green girl
02-09-2006, 08:57 PM
Well, I'm so glad I did this research way back when. I'm finding it much harder to find good mj info on the web, hopefully that is just for now only. My thanks go out to all the authors of these pieces. This was only ever meant to be a personal reference guide for me, so I haven't annotated it the way I should have.
Well there's dry sifted kief, pressed kief, Water extraction, Iso-alcohol extraction, BHO/ Butane extraction, marble/jelly hash, and finger hash to name the top dogs.
How do I make Ice Hash?
This FAQ will describe my ICE hash method, which has a high yield due to the “shaking” process. I yielded between 1/3 and 1/2 gram of sweet, blonde, powdered product from 3/4 oz dried batch of scrog garbage.
Making the mixture
I take the bud leaf and grind it to a powdery consistency in a regular coffee grinder. I find that a 1/4 oz can be done at a time.
I pour the powder into a 1/2 gallon plastic milk container, using a rolled up piece of printer paper (or wax paper) as a funnel.
I then placed 7 normal sized ice cubes on a small folded towel, beat the crap out of it with a rubber mallet on a butcher block to produce a fine, almost powdered ice. The ice is then put into the milk container.
A few ounces of cold water is put into milk container, just enough to maybe go 3/4" above what was in there.
Note: Roughly 1/3 weed garbage, 1/3 ice, 1/3 water based on height within the container, NOT weight or volume! Total height was about 2-1/2" with all ingredients.
Shake and filter
Shake the capped container vigorously for a full ten minutes, broken into two 5-minute sessions. 5 minutes shaking, then 5 minutes to settle in the freezer.
Next step is to pour the concoction through a "permanent" drip coffee filter (works well; has a tight mesh, resulting in cleaner, blonder hash). I pour, then press with my fingers. You want to get the moisture pushed through to the bowl. Take your time. The drippings go into a bowl underneath.
Use a sharp knife to cut the top half off of the milk container and spoon anything you can't pour into the strainer. When you've pressed it close to the limit, toss the rest into the toilet.
Ice
I pre-set my freezer to the max; place the bowl of filtered greenish-brown water into it, take care not to disturb it. The heavy trichomes will sink to the bottom of cold water. THAT'S what you want! I tap the side of the bowl with a spoon once every 10 minutes to help the trichomes settle to the bottom of the bowl.
After about 40 minutes, the fluid in the bowl will skim over with ice. I then remove the bowl, taking care not to let the liquid swish around. Wait a minute or two for the ice to melt.
Use a turkey baster to gently suck out the greenish fluid on the top, taking care not to disturb the residue on the bottom. Paper towels can be used to suck up the last 1/4" of fluid, again being careful not to disturb the dark residue. Suck up as much liquid as you can.
Gently dry out the remaining paste with a hair dryer until it reaches a light uniform color and appears solid. Use an ordinary spoon to scrape the mixing bowl, and ENJOY!
A summary of hash extraction methods
Hash is the collected and pressed resin glands from buds. The best hash is "blond" (in reference to its light tan color); only the pure resin crystals are used. Green hash is the next grade, it contains much more of the plant matter than the blond hash giving it its characteristic green appearance. Black hash is generally either hand rubbed hash, which has turned black because of THC oxidation or a mixture of keef (the crystalline resin glands) and other psychoactive alkaloids.
The methods of collecting this resin vary depending on who makes it and what materials are being used. Typically, most hash is made from the manicured leaf left over from trimming fresh pot, but some is made from buds, and can be chemically extracted from all manner of herb leftovers. Real hash handles easily and tends to stick to itself, instead of you. Under very brief heat, it becomes very soft and easy to crumble or smear into little hash curls that can be rolled into cigarettes, or thrown on bowls or hot knives. Remember the best hash is made from the best bud!
Traditional Preparations
1. Crystal collection
A) Hand rubbing - Hand rubbing is the practice of accumulating lots of resin on your hands then rubbing them together to produce small black balls of hash. Scissors hash is very similar, it is taken off of manicure scissors when pruning bud. This is probably the least effective method of making hash because the hand rubbing breaks open the resin glands oxidizing THC and giving it a black color, but sometimes it's convenient if handling lots of bud.
B) Sieving - On it's most crude level, a sieve is a piece of cloth stretched over a pot, which you break up, handle, bounce, or scrape your buds over to knock the resin glands off into the bowl. The best screens are sized at 150 microns and only allow the resin glands and some fine debris to fall through. They can be obtained from hobby and art supply stores. Green keef can be re-sieved to make it ¡¥more blonde¡¦, the plant matter will tend to float on the screen while the crystals fall through. Alternatively, hash can then be turned over a 50-micron screen, which will allow most of the debris to fall through, but leaves the keef. To maximize the resin collection, the bud or budleaf trimmings should be extremely dry and cold. Put it in the freezer for a few hours before processing. Cruder sieved type hash is made bye drying or rolling dried pot in burlap bags, the resins tend to stick to the sides leaving hash.
C) Water extraction - A crude water extraction can be done with some really dry pot and a jar full of ice water. Don't fill the jar more than 1/5 full of material, throw in some ice cubes and cold water, shake, and voila! The resin tends to sink to the bottom while the leaf matter floats. The vegetation is removed the crystals caught in a coffee filter. A more advanced extraction can be done with 150-micron pore bag to separate the crystals from the leaf. The remaining leaf can be saved to make butter or honey oil.
2. Pressing
Once the keef has been collected it can then be pressed into hash. Keef needs pressure and warmth to become that dense lovely THC laden wonder called hash. Very small amounts can be pressed between your fingers and rolled into a ball (if done in a piece of cellophane it will help inhibit THC degradation). Alternatively, a precision press can be used, it's important to have a good die fitted to 0.001 inches, unless you want to squeeze a bunch of your hard won keef to smash into the gap in the die. Once pressed, most hash tends to darken on the outside but remains blond in the middle. Make sure to pre-press water-extracted hash in a piece of cellophane to help get rid of the water.
Chemical preparations
1. Volatile solvent extraction
A volatile solvent extraction is the simplest method of chemical extraction since it involves simple equipment and solvents that are liquids at room temperature, but low boiling points. Good choices for solvents are alcohols and fine petroleum distillates (EG 99% isopropyl alcohol, 95% ethyl alcohol, and white gas), ketones tend to redux with the cannibinoids, and naphia and heavier solvents are too hard to drive off. Pick a solvent that boils at less than 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and exhibits non-polar tendencies.
