On Sunday, October 2, more than 150 people gathered at Planet Bluegrassin Lyons for another Mason Jar Event Group seasonal dinner. Gathered on the banks of North St. Vrain Creek, guests socialized as they smoked cannabis and enjoyed the first course — organic roasted-squash soup served with grilled Brie-and-green-apple sandwiches — from chef Hosea Rosenberg and his team at Blackbelly.
Associated Press: Gourmet ganja? Marijuana dining is growing up, slowly→
/LYONS, Colo. (AP) — How to set a tone of woodsy chic at a four-course candlelight dinner served under the stars in the Colorado foothills:
Live musicians and flowers, check.
Award-winning cuisine, check.
Beer and wine pairings with each course, check.
Marijuana pairings? Oh, yes.
The 100 diners at this $200-a-plate dinner smoked a citrus-smelling marijuana strain to go with a fall salad with apples, dates and bacon, followed by a darker, sweeter strain of pot to accompany a main course of slow-roasted pork shoulder in a mole sauce with charred root vegetables and rice.
303 Magazine: My First Time at a Cannabis Dinner→
/“This day in rock ‘n roll history, all six members of The Grateful Dead were busted by California narcotics agents for possession of marijuana at the group’s 710 Ashbury Street House in San Francisco, California,” read Kendal Norris, founder of Mason Jar Events, her iPhone doubling as a flashlight in the pure-black evening.
SF Weekly: Chem Tales: ‘High Culture’ Has a New Meaning→
/Once a season, Mason Jar’s Kendal Norris hosts elaborate parties for adults to enjoy marijuana amid other mature pleasures, like good food and conversation. On Sunday, I accepted an invitation to Mason Jar’s latest outing.
A weed-friendly party bus picked guests up in Denver and delivered us into a bucolic autumn scene: Dark wood tables handsomely set amid the resplendent foliage. A bluegrass band unpacked their instruments by a burbling brook. Behind them, a sheer vertical cliff loomed, glowing pink as the sun set.
Rolling Stone: Haute Pot Pairings: Inside the World of High-End Marijuana Cuisine→
/Sativa with fish? Indica with steak? Or is it the other way around? Welcome to the world of pairing strains of marijuana with specific foods to enhance their flavor – the hot trend in states where marijuana is legal.
This is not like eating food cooked with cannabis, which people have been doing at least since Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas served their guests in Paris hashish fudge. "It should be eaten with care," Toklas wrote in her cookbook. "Two pieces are quite sufficient."
Fast Company: High-End Dining: Are Marijuana Meals The Next Big Foodie Trend?→
/"Other venturers into the spacey food space include celebrity chefs. Top Chef star Hosea Rosenberg cooks seasonal, multicourse marijuana pairing meals for theMason Jar Event group in Colorado. Unlike Sayegh's dinners, Rosenberg pairs more traditional edibles (primarily bars and candies) with (non-infused) dishes like pork roast with organic mustard greens, Western Slope apricots, Israeli couscous, and cherry cobbler topped with spiced amaretto ice cream and smoked candied almonds. Mason Jar plans these meals for "the cannabis connoisseur and the cannabis curious," with much of the experience dedicated to educating diners on different varieties. Rosenberg's events are so popular, they each receive as many as 10 sponsors (all from various sectors of the marijuana business), up from four just a year ago. Mason Jar is currently planning a 5,000-person event for 2017." - Fast Company
Zagat: Will Pot-Friendly Restaurants Become a Thing?→
/"At the edge of a flower-lined pond in Longmont farm country, long banquet tables set with china and crystal stand beneath big old shade trees. Waiters bearing hors d’oeuvre trays circulate amid the well-dressed, all-ages crowd gathered on the lawn to mingle and sip Arnold Palmers from Mason jars. If you didn’t know, you’d guess you were at a wedding reception. Until, that is, the THC-infused tea in your drink starts to kick in. Turns out this elegant affair is a multicourse cannabis dinner catered by no less than acclaimed chef Hosea Rosenberg (Blackbelly Market) — the sort of thing food media has been clamoring for ever since Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use in 2012 (us included, as this video attests). Bye-bye pot brownies; hello haute cuisine for so-called cannasseurs.
Though “we’re still building a reputation for these experiences,” says Mason Jar Event Group founder Kendal Norris, “people are excited about the level of sophistication” they can achieve. “I use my parents as an example: they would never go to something like this unless it was in a setting where they felt comfortable.” Rosenberg agrees, seeing his involvement as a chance “to be a part of something amazing, brand-new, experiential and fun.” For now, he eschews cooking with cannabis in favor of wine-style pairings: “We talk to the growers about what they see as the qualities of a particular strain and create dishes that pair best with its flavors, aromas and overall sensations.” Take the first course at the Longmont dinner, in which a sprightly salad of beets, fennel, goat cheese and pistachios matched thecitrusy aromas and energizing effects of OG Kush. But Norris incorporated edibles into the meal as well, such as the BlueKudu Black Forest chocolate bar that accompanied dessert, and Rosenberg predicts that the future for boutique infused foods, “not just sweet but savory" too, is “limitless.”
Food Republic - Puff, Puff, Pastry: Anatomy Of A Marijuana Dinner→
/Since 2015, Kendal Norris has run Mason Jar Event Group, a cannabis-focused venture that pairs weed with yoga and food. The idea literally started with a dream: “In the dream I was moving around a room where people where doing yoga, eating, drinking and consuming cannabis, and I knew that it felt right,” says Norris. “It’s a new concept serving a group that has not had an opportunity like this before.”
