Great Concentration: Purple Bubba Kush, Grown Outdoors, Harvest 2018

Oh Gawd! What is she making now?

That’s a great question and as soon as I know for sure, I’ll let you know. Lol!

This concentration of cannabis falls somewhere between hash oil, rosin, taffy and shatter.

I started with 50 grams of Purple Bubba Kush that @knarly327 and I grew outside, this summer.

After buying a larger still, we then made our own over-proof alcohol from Turbo Yeast and copious amounts (100+ pounds) of white sugar.

This hooch clocked in at 95% and is strong enough to strip paint.

This strength of alcohol is potent enough to extract the essential oil of cannabis from its flowers and that’s ultimately what I am doing.

Here we go!

We started with a new virgin tin paint-can that was purchased from a hardware store.

To this, we added 50 grams of frozen cannabis flower.

Not ground, not decarboxylated.

Then, we poured -20 degrees Celsius alcohol over top of the plant material.

This is where it gets a little fucked up.
We know the risks and we accept them.

Let me introduce you to the newest piece of kit that we’ve added to our Canna-Lab :

A mid-century paint shaker!
(Insert gasping here.)
Shake it baby...

No kidding. We drove 400 km to salvage this machine from the bone yard and it works like a charm to knock trichomes clean off their flowers.

HahHaha! Now, come on...if you don’t do something that scares the hell out of you, every once in awhile, what’s the point of being alive?

We took precautions and I was at the ready with a fire extinguisher. I’m not kidding shaking alcohol especially at 95% can be extremely dangerous because it’s highly flammable and explosive.

After a 3.5 minute alcohol wash that was most definitely shaken, not stirred, you can see that the cannabis has been broken apart just like it had been ground.

We then began the filtering process.

First, with a fine mesh stainless steel strainer.

Once we got to the bottom of the alcohol and plant material mixture, you can start to see the mass of trichomes that have been separated.

The essential oil of cannabis with all its cannabinoids (read: THC, CBD and 109 more that we know about) are found in the gland heads of the trichomes.

As you can see, these trichomes are delicate and under magnification, they look like glass mushrooms with long glass stocks and the occasional amber/cloudy cap.

In the photo (above) you can see the trichomes which have settled to the bottom of my first filtering bowl.

If I had knocked these trichomes off without using a solvent (like alcohol) I could compress these structures and make hash. As I have used a solvent, I have stripped the majority of resinous oil from the gland heads and the trichomes are now depleted of their physchoactivity.

In the photo (below) you can see what the trichomes look like once all the alcohol and resin is removed.

If you have a Kief tray on your grinder, this would be what you are collecting (only full of resin) and completely smoke or vapable.

Then, we filtred the remaining liquid, multiple times, using coffee filtres.

Until we achieved a bright yellow coloured, transparent alcohol liquid.

We then poured this into a Green Oil Machine which (in essence) is a small still.

This machine lets us reclaim most of the alcohol that was used to strip the gland heads of their medicine.

See What I See

You’ll notice that the alcohol went into the machine a decidedly yellow colour and it’s now colourless.

It takes approximately 25 minutes to reclaim the alcohol.

What is left are all the medicinal components in a very concentrated form.

Sort of looks like a fridge experiment, gone horribly wrong. - Rebecca Ryan

From here, the material is placed in a vacuum chamber where any additional water and alcohol is purged out of it for 96 hours.

Not quite yummy but getting there.

After 24 hours:

72 more to go...but you can see the resin that has been captured.

We generally work with a 10:1 ratio.

50 grams of plant material will produce 5 grams of resin.

Concentrate levels can hit 90% THC.

~ Rebecca