Soak your dry weed in the solvent for a few hours to a couple of days, the longer you soak it the more trash comes with the solvent. Then separate the solvent and evaporate. The left over gum is chemically extracted hash. Typically it tends to have a green/black color because most solvent also dissolve plant waxes and chlorophyll, as well as cannibinoids. This green oil can be cleaned from dark green -> light green -> red -> amber using an activated carbon filter on the solution before evaporation. Just fill a tube or funnel with activated carbon (fish tanks, air filters) and run the juice through it. If allowed to soak in ethyl alcohol (usually vodka) and left diluted the green solution is usually refereed to as green dragon, and is drank for some intense effects.
2. Lipid based extraction
Pot butter is easy to make and can be made with butter or any other high fat cooking product (oil, ghee, margarine, Crisco, etc). There are a lot of ways to get the THC to go into the butter, but as far as I see it, only one really easy way- that's to boil it. Step by step:
A. Use the right amount of dope for your butter. My standardized dose is one gram of keefed manicure, trimmings or schwag bud per hit. I generally achieve this by using one stick of butter per ounce of pot. Most recipes I cook with would use 1/4 cup of butter, so I split each recipe into 14 units of cookies, rice krispy treats, toffee, etc.
B. Place your dope and butter in a pot with a couple quarts of water. Bring the mixture to a boil then simmer for one to two hours.
C. Line a bowl big enough to fit the mix, with cloth. Pour the hot mix into the bowl. Once it is cool enough to handle, strain all of the pot out of the mix by carefully lifting the cloth. Be sure to squeeze the mess real good, before throwing the waste vegetable matter into your compost heap.
D. Allow the bowl with water and pot butter mix to sit at room temperature for several hours until cool. Then put the whole mix in the refrigerator over night.
E. In the morning, carefully remove the layer of hardened butter off the top of the water. You did let it sit and cool slowly, so it came off as one neat piece, instead of lots of watery grains. Let it sit on an uncovered plate in the fridge, flipping occasionally until it dries out. Store it in the freezer to keep or cook with it.
3. Direct isomerization
Sometimes if pot is totally rank and crappy, or you're dealing with a bunch of roaches, trimmings, or some other inferior source of THC it is desirable to go well beyond what a simple volatile solvent or super critical fluid extraction can do. You want to convert all those free available cannibidiols into more potent THC analogs and cannabinols.
This technique also will render a fully decarboxylized end product, as well as destroying many terpenes and aromatics which can improve or destroy a product depending on the original quality. It is important to understand this is not a full conversion to ƒ´9-THC, but to THC analogs and more active cannibidiols, and is included in this discussion more as an educational exercise. Basic isomerization takes place with a quick reflux of your cannabinoids in the presence of any H+ source (acid).
1. Treat your stuff as if it were a volatile solvent or critical fluid extraction.
2. With the remaining resin, dissolve it in a non-polar solvent. Be sure to use one that separates easily from water such as naphia or white gas.
3. Treat this mixture with sulphuric or hydrochloric acid until a pH around 1-2 is reached (approximately one drop of concentrated acid per gram of extract).
4. Place this in a reflux apparatus and cook it for about an hour. In case you¡¦re not familiar this is basically just Pyrex breaker with a large looped tube plugged into the top. This will cause the solution inside to be exposed to elevated pressures as well as temperatures, as well as preserving all of the original contents. Simply simply boiling the mixture in a small strong covered vessel can mimic it.
5. Wash what¡¦s left with water, keep the oil layer.
6. Neutralize your mix (bring it to pH 7.0) with a little Sodium Hydroxide solution (pH 9.0) or baking soda then rewash it with water. Save the oil layer again.
7. Allow your oil to evaporate and you should be left with a sticky amber liquid that contains almost pure THC.
I would recommend an extraction for a starting point, since if you start clean your product can only get much better. Once you¡¦ve obtained nearly pure THC, converting it to an acetate is supposed to produce more psychedelic like effects.
More THC analog modifications can be made (to yield pure ƒ´9 or ƒ´6 THC), but generally the consumption of the original products in these reactions makes them hardly worth while (usually 5-20% yeild, so it may be half as psychoactive but you have 5 times as much of it in the beginning).
Hash oil
Hash oil is basically hash in which the walls of the resin glands have been broken down leaving a gooey oil. Often chemically-extracted hash will be almost an oil, or keef can be dissolved in alcohol, then the alcohol is allowed to evaporate. Hash oil can be smoked like hash in cigarettes, bowls, hot knives, reconstituted into a more hash like substance with the addition of ash or powdered plant matter, or applied to bud to make it more potent (way more potent!).
Hash additives and preparations
A variety of different plant extracts can be, and sometimes have been, added to hash for more a more intense psychedelic experience. Generally only a very small portion of additive is added for the amount of keef available, maxing out around 20% additive and around 5% additive on the low end.
Almost any psychotropic herb could be used. Screen your additives into your keef before pressing.
What is hash and how do I make it?
The drug produced by the cannabis plant is principally contained in multi-cellular structures on the surfaces of the leaves and flower parts called stalked capitate trichomes, or multicellular glandular hairs. These structures are shaped like water towers or mushrooms, a ball on top off a stalk. Light glistening off the surface of these translucent structures is what causes the "frosted" appearance of plant parts populated with such glands. The ball structure, or gland head, consists of a number of radially arranged cells which secrete cannabinoid containing oils. The oils collect beneath a waxy cuticle, which occasionally bursts, releasing the oil to form a sticky resin as it dries. This resin may make up the cuticle or the cuticle may be some other substance, the truth is apparently not known. The gland head structure contains the highest concentration of the drug THC, followed by the stalks. The tissues of the plant supposedly contain a small amount of cannabinoids, but it is minimal in my experience, or at least there is little THC content.
The stalked capitate glands are not the only surface structure on cannabis plants. Multicellular sessile or bulbous glands hug the surfaces of some leaves, and are said to contain cannabinoids. In my experience they contribute little to the drug content of the plant. Some authors apparently believe these structures to be juvenile or stunted stalked trichomes. Cystolith hairs are blunt, pointed objects which contain calcium carbonate crystals. They look like faceted traffic cones, and do not have a ball on top. Finally, the plant also produces unicellular hairs, which indeed do look like small hairs. Cystolith glands and unicellular hairs do not produce drug chemicals.
Cannabinoids are chemicals apparently unique to cannabis, consisting of THC, CBN and CBD, and a set of relatives with similar effects, THCV, CBV and CBDV. Many plants contain both sets of chemicals, and in common practice only the first set of abbreviations are used. THC is responsible for the "high" the plant produces, and there are several different versions of THC from different plants. CBN is said to increase the THC effect slightly, and CBD actually blocks the THC effect. CBD can be converted into THC by treating extracted oil with sulfuric acid, a step in the oil trade called "isomerization".