Kindland: I Went to Colorado for a Gourmet Cannabis Pairings Dinner→
/My high sets in some time between the serving of the intermezzo and dessert. I barely notice it. But the euphoria; the escape from anxiety; the feeling of content; the canna-bliss––really takes its place next to my bones, as the Colorado sun begins to retreat behind the surrounding flatiron foothills. The stone isn’t intense or overwhelming. I’m not spun out of my mind, or paranoid, or giggly. To my right, a diverse group of people from all corners of the cannabis industry are laughing, and joking, and smoking, and vaping, and dining on gourmet, chef-prepared food. And to the left, a lone cloud in the distance rids itself of any rain long before it would join our Longmont party. I’m at the Catalina Wine Mixer of Colorado weed dinners.
Read the full article on Kindland
Westword: This Cannabis Summer Harvest Dinner Was So Goddamn Precious→
/The Summer Harvest Dinner welcomed the de-stigmatization of cannabis along with the industry's highest society members to the Shupe Homestead in Longmont on July 14, 2016. It's been nearly one year since the Mason Jar Event Group's first cannabis dinner, with food prepared by the team from Blackbelly out of Boulder. Little jars filled with cannabis from Sweet Leaf were stars of the evening; sponsors whose gifts graced the goodie bags included Canyon Cultivation (delicious lollipops), BlueKudu (Black Forest cannabis chocolate bars), Anonymous Bags, 420 Science, Pax, Baker, Stillwater, Jane West (travel packs), Marley Coffee and Healthy Headie, to name a few.
The Atlantic: Why the Marijuana Business Is Appealing to Female Entrepreneurs→
/“The conversations that I have with executives of companies that are women are a lot easier than the conversations that I have with men,” said Kendal Norris, who runs Mason Jar Events, a company that puts together swanky pot-themed parties. “And I think that might be for a couple of reasons, one of which is, it sort of goes back to that thing from Madeleine Albright, that there’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women.” - The Atlantic
High Times: Top Chef Winner’s Pot Diner
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Top Chef champion Hosea Rosenberg, winner of season 5 of the televised culinary competition, is keeping on the cutting edge of foodie trends by incorporating cannabis pairings into his farm-to-table, local, seasonal style. While serving medicated food in a restaurant setting is still a no-no in Colorado, inviting guests to a private event and offering cannabis along with artisanal cuisine is quite legal. A collaboration led by Mason Jar Event Group, Headquarters cannabis retailers, 3 Chicks Bartending and Rosenberg's Blackbelly restaurant, last night's Harvest Dinner combined high-end cuisine with cocktails and cannabis for a classy night of socializing. Guests were bused to the dinner location at Boulder's Shupe Homestead to avoid any intoxicated driving, and medicated foods were not served.
Westword: Headquarters and Blackbelly Market Pair For A Farm To Table Cannabis Dinner
/It looked like an indie wedding, or a page out of a Pottery Barn catalogue — but it was a marijuana-pairing dinner. The Headquarters cannabis boutique team and Blackbelly Market's Hosea Rosenberg hosted a winter dinner event last weekend at which marijuana normalization reached a new high, at a sold-out (by private invite) event at the farm-chic Shupe Homestead in Longmont.
Leafly: Puffs & Papperdelle: Inside Top Chef Hosea’s Latest Cannabis Paired Dinner→
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But what to do if you’re a newbie to partaking in cannabis? Wandering into a dispensary and knowing what to buy, how much to use, and where you can use it can be overwhelming. Luckily, there’s a creative company out there making this prospect possible: Mason Jar Event Group, a Colorado-based event planning organization that hosts elegant farm-to-table meals (among other events) with cannabis pairings. These events are the perfect opportunity for a non-smoker like me to give it a try. And so, I did.
On Thursday, January 28, I boarded the event shuttle to Shupe Farm in Longmont, Colorado, for a farm-to-table experience called simply “Winter.” On our way we stopped at Headquarters Cannabis Co. to pick up our pre-assembled goody bags for the evening.
Leafly: Yoga + Cannabis = Bliss→
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“Yoga with a View”, a yoga and cannabis brunch hosted by Mason Jar Event Group and catered by Blackbelly Market, a restaurant and catering company owned by "Top Chef" season five winner Hosea Rosenberg. The event took place last month in Longmont, Colo., an hour’s drive north of Denver.
Pairing cannabis with yoga is becoming quite the trendy activity, but this event went above and beyond in pushing the boundaries of decadence. Sponsored by Green Dot Labs, Headquarters Cannabis Company, Love’s Oven, and, yes, Leafly, the brunch was steeply priced at $200 a ticket, but the approximately 75 attendees definitely got their money’s worth.
Leafly: Yoga And Beer Or Yoga And Cannabis: Which is the Most Elite Retreat?→
/At least 8.7 percent of U.S. adults, or 20.4 million people, practice yoga, and nearly 45 percent of Americans who haven’t tried yoga are interested in giving it a shot. The ancient discipline has exploded in popularity over the past several years, with various types (classical, Ashtanga, Hatha, to name a few) appealing to yogis of all abilities. But after a few years of practice, donning spandex and unrolling your mat can feel a little stale or uninspired, which is why some instructors are trying to spruce up the age-old exercise by pairing yoga with other adult lifestyle activities like beer and cannabis.
