The Ultimate Solventless Rosin Pressing Resource
How To Smoke Bubble Hash
Bubble hash is one of the most spectacular forms of cannabis and possibly the most coveted type of solventless extract. Bubble hash can be used to make edibles, pressed into rosin, or consumed by itself. It’s rare to find true 6-star bubble hash in dispensaries, because the best of the best doesn’t normally stray too far from the extractors who are skilled enough to produce it!
While a 1 or 2-star hash is great for edibles, and a 3 or 4-star hash is good for pressing rosin, the premium product is normally smoked in its unmodified form.
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What Is Full Spectrum Bubble Hash and Why Does it Matter?
Full spectrum refers to the array of cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids present in a cannabis extract. Solventless methods like ice water extraction, which is used to make bubble hash, and pressing rosin capture all of the active ingredients within the cannabis resin. What you get is the full experience of the plant, the full spectrum of what it has to offer.
More broadly, full spectrum can refer to cannabis products that contain all the therapeutic compounds produced by the source plant.
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How To Use a Freeze Dryer To Dry and Cure Cannabis Flowers
In the past few years, using freeze dryers to dry bubble hash has become commonplace for commercial extractors and even in-home hobbyists. Freeze drying hash not only speeds up the drying process, it also ensures a consistent and thorough removal of moisture, preventing mold growth and preserving terpenes. Freeze dryers may currently be associated mostly with bubble hash, but the technology can also be applied to drying and curing cannabis flowers.
So what is freeze drying? Freeze drying involves removing water moisture through sublimation
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Difference between Pillow Tech, Bottle Tech, and Chottle Tech
In the art of rosin extraction, there are several different methods that extractors can use to accomplish the same goal. For example, all rosin extraction involves pressing cannabis material between heated plates, but there are a variety of ways to pack the starting material into filter bags and position it between the plates. These different approaches are referred to as techniques, or “tech” for short. Pillow Tech, Bottle Tech, and Chottle Tech are different ways that rosin filter bags can be used to hold starting material, and how that material is oriented between rosin plates for extraction.
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What's The Problem with Using Dry Ice for Dry Sifting?
Dry ice is the solid form of carbon dioxide, capable of achieving temperatures much lower than that of regular ice. Unlike water ice that changes from a solid to a liquid when it melts, dry ice sublimates as it warms up, meaning it changes from a solid directly into a gas vapor. This vapor cools the surrounding environment, which makes dry ice an effective cooling agent. At more than 100 degrees below zero, dry ice gets so cold that it can actually damage unprotected skin.
One of the mantras often heard when working with solventless cannabis extracts like bubble hash and dry sift is “keep tools and environment cold”.
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Why It's Important to Pre-Heat Your Rosin Bags for Pressing Rosin
Preheating cannabis starting material is an important prerequisite for extracting rosin. Whether you’re pressing flower, dry sift, or bubble hash, warming the material between heated rosin plates helps prepare the cannabis for extraction. Although pressing material without preheating will still give you results, you can achieve a more efficient extraction and better yields with a quick preheat before full pressure is applied.
Benefits of Preheating
Preheating cannabis prepares the trichomes
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How To Use a Wine Cooler To Dry Bubble Hash
A wine cooler, or wine chiller, is an appliance designed to generate and maintain the ideal environment for storing bottles of wine. It turns out that these specialized refrigerators are also useful for hash makers to dry bubble hash. But how is a wine fridge different from regular refrigerators, and what makes them useful for drying bubble hash?
Many wine coolers look like mini refrigerators with a glass door, but they are built with features that differ from traditional refrigerators.
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Buying vs Building Your Own Rosin Press
A common question for people just getting into rosin is what type of rosin press they should buy. A hair straightener is some extractors’ first foray into solventless extraction, but the limited capabilities of this makeshift approach soon grows old (especially given the easy availability of better alternatives). Although a hair straightener can definitely produce quality rosin, a press that utilizes heated plates designed specifically for rosin production that can generate several tons of pressure is both easier to operate and more efficient for processing cannabis material.
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Top 5 Bubble Hash Drying Tips
Ice water extraction is the ideal method used to create high quality bubble hash. While other methods like dry sifting can produce excellent solventless concentrates, ice water offers extractors greater control over isolating trichomes and removing plant contaminants. But after extraction is complete a lot of water still remains, leaving a totally saturated patty of cannabis trichomes. Not only is the hash unusable in this state, but it’s vulnerable to microbial growth like mold.
Just like fruits and other foods, bubble hash can invite microbial growth if there’s sufficient moisture present.
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How To Press without Rosin Bags
Rosin filter bags offer many advantages to solventless extractors. They keep cannabis material tight and compacted for a consistent flow of rosin, facilitate even pressure from the heated plates onto the material throughout extraction, and help remove unwanted lipids and plant particles from rosin. Rosin filter bags are a staple of the solventless extraction toolkit. But can you press rosin without filter bags?
The answer depends on what type of cannabis material you’re pressing.