Hash is made by knocking the trichomes off the surface of the plant, by mechanical action typically, and by pressing the glands together into a ball or cake. Depending on the method used, the hash may consist of gland heads and stalks and various contaminants, such as the elements mentioned above, and small bits and pieces of plant tissue. Hash made purely from gland heads is very strong and compresses to a hard plastic-like lump with hand pressure. Hash with a lot of contaminants may require heat and pressure to compact.
The effect of smoking hash can differ from the parent plant, as the heads of the stalked glands may contain more THC in comparison to the side chemicals than the stalks and the tissues of the plant. Hash made only from the heads of the stalked glands is very potent, and can create an uplifting high similar to a vaporizer hit, though deeper and more persistent. As more stalks are added to the hash, the character of the high changes in various ways, though typically good hash has a strong initial rush and a mild, soft letdown. I have found that the varietal character of the parent plants is diminished in hash. The cystolith and hair trichomes add nothing to the high, but may add to the flavor. Essential oils are distributed throughout the plant, making up about 10% of the stalked glands by weight. The essential oil content of the contaminants is apparently not known.
Methods of small scale hash production
We’ll ignore the hash making methods used in cannabis growing countries for the commercial markets and focus solely on the home grower. There are three methods in common use.
The first is flat screening, typically using a silk screen frame with fine plastic fabric. Fine steel screens are also used in flat screening. The method involves rubbing cannabis trim across the surface of the screen, the glands and other contaminants dropping through the screen to be collected on a surface like a piece of glass. A flat screen can also be used with an electric motor rigged to produce a back and forth or vibrating motion.
The second method also uses screen, but in a rotating drum, typically motorized using a rotisserie motor or the like. A rotating machine takes less skill to use, substituting time for pressure in flat screening. A drum machine can remove nearly all the glands without depositing any plant tissue. That would be very difficult with a flat screen.
Finally, the glands can also be knocked off the plant by agitating the material in ice water. The glands sink to the bottom of the mixture and can be sieved, dried and pressed together. While this method requires only a blender and a coffee filter, it seems to produce more contaminants than screening, and the output can’t be controlled as well, if at all.
Before discussing each method in more detail, let’s talk about the preparation of the raw materials.
Preparing "skuff"
Skuff, or "shake" or bud trim, is leaves and undersized flower parts that are trimmed off cannabis flowers or buds. Unless glands can be seen on the surface of the leaves, they should not be collected as skuff, as all they can provide to the hash is contaminants. Sometimes a leaf will have a frosted appearance, but on closer examination the structures on the leaf turn out to consist principally of hairs, common on the stalks of fan leaves. The first tool needed in making hash is a magnifying glass to observe the plant surfaces. I find that a 16x "loupe" is sufficient for this purpose. Inexpensive 30x plastic scopes can apparently be found in toy stores.
In order to be ready for smoking, the THC oil must be dried. At the same time in order to allow mechanical skuffing, the plant material must also be dried. It is not necessary that the skuff be "cured" as buds are, because the vegetable material will not be used in any way. But I have found that the skuff needs to be thoroughly dried over a long period of time, at least a month, though I prefer two. Skuff processed before that time is not as potent as it should be, and the resulting hash seems never to dry properly to gain the potency back.
I have read many times that skuffing should be done in a cold, dry atmosphere and that the skuff itself should be crispy dry. For small scale skuffing, that is not only incorrect, it is also counter-productive, as it accelerates the expression of contaminants from the skuff. I used to believe in cold and dry until oldtimer1 taught me different; try it and see for yourself. The product of the first 20 minutes of skuffing on a drum machine should only be the heads of stalked capitate glands. Skuffing done in cold, dry conditions will prematurely kick out a lot of cystolith mineral trichomes. I recommend skuffing at low room temperature, in the 60’s say, and at normal humidity, although I’ve made excellent hash in somewhat colder and hotter conditions.
The skuff should also not be physically altered. A drum machine will remove nearly all the drug potential from the plant, regardless of the shape and size of the leaf parts. With large leaf pieces, like those produced by the buds of certain strains, a mechanical aid can be introduced into the machine, like a rubber ball. The ball will gently press the leaf pieces to the screen over time. Crunching up the skuff will only serve to introduce vegetable contaminants into the hash, and will release cystolith and unicellular hairs into the first product from the skuffing, a product which should be the most pure. Be gentle with the skuff.
Flat screening
Flat screens can be made from commercial steel fabric, usually available by special order in printing supply shops, or from plastic silk screen fabric. Fortunately, printing supply shops sell stacks of pre-made plastic screens in wood frames for a modest price, typically $15-25, depending on the size. Because the grade of the hash from a flat screen depends on the vigor of the handling, screens with smaller holes are better, in the range of 110 lines per inch to 137 at the high end. A 125 "mesh" frame is a good compromise. The silk screen material is attached by glue to the bottom of the wood frame, leaving a well on top with the wood pieces forming the sides.
Making good hash from flat screens depends on a lot of personal involvement. The method is simple. The frame is placed over a collection surface, like a sheet of glass or a mirror. I like to attach small wooden blocks to the bottom of the screen frame so that it can be used right side up, with the flat side of the frame on the bottom. That way the skuff is held within the walls of the frame as it is skuffed. The skuff is placed in the frame and is gently pushed back and forth over the screen with a pusher, like a credit card.
Making the best grade of hash can be done by applying almost no pressure to the skuff as it is moved around on the screen. There’s no way that a flat screen can produce as much of the top product as a drum machine, since a lot of the capitate glands will not be in contact with the screen unless pushed into it. The pressure of the tumbling skuff accomplishes that in a gentle fashion in a drum machine, but extra pressure applied by hand will cause contaminants to be expressed in flat screening.
Additional pressure on the skuff is best done by tilting the plastic pusher card into the skuff as it is moved across the screen. But there is a limit to how much pressure can be applied before vegetable material starts to break off and be passed through the screen. Some vegetable material is acceptable in the lowest grades of hash, but too much pressure will produce a light green product that does not provide the expansive rush expected from hash.
It is difficult, if possible, to extract all the glands from the skuff by flat screening. I’ve found that the exhausted flat-screen skuff is still quite potent, and is welcome by smokers who remember the good old days when you could sit and smoke Mexican grass for hours on end, a social event lost in modern times due to the uniform high potency of home-grown pot.
Although flat skuffing is not as productive or as easy to control as a drum machine, it brings gland hash within the range of anyone with a few dollars and some bud trim.
Drum machines
A drum machine tumbles the skuff inside of a wheel with fabric attached to the rim, like a squirrel cage. The key to the drum machine is the slow speed it operates at. Time replaces the pressure of flat screening, the longer the run, the more contaminants. But proper drum screening never introduces vegetable material into the hash, as it never handles the skuff vigorously enough to crumble the leaves. A drum machine can gently strip nearly all the drug containing glands from plant material.
