My 1st very ambitious crop of 17 plants in 2 tents came to an abrupt halt in the 7th week of flower after a confrontation with building management about the smell coming from our apartment. It’s now clear that we will never be allowed to grow in this location again, sadly.
So I was forced to harvest W-A-A-A-Y early. Most of the crop were sativas with long 12-week flowering periods, so they were harvested when only half-way thru flower, and are nowhere close to peak THC. What’s worse, as a novice I failed to notice a hermie in my crop in time, so the whole crop of 17 plants got polinated and are full of seeds.
The thing is, we live in a place where we can’t buy weed. So salvaging this crop somehow is our only hope of having access to any cannabis product.
What is the best way to CONCENTRATE a large quantity (3 lbs approx) of weed that is all basically so weak that you would have to smoke 2 or 3 joints just to catch a buzz?
Should I try and figure out how to make bubble hash from it? Cannnabutter and some cookies or brownies?
I’d really love to find a way to turn this 3 pounds of super-weak weed into something useful. The one thing we do have on our side is quantity. It’s all really shitty weed, but we do have a LOT of it.
I should have mentioned… I’m a vaporizer kind of guy, and don’t SMOKE anything. So the ideal solution would be some way to reduce this large crop to some kind of concentrated liquid or oil that I could use with my vaporizer.
I know there’s a technique to drench buds with butane to get all the THC out of them but it sounds both dangerous and like it would make a huge smell. Remember we almost got kicked out of the building over the smell coming from the grow tents so another big smell event the neighbors can feel is definitely not strategic.
I have a small appliance called the ‘Source Turbo’. It’s an alcohol extraction/recovery device that allows you to solvent-extract cannabinoids using 190 proof grain alcohol. The company (Extract Craft) has a larger device called the ETOH Pro (about $1,600) that will do 4 or 5 oz at a time.
Quick Wash Ethanol Extraction or QWET: freeze plant material to -40F (or C–same thing) using dry ice along with the alcohol: combine the two, shake thoroughly for 3 minutes, rest for 2 more then strain, filter and put in the crucible to be extracted. The result depends on you as you can reduce to a tincture, oil, shatter or crumble, depending. Carts can be made using this process and you can thin with terpene concentrates that are available.
Once that run is done you can soak plant material for a couple of days and extract the rest of the goodness, but it’s too harsh for smoking or vaping and is normally used for edibles.
Here’s some Durban Thai/Cindy 99 I did: 30 grams of flower and got 7 grams of cream. Still haven’t done a second wash yet:
Just to make sure I understand this… Take the buds and grind them up in a blender to expose more surface area, then combine plant matter, ethanol and dry ice (all 3 together right?). Shake not stir James Bond style, then strain the whole thing down. The super-cooled alcohol carries the good stuff down and is probably concentrated enough at that point to use as a vaporizer oil.
How much SMELL does that project produce? I’m trying to imagine what ethanol mixed with super-frozen weed buds and dry ice smells like, and I’m drawing a blank…
Sounds like you have a 3 pounds ok high , unless you grow more and extract the thc then some how make your old weed absorb that new weed thc other than that you need a new grow
Re-reading this, it sounds like it needs full on lab equipment. Working with -40 alc/dry ice is seriously dangerous without proper safety precautions. That’s beyond my ability.
In case it wasn’t clear, my objective is PERSONAL USE supply of SOMETHING with THC active content. Original plan of a huge crop of sativas foiled so now that it’s become clear we cannot have quality weed (none of it is high grade), we need to go the edibles direction. I would love to produce some shatter, but frankly I don’t want to sent up a chemistry lab for this.
I was thinking fill a large 1.7L glass curing jar already full of buds up with oilve oil, then clamp down the ceramic lid to contain the smell, and cook the whole thing in the sealed jar at 240F for an hour to d-carb the cannabinoids and effectively transfer them into the oil.
