The key to pot criticism, Mr. Browne said, is knowing your audience. While he tries to keep his language basic enough that a nonsmoker could understand it (“I think pot needs smart people to be ambassadors to the masses,” he said), he doesn’t want to be condescending to those who do. “I never want to be that pretentious pot critic,” he said...

The reviews themselves have a certain formula. Mr. Browne begins with a physical description of the product (is it moist, with the THC visible, or a drier, less tightly packed bud?) as well as the smell and taste (“rubber and pepper dominate the jar like a bunch of green army men relegated to miniature mess hall duty,” he wrote recently, of an “unfortunately titled” strain called Alien Napalm)...

The most important element of being a pot critic, though, is one that traditional food criticism may lack (at least in this much detail): how the product makes you feel. Seated in his living room testing out the Lemon Kush, Mr. Browne kept detailed notes from the moment he ingested, and observed how it moved through his body. (When writing about Jack Flash, another strain, he once noted that it “always gets me straight between the temples.”) With the Kush, he observed whether the pot relieved his headache (a little) and tracked, in painstaking detail, how the feeling of the high evolved.