Drum machines can be purchased from at least one supplier in Holland who calls their product the "Pollinator". The Pollinator may be a nice machine, but the price is very high considering how simple the machine is. A home-built machine can easily be made for a few dollars by anyone with a reasonable degree of home handyman skills, which is just about a given for cannabis growers. Here’s a link to an article I wrote that describes how I built my machine, and some pictures:
Here are the plans with photos:
The article describes the method for using a drum machine (http://www.overgrow.com/iss1/hashwithot_3.html), and I’ll extract some of that material here:
"I start with a 137 mesh screen, the tightest I use. The first pass is for about 20 minutes, and that should just knock off gland heads. That material is collected and compressed by hand, and it's really special. A small piece, like a shrew dropping, provides a wonderful head rush, like the best vaporizer hit you've ever had. You can't do it too often though, or the rush effect is reduced considerably. Twice a week is about the maximum for me. I then run the 137 screen for about 45 minutes, maybe an hour. This grade of powder consists mostly of heads and stalks, compresses easily, and is premium grade hash, with a nice lift off and a mellow high.
"Then I might run the 137 mesh again for another hour, which produces a second grade of hash, with a fair amount of contaminants, cellular hairs and mineral trichomes. This grade also compresses easily, and has a nice taste. Finally I switch wheels to the 83 grade and run it for a couple of hours, sometimes with a rubber ball in the cage to work the material, especially if the skuff consists of large pieces of leaf. This grade usually compresses with some work, but sometimes it is necessary to mix in a few drops of water and heat the powder mixture in the microwave for brief periods, a little at a time, until it can be worked. I like the utility grade, because you can smoke more than a couple of shrew droppings, and who doesn't like to smoke hash?"
Who indeed? Obtaining a drum machine for yourself will involve some work, but it’s really worth the effort. Nothing makes hash as well as a drum machine.
The blender method
Here is a very clever method for extraction, which takes advantage of the glands sinking in water while the vegetable material floats. It isn’t at all clear to me why that should be, just another remarkable feature of a remarkable plant. This is from a post from Shiva on the subject:
" . . . The basic idea is that ice water makes the glands not sticky so they just have to be loosened from the leaf and then the glands will be suspended in the cold water, and will eventually sink as the glands are heavier than water. Here is the equipment check list: Blender . . . ice cubes, 2 2-liter coke bottles . . . 2 ft/length aquarium tubing or similar, funnel, 90-line silk screen (more experiments in the future) coffee filters and good trim leaf (wet might be best?). There are improvements that could be made in total recovery but . . . this worked out well. I yielded 4.5 grams of the good stuff with 1/2 a grocery bag of trim leaf.
"Process: Grab your blender, fill it halfway with trim leaf and add water and ice cubes. You don't have to have tons of ice, were not making a frozen margarita, we shooting for green, frothy, icy-cold smoothie, I blended each batch for less than a minute, when it looked like major turbulence had most likely loosened the good stuff I stopped ... probably 40 secs worth. Use the funnel and the 90-line silk screen to make a filter and filter your smoothie into the 2 litter Coke bottles. Squeeze as much liquid out of the filtered leaf in the silk screen filter.
"After you fill up your bottles . . . put [them] in the fridge to keep it cold, after 30 minutes you'll notice a nice blond looking substance on the bottom of your bottles. Grab your aquarium hose tubing a make a siphon to take the extraneous green liquid out of the bottle. I then repeat the smoothie making, silk screen filtering, and fill the bottles back up with new solution to let settle for another 30 mins and then siphon again. You want to siphon so you have less volume to ultimately filter ... I left an inch of liquid above the top of the resin collected on the bottom of the bottles. Grab your funnel and put a coffee filter in it, and now pour what's left at the bottom of your Coke bottles into the funnel. When the liquid has drained, Spoon glands into a glass dish to let dry. I used a heat mat to speed up this process ... I spread the glands out to dry them quicker and then pushed them together like play-dough. 4.5 grams of nice hash.
"The real trick to making blender hash is the ice cubes. I've also decided that dry leaves are easier to use. I was filling the blender about half way with leaves, and then the rest of the way almost to the top with ice, and then water up pretty high. I'd blend it up for about a minute and strain it. You want the blended leaf and water solution was very cold, otherwise the glands won't separate as well . . ."
Thanks, Shiva. Here’s a later post by Tumbleweed adding his perspective:
". . . I didn't rush the process at all, I actually found I needed to let it sit a little bit longer before pouring off the excess liquid. Also, if you kind of gently tap the bottom of the jar on the table, it seems to get some of the floaters to settle to the bottom. Afterwards, I just scrapped it off the paper filter and formed a little pyramid with it in my fingers and let it dry over night . . . . [What follows may be a post by someone else ]:
"It is really easy, you can't hardly mess up. First, put 16 oz or so, of water in a blender. Add a large handful of leaves, put in 3 or 4 ice cubes. Blend at medium-high speed for 3-4 minutes or so. Just make sure everything is chopped very finely. You should now have just under a quart of slush. Second, you will need a gold reusable coffee filter, I got mine at K-mart for about 6 dollars. Get a large mouth quart mason jar, and strain your Slurpee mixture through it. Once you have strained all the liquid through, run some more water through the leaf material to wash any extra trichomes through, go ahead and fill up the quart jar.
"After a few minutes you will notice a white collection at the bottom of the jar, this is the trichomes, let the trichomes settle to the bottom for about 20-30 minutes. Next, pour off the top 2/3's of the filtered green water, leaving the settled trichomes on the bottom. Add more ice water to get the green stuff out, and again let the trichomes settle to the bottom for about 20 minutes, repeat this step one more time. Pour off as much water as you can without pouring off trichomes, filter the resulting trichome/water mix through a paper coffee filter. The trichomes will not go through the paper, but the water will. When all water has gone through, you will be left with slightly wet, cold, mass of trichomes, they will be easy to work with and press. Hint: I use some toilet paper to absorb the water from the coffee filter as a last step, this helps it to dry fast. If I made this sound more complicated than it is, sorry. It's really easy and hard to mess up."
Thanks, Tumbleweed. The blender hash method isn't a controlled process, so you get what corresponds to a fairly loose mesh hash from a skuff machine, a little dark green color possibly, but certainly a fair amount of hairs and mineral trichomes. I'm not knocking it, mind you, it's basically the same quality hash I prefer to smoke most often. It's just that with the skuff machine screening you can control the output by varying the mesh size and the time the unit is running to get various grades of hash. And, I can’t speak for the blender, but a drum machine is nearly completely efficient at extracting the drug potential from the plant.