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The Anatomy of a Cannabis Trichome and Why It's Important
Know why good cannabis looks like it’s covered in a sugar-like coating of tiny crystals? That lovely layer of sparkling goodness is actually thousands of little appendages that hold the magic of the cannabis plant. These resin-producing glands are called trichomes, and they contain the cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids in highly concentrated amounts. Growers think about cultivating cannabis in terms of flower production, but another way to think about it is through the lens of farming terpenes. At the end of the day, it’s the trichomes we’re after.
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Indoor vs Outdoor Cannabis Cultivation
The definitions of indoor and outdoor cannabis cultivation are self-explanatory: indoor growing takes place within an enclosed structure utilizing artificial light, whereas outdoor growing takes place outside using the sun as the primary source of light. Cannabis can be successfully grown in either type of environment. Both indoor and outdoor flowers are capable of reaching incredibly high qualities of flavor and potency. However, there are factors unique to each approach, and pros and cons that come with either type of garden you choose to establish.
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Do I Need To Freeze Fresh or Cured Material Before Washing?
We know that cold temperatures are a necessity for producing high quality bubble hash with the ice water extraction method. Cold temperatures make trichomes on the cannabis material brittle enough to fall away from their stalks, while also minimizing terpene loss and helping to keep resin contained within the trichomes. But do we have to actually freeze cannabis material before beginning the process of washing hash?
First, let’s look at the different preparations possible for cannabis material used for washing bubble hash.
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Aging Bubble Hash Temple Balls 101
There’s much more to aging bubble hash than simply the passage of time. Without proper preparations and a controlled environment, hash is just getting older in long term storage, not really aging like a fine wine, tobacco, or cheese. There isn’t yet much scientific research that gives us a clear understanding of the chemistry behind the magic of aging bubble hash, but we still have data. That data comes from human experience, passed down through the traditions developed over thousands of years in hash producing regions of the world.
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How To Pre Soak Fresh or Cured Material Before Washing for Ice Water Extraction
For thousands of years hash producers have been extracting resin-filled trichomes from cannabis flowers, creating a pure and potent concentrate that captures the most desirable qualities of the plant. The first hash was collected directly by hand from mature flowers, creating a smear of resin by rubbing open palms across the plants. The hash was then peeled away and rolled into balls, called charas.
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Wet Trimming vs Dry Trimming Cannabis Flowers
Trimming cannabis involves snipping away excess leaves that grow out of the buds, exposing the swollen calyxes and dense flower structure underneath. Trimming always happens after harvest, but it can take place before or after the flowers have been dried. Wet trimming takes place right after the flowers are harvested, before they’re hung to dry. Dry trimming takes place after the plants have already been hung to dry, before they go into jars for curing.
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Pros and Cons of Hand Trimming vs Machine Trimming
Autumn is here, and outdoor growers are looking ahead to that magical time of year when nearly a year’s worth of hard work will finally pay off. Flowers are maturing, leaves are turning, and trichomes are swelling with medicine-rich resin that’s nearing peak ripeness. October is called Croptober for good reason, as the crop and chop is top of mind!
Whether you have 3 plants or 300, planning and preparations are in order to ensure your cannabis makes it across the finish line in top condition. Part of that is determining when exactly the plants are ready for the harvest.
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How To Change the Drainage Hose in a Bubble Hash Washing Machine
Compact washing machines like the kind sold for cleaning mini loads of laundry make the perfect mixers for ice water hash extraction. Their 5-gallon capacity is just the right size for mixing together several ounces of cannabis material and ice water, and their portability and simplicity of use makes them one of the most popular appliances to easily repurpose for bubble hash production. With a few ounces of good cannabis, clean water, ice, a washing machine, and a set of quality bubble wash bags
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Top 10 Harvesting Tips for Cannabis Growers
After months of careful cultivation, harvest time is finally here! You've grown some lovely ladies to full maturity, now it's time to reap the rewards of a beautiful bounty. But just like growing the plants, harvesting them requires careful planning and attention to detail. A haphazard process or impatience in letting the plants dry can ruin months of hard work. Proper harvesting techniques not only maintain the levels of quality your flowers achieved, they actually enhance them.
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Top 5 Common Mistakes When Washing Hash
One of the things we love most about our work in the solventless community is sharing the tips and tricks we’ve picked up over the years in working with the cannabis plant. Solventless extraction requires knowledge of cannabis, its trichomes, and the techniques and best practices required to isolate, collect, and process them. The resulting concentrates, when made with care and intention, capture the essence of the cannabis plant better than anything else available.
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The Difference between Drying, Curing, Storing, and Aging Cannabis
Drying, curing, storing, and aging are distinct phases of preparation and preservation for cannabis. All the care and skill required to grow premium cannabis is only meaningful when the best qualities of the living plant can be maintained and even enhanced after harvest. What happens to cannabis after it’s harvested, and how the resulting solventless concentrates are cured and stored, have a significant impact on the quality that the consumer will enjoy.
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