Types of Kratom

Where did kratom strain names come from?

We went looking for the first seller to use one. We didn’t find a record of it, and no source we read names one. What survives is a handful of dated pages, and here is what they show.

The oldest account of the trade we read is from the spring of 2003. Jon Hanna wrote it for The Entheogen Review, an independent journal that covered psychoactive plants, and it exposed leaf being sold as kratom that wasn’t. Leaf in that article is identified by the country it was said to come from. Material said to come from Myanmar had the wrong vein pattern and hairy undersides, and testing found none of the alkaloid mitragynine in it. A country of origin was the whole description, and the plant itself was wrong. A note added later named a single company as apparently the only source of imported dried leaf, a sign of how small the trade was. No kratom strain name appears anywhere in the article. How that trade grew is covered in history of kratom.

A year later the picture was the same. The Kratom User’s Guide, a free guide by Daniel Siebert and a coauthor, was posted online and revised over the years. Its section on where to buy kratom, in the March 2004 version, was one sentence saying that online merchants sold dried leaf, extracts or both. It named no product. The August 2004 version said the same.

By the September 2008 version, that section had grown a warning. It told readers to beware of misleading labels, and it gave premium, super and super premium as examples of grade names some vendors were using. There was no strain name in it.

The oldest store catalog we could read is from May 2009, in a copy of the page saved by the Internet Archive. It belongs to the storefront whose later catalogs our page on kratom colors follows. The store sold crushed and powdered leaf in three kinds, listed as from Thailand, maeng da and premium commercial, plus one extract. Nothing on it carried a color. Color words reached that same catalog by 2014, and the colors page covers the change.

So on the pages that survive, grade words were in use by 2008, maeng da was on a catalog by 2009, and color words followed. None of it shows who coined a single word. A few pages can’t date a first use, and we’d rather say that than offer a date we can’t back up.

What happened when we tried to buy by name?

When we started Whole Earth Gifts, the plan was to list as many strain names as we could. That is what other sellers were doing.

Then we contacted growers and distributors. The answer was short. We have four colors. Call them whatever you want.

The suppliers we asked sold by color, and any name was ours to choose. That is how a batch reaches us, and what is kratom walks through that chain from farm to shelf.

It also meant the whole naming system was on offer. Buy green from one supplier and sell it as indo. Buy green from another and sell it as maeng da. Buy a bali from one supplier and a thai from another, and they could literally be from the same tree. That’s less far-fetched than it sounds, because almost all the leaf sold in this country comes off one island, which where does kratom come from covers.

It wouldn’t strictly be lying. Leaf from two suppliers really is different leaf, and that is real variety. It just isn’t the variety the name claims to describe.

We chose not to do it. Our line carries no more than one strain name per color. The green and the white carry maeng da, the red carries bali, and the gold carries no strain name at all. The name we actually stand behind is the one in front of them, Whole Earth.

How is a kratom product name put together?

Each of the three parts comes from somewhere different.

The color word usually comes before the strain name, and it’s the only part with a process behind it. White, green, red and gold report how the leaf was dried and handled after picking.

The strain name follows it. Most are places, like bali, borneo, thai, malay, sumatra and indo. Maeng da is an exception. It is a Thai word, not a place. Four of them have an article here: maeng da kratom, bali kratom, thai kratom and borneo kratom.

A grade word is optional, and it goes in front. Super, premium and super premium are the three the 2008 guide named, and any seller can print one on any bag.

Our own shelf shows how it stacks. Red Bali is a color and a place. White Maeng Da is a color and a Thai word. Pure Gold is a color and an adjective.

Now run the numbers on just the words above. Four colors and those seven strain names make 28 labels. Let each label carry one of the three grade words, or none, and it’s 112 labels. That is before anyone makes up a new word, and a seller who wants a new product needs a new word rather than a new plant. One pass through public listings found 46 names rather than seven, and they are sorted on kratom strain names.

Does anyone sell kratom without a strain name?

Yes, and one of the brands we carry does it well.

1836 Kratom builds several of its product names around a color word and a nickname of its own. Green Means Go, Great White and Texas Red are all built that way, and none of them borrows a strain name. The color word tells you which kind of powder you’re holding, and the rest of the name points at 1836 rather than at a place.

We respect that, and it gets at the real point. A name tied to one company is a promise that the next bag will match the last one, with that company’s reputation behind it. A strain name can’t make that promise. Bali belongs to every seller at once, so it can’t vouch for any one of them.

None of the extra effort was required. 1836 could sell a plain white label with green lettering that just says green, and the powder inside wouldn’t change. It puts real artwork and branding on the bag anyway. We read that as a company that thinks its product is worth the trouble. We think it’s a great product, and a company doing this the right way.

It isn’t all or nothing. The same lineup carries Atomic Maeng Da, which we stock, 99 Red Bali, and a Super Gold that uses one of the grade words the 2008 guide named. What those show is that a strain name isn’t something the leaf needs. It is a choice, made one product at a time.

What can a strain name tell you?

It tells you what a seller decided to call a lot of leaf. From a seller who names things consistently, it can help you find the same kind of lot again.

It can’t tell you where the leaf grew, what variety it is or what’s in it. On every page we found, the leaf came first and the people selling it added the names. What’s actually in a lot is on its certificate of analysis, the lab report for that batch, which kratom lab testing covers.

Where could strain names go from here?

This part is our own speculation, and we’re labeling it that way on purpose. The rules around kratom are being written state by state. If kratom is ever regulated the way other packaged products are, we’ve wondered whether the place names will fade. Our suppliers already talk about the leaf in colors, and those colors describe what happened after picking. Color could last. A place name used for leaf that didn’t grow there might not, and names could move toward a brand’s own invented words, like 1836’s. It’s something we’re watching, not something we expect on any date.