Bulk methods
One of the methods above is probably best for small growers with a few ounces of skuff to deal with at a time. Commercial growers could build a large drum machine, but other methods, similar to that used in hash commerce, may be more suitable. Ganja Baron describes his method:
" First I rub [the skuff] hard through a wide mesh screen made from silk stockings. You will get a mixture of fine plant material and resin glands, which you put on a fine silk screen. You tap the screen lightly and the resin will fall through the screen, and the plant matter will stay on top. You can do this several times with the same material until you notice that the quality is not sticky enough after it has gone through the second process."
He goes on to discuss the usual method for pressing hash using heat:
"You take the powder put it in the cellophane bag, or fold a bag out of the cellophane. You can wet the cellophane at the edges to make it stick. Close the bag and distribute it evenly. The powder should be about a quarter inch thick. It doesn’t matter if the cellophane is put once or twice around the material. Fold it nice and evenly. With a needle you make a few holes into the cellophane bag about 1 inch distance to each other. Put the bag on the table. Wet a few pages of the newspaper and put it on top of the cellophane It should be wet but not soaking wet. A clothes iron is set at low to medium heat. Now put the iron on the paper and press it down for about 10-20 seconds. If the bag is bigger you have to move the iron and press it down again until you have plaited the whole bag. Take the newspaper off and turn the bag, which now has gotten a bit thinner and changed into a hashish loaf, put the wet newspaper paper back on and plait the other side. If you like it you can now take a bottle and roll it with force forth and back from both sides. Let the bag cool down for a minute or two and remove the cellophane. If you want that your loaf looks really nice you take a knife and straighten the edges, by cutting of the hashish at the sides where the loaf tends to get a bit thin."
"Opinions vary on the use of heat and pressure, some prefer loosely pressed stuff, others the dark stuff pressed with a bit of heat. I like this method because it produces nice looking, darker colored, easy to handle loafs."
Loafs of hash. Big growers make me jealous! Ganja Baron also suggests freezing skuff if the pot is of a type that produces chunks of glands stuck together, like Northern Lights. Pictures I have seen of some of the "Whites" shows long stalks that lay down and tangle over each other. Perhaps a gentle drum skuffer would have a problem with this type of pot as well.
Conclusion
I hope this survey has been useful. Thanks to many growers who provided indirect input, especially the ones I stole from directly, and to Michael Starks’ book "Marijuana Chemistry" for the botany (great book). And thanks, of course, to oldtimer1 who provided the inspiration to get me into the drum game.
Well there's dry sifted kief, pressed kief, Water extraction, Iso-alcohol extraction, BHO/ Butane extraction, marble/jelly hash, and finger hash to name the top dogs.
How do I make Ice Hash?
This FAQ will describe my ICE hash method, which has a high yield due to the “shaking” process. I yielded between 1/3 and 1/2 gram of sweet, blonde, powdered product from 3/4 oz dried batch of scrog garbage.
Making the mixture
I take the bud leaf and grind it to a powdery consistency in a regular coffee grinder. I find that a 1/4 oz can be done at a time.
I pour the powder into a 1/2 gallon plastic milk container, using a rolled up piece of printer paper (or wax paper) as a funnel.
I then placed 7 normal sized ice cubes on a small folded towel, beat the crap out of it with a rubber mallet on a butcher block to produce a fine, almost powdered ice. The ice is then put into the milk container.
A few ounces of cold water is put into milk container, just enough to maybe go 3/4" above what was in there.
Note: Roughly 1/3 weed garbage, 1/3 ice, 1/3 water based on height within the container, NOT weight or volume! Total height was about 2-1/2" with all ingredients.
Shake and filter
Shake the capped container vigorously for a full ten minutes, broken into two 5-minute sessions. 5 minutes shaking, then 5 minutes to settle in the freezer.
Next step is to pour the concoction through a "permanent" drip coffee filter (works well; has a tight mesh, resulting in cleaner, blonder hash). I pour, then press with my fingers. You want to get the moisture pushed through to the bowl. Take your time. The drippings go into a bowl underneath.
Use a sharp knife to cut the top half off of the milk container and spoon anything you can't pour into the strainer. When you've pressed it close to the limit, toss the rest into the toilet.
Ice
I pre-set my freezer to the max; place the bowl of filtered greenish-brown water into it, take care not to disturb it. The heavy trichomes will sink to the bottom of cold water. THAT'S what you want! I tap the side of the bowl with a spoon once every 10 minutes to help the trichomes settle to the bottom of the bowl.
After about 40 minutes, the fluid in the bowl will skim over with ice. I then remove the bowl, taking care not to let the liquid swish around. Wait a minute or two for the ice to melt.
Use a turkey baster to gently suck out the greenish fluid on the top, taking care not to disturb the residue on the bottom. Paper towels can be used to suck up the last 1/4" of fluid, again being careful not to disturb the dark residue. Suck up as much liquid as you can.
Gently dry out the remaining paste with a hair dryer until it reaches a light uniform color and appears solid. Use an ordinary spoon to scrape the mixing bowl, and ENJOY!
A summary of hash extraction methods
Hash is the collected and pressed resin glands from buds. The best hash is "blond" (in reference to its light tan color); only the pure resin crystals are used. Green hash is the next grade, it contains much more of the plant matter than the blond hash giving it its characteristic green appearance. Black hash is generally either hand rubbed hash, which has turned black because of THC oxidation or a mixture of keef (the crystalline resin glands) and other psychoactive alkaloids.
The methods of collecting this resin vary depending on who makes it and what materials are being used. Typically, most hash is made from the manicured leaf left over from trimming fresh pot, but some is made from buds, and can be chemically extracted from all manner of herb leftovers. Real hash handles easily and tends to stick to itself, instead of you. Under very brief heat, it becomes very soft and easy to crumble or smear into little hash curls that can be rolled into cigarettes, or thrown on bowls or hot knives. Remember the best hash is made from the best bud!
Traditional Preparations
1. Crystal collection
A) Hand rubbing - Hand rubbing is the practice of accumulating lots of resin on your hands then rubbing them together to produce small black balls of hash. Scissors hash is very similar, it is taken off of manicure scissors when pruning bud. This is probably the least effective method of making hash because the hand rubbing breaks open the resin glands oxidizing THC and giving it a black color, but sometimes it's convenient if handling lots of bud.
