hiking Boots You Should Absolutely, Positively Wear Off the Mountain Remember when lockdown started and suddenly everyone got really into hiking? Like, your friends whose regular exercise previously consisted of the walk to and from the bar for the daily shot-and-a-beer special were miraculously transformed into sure-footed mountaineers who knew about trailheads and elevation changes and washouts and shit? No? Just us? We're certain it's not just us. But even if it is, over the last few months, Style Director Jonathan Evans found himself working a pair of hiking boots into his regular footwear rotation. Turns out the right pair—in this case, the Ansel by the newcomers at direct-to-consumer brand Season Three—works just as well on the sidewalk as it does on the mountain. Even better, perhaps. Go figure. Here's why the boots have earned our latest Esquire Endorsement.
 'An Endless Hell Loop of Being On Air': The Oral History of CNN's Election Week As Election Night 2020 bled into Election Week, the talking heads on CNN became something like members of our families. We memorized the shades of John King's magic map; Wolf Blitzer's calming voice put us to sleep. And, somehow, when we woke up the next morning, as Tuesday turned to Wednesday which morphed into Thursday and then Friday, those same anchors remained on television. We wondered, when were these people sleeping? The answer, it turns out, was: barely at all. Esquire's Kate Storey spoke to more than a dozen CNN anchors, reporters, and producers about how they pulled off the longest and most dramatic Election Week in recent memory, which wound up being the cable news network's most watched week of all time.  The 55 Best Gifts She Won't Return for Store Credit You want to get your wife something nice. Easier said than done, right? Her style is too good, and her interests too complex, for you to even begin to narrow down the overwhelming options. But when you are completely bereft of ideas, there's absolutely no shame in asking for a suggestion. And that's what we're here for: to lead you in the right direction so you choose the best possible present to give the most important woman in your life. Read on for the greatest gifts for your wife, from high-fashion picks that'll seriously impress her, to home decor she'd never splurge on herself, to tech she'll use every single day. You'll knock it out of the park—a top candidate for all-time best husband of the century.
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Sunday, November 22, 2020
The Untold Story of Jerry Garcia’s Family and Their Weed Business
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