Old school cannabis strains are fading fast in a market obsessed with THC percentages. But this Muskegon microbusiness is betting the farm on the classics.
Kyle Kaminski
August 4, 2026
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MUSKEGON—Every Michigan stoner over 60 has the same speech, and I’ve sat through it a 100 times. Weed was better back then. You kids don’t know. We had Panama Red.
These are usually the same folks who think music sounds better on vinyl and insist Coca-Cola tastes better in glass bottles. As a millennial who’s now been smoking licensed dispensary weed longer than I’ve shopped the black market, I’ve never fully understood the concept.
That all changed last month after I spent an afternoon in a 114-year-old warehouse in downtown Muskegon. And I’m pleased to report that your old stoner uncle is at least partly correct.
Weed might not have been better back in the 1970s and 1980s. But it was different.
That’s because commercial grow operations have spent years breeding out an entire generation of classic marijuana strains in favor of whatever produces the biggest harvest, the fastest, at the lowest possible cost. And the old school stuff usually loses on all three counts.
But those classic strains live on at IndiGrow, the only licensed cannabis microbusiness in Muskegon—and one of the only cannabis cultivation operations in Michigan that’s dedicated almost exclusively to growing the same strains your dad used to smoke back in the 1970s.
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“This industry has spent the last 10 years or so selectively breeding what’s easy to grow, not what is good to smoke,” said Steven Kekelik, who founded IndiGrow alongside his wife Karen and her father Dr. Paul Lomeo, in 2021. “We really wanted to start from the basics.”
Pins on a map
There’s a map of the world hanging in the lobby with flags stuck in it. Afghanistan. Thailand. Pakistan. Hawaii. Every pin marks the origin point of a real strain growing inside the building.
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Because weed used to be named after real places. Acapulco Gold. Panama Red. Thai Stick. Durban Poison. Maui Wowie. Afghan Kush. The name was the address, where iconic cannabis strains used to spend a few thousand years adapting to one specific corner of the world.
The industry refers to these regional originals as “landrace” strains, and every hybrid strain in every jar on every shelf in Michigan, at some point, descended from them, Steven explained.
The Kekeliks started walking me through lineages, and about two minutes into the tour, I stopped feeling like I was in a grow room and started feeling like I was in a Traverse City winery.
Steven talks about his plants the way a winemaker talks about vineyards—where the genetics come from, what the climate in that particular corner of the world did to them, why plants from one region smell nothing like plants from another. Provenance actually means something here.
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“I think there’s a big movement in the country to go back to local farm-raised, non-GMO products,” Steven said. “And I think cannabis is much the same.”
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That’s where IndiGrow started in 2021, and it’s still the foundation of the menu. Some of what they’re growing today is true landrace, sourced from the places on that map. Other strains are one or two generations younger, like AK-47, Trainwreck, White Widow, and Maui Wowie.
They’re mostly from what Steven calls the “heirloom” era of the late ’90s and early 2000s—when growers were still selecting strains for what a plant actually did instead of what it could yield.
He treats the whole range as one continuous line, because functionally it is: This is the weed that existed before the market went off the rails chasing THC numbers and harvest efficiency.
“It’s kind of like you don’t go to the bar and order a shot of Everclear,” Karen told me. “You’re trying to drink a craft beer and maybe play darts with your friends, or you’re noticing the notes in the wine varietals. You’re having that full experience versus just trying to get drunk.”
Slow weed
Heirloom seeds aren’t easy—and that’s the point.
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Old school genetics tend to run tall and lanky. These plants take their time from seed to harvest. They also carry no particular resistance to the microbes that thrive in a grow room, and they don’t respond to heavy feeding and nutrients the way modern plants have been bred.
IndiGrow runs them anyway. Their head grower, Chris Zimmer, is a former medical marijuana caregiver. He knows growing good weed takes time—and that the THC number printed on the label is an entirely overrated and inaccurate measure of the real cannabis experience.
“I’ve never met someone in my professional career that is trying to improve so constantly,” Steven said of Zimmer. “It’s never enough for him. It’s just never good enough.”
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For the uninitiated: THC is one compound among dozens in the plant. Terpenes—the aromatic stuff that makes a jar smell like pineapple or diesel or pine—shape the character of a high as much as raw potency. And they’re often the first casualty when weed gets rushed onto a shelf.
In short, a 32% THC flower with no terpene profile might get you stoned, but not in a particularly memorable way. A carefully grown 18% strain that’s allowed to finish on its own schedule will usually deliver a far more robust experience.
That’s the trade-off IndiGrow makes on purpose.
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“I usually like the 18-20% THC range. It gives that terpene expression,” Steven said. “Anything higher isn’t necessarily a good customer experience. It’s just marketing.”
Verifying these old school genetics is its own challenge. Some seeds have come from customers who travel overseas and bring them back. Others have been dropped off by local growers who have been keeping the same strain alive for decades.
Zimmer takes his genetics wherever he can find them.
And then there’s the panel of longtime stoners old enough to have smoked the real thing. When something new comes in, Indigrow hands it over for a ruling. And it only makes the dispensary shelf if the old potheads vouch for its authenticity.
“They’ll be like, ‘Yeah, it tastes just like it,’” Steven said.
A surgeon, a lawyer, and a salesman
Despite the focus on old school weed, Steven, Karen, and Lomeo are not old school stoners...
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