B) Sieving - On it's most crude level, a sieve is a piece of cloth stretched over a pot, which you break up, handle, bounce, or scrape your buds over to knock the resin glands off into the bowl. The best screens are sized at 150 microns and only allow the resin glands and some fine debris to fall through. They can be obtained from hobby and art supply stores. Green keef can be re-sieved to make it ¡¥more blonde¡¦, the plant matter will tend to float on the screen while the crystals fall through. Alternatively, hash can then be turned over a 50-micron screen, which will allow most of the debris to fall through, but leaves the keef. To maximize the resin collection, the bud or budleaf trimmings should be extremely dry and cold. Put it in the freezer for a few hours before processing. Cruder sieved type hash is made bye drying or rolling dried pot in burlap bags, the resins tend to stick to the sides leaving hash.
C) Water extraction - A crude water extraction can be done with some really dry pot and a jar full of ice water. Don't fill the jar more than 1/5 full of material, throw in some ice cubes and cold water, shake, and voila! The resin tends to sink to the bottom while the leaf matter floats. The vegetation is removed the crystals caught in a coffee filter. A more advanced extraction can be done with 150-micron pore bag to separate the crystals from the leaf. The remaining leaf can be saved to make butter or honey oil.
2. Pressing
Once the keef has been collected it can then be pressed into hash. Keef needs pressure and warmth to become that dense lovely THC laden wonder called hash. Very small amounts can be pressed between your fingers and rolled into a ball (if done in a piece of cellophane it will help inhibit THC degradation). Alternatively, a precision press can be used, it's important to have a good die fitted to 0.001 inches, unless you want to squeeze a bunch of your hard won keef to smash into the gap in the die. Once pressed, most hash tends to darken on the outside but remains blond in the middle. Make sure to pre-press water-extracted hash in a piece of cellophane to help get rid of the water.
Chemical preparations
1. Volatile solvent extraction
A volatile solvent extraction is the simplest method of chemical extraction since it involves simple equipment and solvents that are liquids at room temperature, but low boiling points. Good choices for solvents are alcohols and fine petroleum distillates (EG 99% isopropyl alcohol, 95% ethyl alcohol, and white gas), ketones tend to redux with the cannibinoids, and naphia and heavier solvents are too hard to drive off. Pick a solvent that boils at less than 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and exhibits non-polar tendencies.
Soak your dry weed in the solvent for a few hours to a couple of days, the longer you soak it the more trash comes with the solvent. Then separate the solvent and evaporate. The left over gum is chemically extracted hash. Typically it tends to have a green/black color because most solvent also dissolve plant waxes and chlorophyll, as well as cannibinoids. This green oil can be cleaned from dark green -> light green -> red -> amber using an activated carbon filter on the solution before evaporation. Just fill a tube or funnel with activated carbon (fish tanks, air filters) and run the juice through it. If allowed to soak in ethyl alcohol (usually vodka) and left diluted the green solution is usually refereed to as green dragon, and is drank for some intense effects.
2. Lipid based extraction
Pot butter is easy to make and can be made with butter or any other high fat cooking product (oil, ghee, margarine, Crisco, etc). There are a lot of ways to get the THC to go into the butter, but as far as I see it, only one really easy way- that's to boil it. Step by step:
A. Use the right amount of dope for your butter. My standardized dose is one gram of keefed manicure, trimmings or schwag bud per hit. I generally achieve this by using one stick of butter per ounce of pot. Most recipes I cook with would use 1/4 cup of butter, so I split each recipe into 14 units of cookies, rice krispy treats, toffee, etc.
B. Place your dope and butter in a pot with a couple quarts of water. Bring the mixture to a boil then simmer for one to two hours.
C. Line a bowl big enough to fit the mix, with cloth. Pour the hot mix into the bowl. Once it is cool enough to handle, strain all of the pot out of the mix by carefully lifting the cloth. Be sure to squeeze the mess real good, before throwing the waste vegetable matter into your compost heap.
D. Allow the bowl with water and pot butter mix to sit at room temperature for several hours until cool. Then put the whole mix in the refrigerator over night.
E. In the morning, carefully remove the layer of hardened butter off the top of the water. You did let it sit and cool slowly, so it came off as one neat piece, instead of lots of watery grains. Let it sit on an uncovered plate in the fridge, flipping occasionally until it dries out. Store it in the freezer to keep or cook with it.
3. Direct isomerization
Sometimes if pot is totally rank and crappy, or you're dealing with a bunch of roaches, trimmings, or some other inferior source of THC it is desirable to go well beyond what a simple volatile solvent or super critical fluid extraction can do. You want to convert all those free available cannibidiols into more potent THC analogs and cannabinols.
This technique also will render a fully decarboxylized end product, as well as destroying many terpenes and aromatics which can improve or destroy a product depending on the original quality. It is important to understand this is not a full conversion to ƒ´9-THC, but to THC analogs and more active cannibidiols, and is included in this discussion more as an educational exercise. Basic isomerization takes place with a quick reflux of your cannabinoids in the presence of any H+ source (acid).
1. Treat your stuff as if it were a volatile solvent or critical fluid extraction.
2. With the remaining resin, dissolve it in a non-polar solvent. Be sure to use one that separates easily from water such as naphia or white gas.
3. Treat this mixture with sulphuric or hydrochloric acid until a pH around 1-2 is reached (approximately one drop of concentrated acid per gram of extract).
4. Place this in a reflux apparatus and cook it for about an hour. In case you¡¦re not familiar this is basically just Pyrex breaker with a large looped tube plugged into the top. This will cause the solution inside to be exposed to elevated pressures as well as temperatures, as well as preserving all of the original contents. Simply simply boiling the mixture in a small strong covered vessel can mimic it.
5. Wash what¡¦s left with water, keep the oil layer.
6. Neutralize your mix (bring it to pH 7.0) with a little Sodium Hydroxide solution (pH 9.0) or baking soda then rewash it with water. Save the oil layer again.
7. Allow your oil to evaporate and you should be left with a sticky amber liquid that contains almost pure THC.
I would recommend an extraction for a starting point, since if you start clean your product can only get much better. Once you¡¦ve obtained nearly pure THC, converting it to an acetate is supposed to produce more psychedelic like effects.
More THC analog modifications can be made (to yield pure ƒ´9 or ƒ´6 THC), but generally the consumption of the original products in these reactions makes them hardly worth while (usually 5-20% yeild, so it may be half as psychoactive but you have 5 times as much of it in the beginning).
Hash oil
Hash oil is basically hash in which the walls of the resin glands have been broken down leaving a gooey oil. Often chemically-extracted hash will be almost an oil, or keef can be dissolved in alcohol, then the alcohol is allowed to evaporate. Hash oil can be smoked like hash in cigarettes, bowls, hot knives, reconstituted into a more hash like substance with the addition of ash or powdered plant matter, or applied to bud to make it more potent (way more potent!).
