The history of Guava

Timeline

1. 1991Chemdog starts growing and spreading Chemdawg, the line that Top Dawg Seeds’ Stardawg is later built on.^1,6
2. 1999Top Dawg Seeds’ breeder starts growing, in New York City. The Chem D cut came later, from Chemdog himself, and went into Tres Dawg with Sensi Seeds’ Afghan #1.¹
3. 2011Top Dawg Seeds’ first release of Star Dawg, Chem 4 × Tres Dawg. By the breeder’s account, “That’s when the Guava came out.”^1,7
4. 2012Stardawg Guava wins first place for Best Sativa at the Denver Cannabis Cup, according to Leafly; Weedmaps also calls it a one-time Denver Cannabis Cup winner in that category.^8,9
5. Jun 16, 2014Gelato’s pheno-hunt ends with an invite-only tasting. The Cookies Fam’s Guava is, in Leafly’s words, a Gelato phenotype; no source gives the year it was selected.^2,3
6. Oct 2016Top Dawg Seeds tells High Times that Guava is one of four popular versions of Star Dawg, and that “it yields well, commercially it does well”.¹
7. Sep 2020The earliest result in our lab dataset for flower labelled Guava; the 92 tests run to 2024.¹⁰
8. 2021The busiest year for Guava in our lab data: 53 of the 92 tests.¹⁰
9. Oct 2026Leafly’s product listing for Nature’s Heritage’s Guava IX flower shows it at two dispensaries in Ellicott City, Maryland.¹¹
10. Oct 2026Weedmaps menus list flower under Guava names at 409 stores in 22 of 27 markets, most of it under longer names such as Guava Casquitos or Passion Orange Guava.¹²

Why the name spread

It spread as a name more than as one plant. Weedmaps says Guava “got passed around enough to end up attached to completely different family trees”, and SeedFinder lists four breeders’ Guavas: Bean Addicts, Cookie Fam Genetics, Flavour Chasers and Garden of Green.^5,13 The first came from a seed release: Top Dawg Seeds says its Guava came out with the first Star Dawg in 2011 and that it yields well and does well commercially.¹

The Cookies Fam’s Gelato phenotype is the Guava that Leafly, AllBud and SeedFinder’s Cookie Fam entry describe, and breeders have crossed it again: Grandiflora’s Grandi Guava, the Cookies Fam’s own Guava Runtz and Zamnesia’s Frosted Guava.^3,4,14,15,16 Flavour Chasers, a seed company whose team started out in London and produces in California, sells its own Stardawg × Afghani Guava as feminized seed.^17,18

Plenty of other strains borrowed the word. In state lab records our matching excluded 2,379 results with longer Guava names, led by “Guava IX” (472), “Guava Lava” (96) and “Guava Jelly” (73), against 92 that matched plain Guava.¹⁰

The disputed parts of the story

• Which plant is Guava: a Gelato phenotype from the Cookies Fam (Leafly, AllBud, SeedFinder), a Stardawg phenotype released in 2011 (Top Dawg Seeds), or Stardawg × Afghani (the lineage on Weedmaps’ Guava page, from Flavour Chasers).^{1,3,4,13,14,18}
• Stardawg Guava’s parents: Leafly lists Chemdawg #4 as its parent and Weedmaps gives Stardawg Haze × Guava for The Bank’s version; Top Dawg Seeds describes its own Guava as a version of Star Dawg, and no source says outright that Stardawg Guava is that phenotype.^1,8,9
• The 2012 award: Leafly and Weedmaps say Stardawg Guava won Best Sativa at the Denver Cannabis Cup; we could not open a High Times list of winners to confirm it.^8,9
• The date of the Cookies Guava: sources call it a Gelato phenotype but give no year, and Leafly’s Cookies-family genealogy, which dates Gelato’s pheno-hunt to 2014, does not mention it.^2,3
• Guava IX’s Guava parent: Leafly lists Stardawg × Guava without saying which Guava.¹⁹