I guess then I would need recipes that use a lot of olive oil and that’s probably why people prefer making cannabutter instead. As you can tell, I’m obviously clueless about edibles because until this situation necessitated looking for creative options, I was never heavy into them before.
when i see that kind of weight one thing comes to mind…BUBBLE HASH!! if you got a top loading wash machine you in business fill it with ice get some graduating hash bags and just agitate!!!also theres virtually no wasted product, …truly a sad sad story i cringed a little and gripped my tea cup super aggressive while reading!, im sorry to hear that, but sounds like you know whats up and what has to be done!. i cant wait to see the outcome
No. Grinding of plant material will release chlorophyll which is nasty to the taste. Alcohol in a Mason jar. Flower in another Mason jar. Place both in a cooler full of dry ice and allow to cool for 4 hours. THEN mix ethanol and flower to do your QWET. The warmer the alcohol, the more lipids and waxes along with chlorophyll will be extracted. These are not good to smoke of vape.
The process produces almost no odor. Maybe a bit of vodka smell but that’s all.
A lot of these users buy a lab freezer and chill to -70F!
FYI you will need gloves to handle the jars as they WILL burn you; they are that cold.
James Bond jokes aside, please clarify the SHAKE part of the instructions. I can’t visualize how I would do that working with -40 liquids. I can see how I could pour the ethanol over the plant material and then STIR it in the jar with the ethanol safely. I would need to find a safe tool to stir with but that’s not hard. But to SHAKE what would have to be >1L at a time of -40F liquid doesn’t sound like something I could do safely.
I put on a pair of garden gloves and had a few kitchen towels handy to stand the jars on (instead of the granite counter). My hands got cold but not too cold.
When I say shake: SHAKE IT. Think ‘shake-weight’ lol. I do break the material up loosely before going in the freeze. There are others who say modest agitation. Save that material and re-wash for FECO.
Thanks so much for all your help, @Myfriendis410! At first I had an image of the meth lab equipment from Breaking Bad being needed, but after watching a couple of QWET Youtube vids, I now realize this is pretty straight-forward. But I have a couple of new questions:
The dry ice stuff is still pretty intimidating. While I do understand why that might be “ideal”, would you agree that just putting both mason jars in a large freezer set as cold as it goes (probably closer to -30F than -40F) would probably work just fine? I see people in some of the vids just doing the whole process on their kitchen counter so I can’t imagine being right at -40 degrees being essential.
I didn’t realize on my first read we’re talking about ETHYL alcohol, not isopropyl. I don’t drink alcohol and don’t want an alcoholic tincture as the result product, but I see some people are first making the QWET tincture then mixing with oil then boiling off all the alcohol to get concentrated oil/butter. That seems like the best general strategy, but I can’t tell. I know what shatter is and have smoked it a couple of times. It seemed like a real pain because you had to keep it frozen to keep it brittle enough to “shatter” off a chunk. If the goal is to get something I can vape with my Storz-Bickel Mighty vaporizer, what is the best thing to put in the dosing capsules? Oil? Something else?
Water freezes at 32f, so I’d guess that a normal fridge has a low-point closer to 30f than -30f. I have a Wynter freezer which makes a big deal about reaching -10f.
I’m talking freezer, not fridge. I have a large “deep freezer” lid on top. I seriously doubt it gets to -40 but so far as I can tell, the reason for the lower temperature is to get a purer extraction containing less oils, waxes, and other undesirable plant material. Frankly I can live with a little imperfection in that regard. right now I have 3 lbs of weed which is more weed than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time, but it also feels like I have about a dime bag worth of THC in total!
One of the vids said make the alcohol tincture first, mix with oil, then cook off all the alcohol to get a finished product that’s just oil and cannabinoids. That sounds great in terms of the finished product being something I could both vape and use for edibles. But my big fear is the smell. That sounds like you have to basically simmer the oil-ethanol-weed tincture for a few days to “boil it all down” to just the oil. Remember, this whole mess started with me almost getting kicked out of the building I live in because of SMELL. I can’t be distilling cannabis-scented alcohol for days at a time. That would amount to all out war with building administration…
If the process calls for -40, and you have a freezer that can’t get below 20f, I think you need to bite the bullet and buy a cooler of dry ice. It’s a fairly common item. Just treat it like it’s red hot metal, and you’ll be fine.