Hash additives and preparations
A variety of different plant extracts can be, and sometimes have been, added to hash for more a more intense psychedelic experience. Generally only a very small portion of additive is added for the amount of keef available, maxing out around 20% additive and around 5% additive on the low end.
Almost any psychotropic herb could be used. Screen your additives into your keef before pressing.
What is hash and how do I make it?
The drug produced by the cannabis plant is principally contained in multi-cellular structures on the surfaces of the leaves and flower parts called stalked capitate trichomes, or multicellular glandular hairs. These structures are shaped like water towers or mushrooms, a ball on top off a stalk. Light glistening off the surface of these translucent structures is what causes the "frosted" appearance of plant parts populated with such glands. The ball structure, or gland head, consists of a number of radially arranged cells which secrete cannabinoid containing oils. The oils collect beneath a waxy cuticle, which occasionally bursts, releasing the oil to form a sticky resin as it dries. This resin may make up the cuticle or the cuticle may be some other substance, the truth is apparently not known. The gland head structure contains the highest concentration of the drug THC, followed by the stalks. The tissues of the plant supposedly contain a small amount of cannabinoids, but it is minimal in my experience, or at least there is little THC content.
The stalked capitate glands are not the only surface structure on cannabis plants. Multicellular sessile or bulbous glands hug the surfaces of some leaves, and are said to contain cannabinoids. In my experience they contribute little to the drug content of the plant. Some authors apparently believe these structures to be juvenile or stunted stalked trichomes. Cystolith hairs are blunt, pointed objects which contain calcium carbonate crystals. They look like faceted traffic cones, and do not have a ball on top. Finally, the plant also produces unicellular hairs, which indeed do look like small hairs. Cystolith glands and unicellular hairs do not produce drug chemicals.
Cannabinoids are chemicals apparently unique to cannabis, consisting of THC, CBN and CBD, and a set of relatives with similar effects, THCV, CBV and CBDV. Many plants contain both sets of chemicals, and in common practice only the first set of abbreviations are used. THC is responsible for the "high" the plant produces, and there are several different versions of THC from different plants. CBN is said to increase the THC effect slightly, and CBD actually blocks the THC effect. CBD can be converted into THC by treating extracted oil with sulfuric acid, a step in the oil trade called "isomerization".
Hash is made by knocking the trichomes off the surface of the plant, by mechanical action typically, and by pressing the glands together into a ball or cake. Depending on the method used, the hash may consist of gland heads and stalks and various contaminants, such as the elements mentioned above, and small bits and pieces of plant tissue. Hash made purely from gland heads is very strong and compresses to a hard plastic-like lump with hand pressure. Hash with a lot of contaminants may require heat and pressure to compact.
The effect of smoking hash can differ from the parent plant, as the heads of the stalked glands may contain more THC in comparison to the side chemicals than the stalks and the tissues of the plant. Hash made only from the heads of the stalked glands is very potent, and can create an uplifting high similar to a vaporizer hit, though deeper and more persistent. As more stalks are added to the hash, the character of the high changes in various ways, though typically good hash has a strong initial rush and a mild, soft letdown. I have found that the varietal character of the parent plants is diminished in hash. The cystolith and hair trichomes add nothing to the high, but may add to the flavor. Essential oils are distributed throughout the plant, making up about 10% of the stalked glands by weight. The essential oil content of the contaminants is apparently not known.
Methods of small scale hash production
We’ll ignore the hash making methods used in cannabis growing countries for the commercial markets and focus solely on the home grower. There are three methods in common use.
The first is flat screening, typically using a silk screen frame with fine plastic fabric. Fine steel screens are also used in flat screening. The method involves rubbing cannabis trim across the surface of the screen, the glands and other contaminants dropping through the screen to be collected on a surface like a piece of glass. A flat screen can also be used with an electric motor rigged to produce a back and forth or vibrating motion.
The second method also uses screen, but in a rotating drum, typically motorized using a rotisserie motor or the like. A rotating machine takes less skill to use, substituting time for pressure in flat screening. A drum machine can remove nearly all the glands without depositing any plant tissue. That would be very difficult with a flat screen.
Finally, the glands can also be knocked off the plant by agitating the material in ice water. The glands sink to the bottom of the mixture and can be sieved, dried and pressed together. While this method requires only a blender and a coffee filter, it seems to produce more contaminants than screening, and the output can’t be controlled as well, if at all.
Before discussing each method in more detail, let’s talk about the preparation of the raw materials.
Preparing "skuff"
Skuff, or "shake" or bud trim, is leaves and undersized flower parts that are trimmed off cannabis flowers or buds. Unless glands can be seen on the surface of the leaves, they should not be collected as skuff, as all they can provide to the hash is contaminants. Sometimes a leaf will have a frosted appearance, but on closer examination the structures on the leaf turn out to consist principally of hairs, common on the stalks of fan leaves. The first tool needed in making hash is a magnifying glass to observe the plant surfaces. I find that a 16x "loupe" is sufficient for this purpose. Inexpensive 30x plastic scopes can apparently be found in toy stores.
In order to be ready for smoking, the THC oil must be dried. At the same time in order to allow mechanical skuffing, the plant material must also be dried. It is not necessary that the skuff be "cured" as buds are, because the vegetable material will not be used in any way. But I have found that the skuff needs to be thoroughly dried over a long period of time, at least a month, though I prefer two. Skuff processed before that time is not as potent as it should be, and the resulting hash seems never to dry properly to gain the potency back.
I have read many times that skuffing should be done in a cold, dry atmosphere and that the skuff itself should be crispy dry. For small scale skuffing, that is not only incorrect, it is also counter-productive, as it accelerates the expression of contaminants from the skuff. I used to believe in cold and dry until oldtimer1 taught me different; try it and see for yourself. The product of the first 20 minutes of skuffing on a drum machine should only be the heads of stalked capitate glands. Skuffing done in cold, dry conditions will prematurely kick out a lot of cystolith mineral trichomes. I recommend skuffing at low room temperature, in the 60’s say, and at normal humidity, although I’ve made excellent hash in somewhat colder and hotter conditions.
The skuff should also not be physically altered. A drum machine will remove nearly all the drug potential from the plant, regardless of the shape and size of the leaf parts. With large leaf pieces, like those produced by the buds of certain strains, a mechanical aid can be introduced into the machine, like a rubber ball. The ball will gently press the leaf pieces to the screen over time. Crunching up the skuff will only serve to introduce vegetable contaminants into the hash, and will release cystolith and unicellular hairs into the first product from the skuffing, a product which should be the most pure. Be gentle with the skuff.
Flat screening
Flat screens can be made from commercial steel fabric, usually available by special order in printing supply shops, or from plastic silk screen fabric. Fortunately, printing supply shops sell stacks of pre-made plastic screens in wood frames for a modest price, typically $15-25, depending on the size. Because the grade of the hash from a flat screen depends on the vigor of the handling, screens with smaller holes are better, in the range of 110 lines per inch to 137 at the high end. A 125 "mesh" frame is a good compromise. The silk screen material is attached by glue to the bottom of the wood frame, leaving a well on top with the wood pieces forming the sides.
Making good hash from flat screens depends on a lot of personal involvement. The method is simple. The frame is placed over a collection surface, like a sheet of glass or a mirror. I like to attach small wooden blocks to the bottom of the screen frame so that it can be used right side up, with the flat side of the frame on the bottom. That way the skuff is held within the walls of the frame as it is skuffed. The skuff is placed in the frame and is gently pushed back and forth over the screen with a pusher, like a credit card.
Making the best grade of hash can be done by applying almost no pressure to the skuff as it is moved around on the screen. There’s no way that a flat screen can produce as much of the top product as a drum machine, since a lot of the capitate glands will not be in contact with the screen unless pushed into it. The pressure of the tumbling skuff accomplishes that in a gentle fashion in a drum machine, but extra pressure applied by hand will cause contaminants to be expressed in flat screening.
Additional pressure on the skuff is best done by tilting the plastic pusher card into the skuff as it is moved across the screen. But there is a limit to how much pressure can be applied before vegetable material starts to break off and be passed through the screen. Some vegetable material is acceptable in the lowest grades of hash, but too much pressure will produce a light green product that does not provide the expansive rush expected from hash.
It is difficult, if possible, to extract all the glands from the skuff by flat screening. I’ve found that the exhausted flat-screen skuff is still quite potent, and is welcome by smokers who remember the good old days when you could sit and smoke Mexican grass for hours on end, a social event lost in modern times due to the uniform high potency of home-grown pot.
Although flat skuffing is not as productive or as easy to control as a drum machine, it brings gland hash within the range of anyone with a few dollars and some bud trim.
Drum machines
A drum machine tumbles the skuff inside of a wheel with fabric attached to the rim, like a squirrel cage. The key to the drum machine is the slow speed it operates at. Time replaces the pressure of flat screening, the longer the run, the more contaminants. But proper drum screening never introduces vegetable material into the hash, as it never handles the skuff vigorously enough to crumble the leaves. A drum machine can gently strip nearly all the drug containing glands from plant material.
Drum machines can be purchased from at least one supplier in Holland who calls their product the "Pollinator". The Pollinator may be a nice machine, but the price is very high considering how simple the machine is. A home-built machine can easily be made for a few dollars by anyone with a reasonable degree of home handyman skills, which is just about a given for cannabis growers. Here’s a link to an article I wrote that describes how I built my machine, and some pictures:
Here are the plans with photos:
The article describes the method for using a drum machine (http://www.overgrow.com/iss1/hashwithot_3.html), and I’ll extract some of that material here:
"I start with a 137 mesh screen, the tightest I use. The first pass is for about 20 minutes, and that should just knock off gland heads. That material is collected and compressed by hand, and it's really special. A small piece, like a shrew dropping, provides a wonderful head rush, like the best vaporizer hit you've ever had. You can't do it too often though, or the rush effect is reduced considerably. Twice a week is about the maximum for me. I then run the 137 screen for about 45 minutes, maybe an hour. This grade of powder consists mostly of heads and stalks, compresses easily, and is premium grade hash, with a nice lift off and a mellow high.
"Then I might run the 137 mesh again for another hour, which produces a second grade of hash, with a fair amount of contaminants, cellular hairs and mineral trichomes. This grade also compresses easily, and has a nice taste. Finally I switch wheels to the 83 grade and run it for a couple of hours, sometimes with a rubber ball in the cage to work the material, especially if the skuff consists of large pieces of leaf. This grade usually compresses with some work, but sometimes it is necessary to mix in a few drops of water and heat the powder mixture in the microwave for brief periods, a little at a time, until it can be worked. I like the utility grade, because you can smoke more than a couple of shrew droppings, and who doesn't like to smoke hash?"
Who indeed? Obtaining a drum machine for yourself will involve some work, but it’s really worth the effort. Nothing makes hash as well as a drum machine.
The blender method
Here is a very clever method for extraction, which takes advantage of the glands sinking in water while the vegetable material floats. It isn’t at all clear to me why that should be, just another remarkable feature of a remarkable plant. This is from a post from Shiva on the subject:
" . . . The basic idea is that ice water makes the glands not sticky so they just have to be loosened from the leaf and then the glands will be suspended in the cold water, and will eventually sink as the glands are heavier than water. Here is the equipment check list: Blender . . . ice cubes, 2 2-liter coke bottles . . . 2 ft/length aquarium tubing or similar, funnel, 90-line silk screen (more experiments in the future) coffee filters and good trim leaf (wet might be best?). There are improvements that could be made in total recovery but . . . this worked out well. I yielded 4.5 grams of the good stuff with 1/2 a grocery bag of trim leaf.
"Process: Grab your blender, fill it halfway with trim leaf and add water and ice cubes. You don't have to have tons of ice, were not making a frozen margarita, we shooting for green, frothy, icy-cold smoothie, I blended each batch for less than a minute, when it looked like major turbulence had most likely loosened the good stuff I stopped ... probably 40 secs worth. Use the funnel and the 90-line silk screen to make a filter and filter your smoothie into the 2 litter Coke bottles. Squeeze as much liquid out of the filtered leaf in the silk screen filter.
"After you fill up your bottles . . . put [them] in the fridge to keep it cold, after 30 minutes you'll notice a nice blond looking substance on the bottom of your bottles. Grab your aquarium hose tubing a make a siphon to take the extraneous green liquid out of the bottle. I then repeat the smoothie making, silk screen filtering, and fill the bottles back up with new solution to let settle for another 30 mins and then siphon again. You want to siphon so you have less volume to ultimately filter ... I left an inch of liquid above the top of the resin collected on the bottom of the bottles. Grab your funnel and put a coffee filter in it, and now pour what's left at the bottom of your Coke bottles into the funnel. When the liquid has drained, Spoon glands into a glass dish to let dry. I used a heat mat to speed up this process ... I spread the glands out to dry them quicker and then pushed them together like play-dough. 4.5 grams of nice hash.
"The real trick to making blender hash is the ice cubes. I've also decided that dry leaves are easier to use. I was filling the blender about half way with leaves, and then the rest of the way almost to the top with ice, and then water up pretty high. I'd blend it up for about a minute and strain it. You want the blended leaf and water solution was very cold, otherwise the glands won't separate as well . . ."
Thanks, Shiva. Here’s a later post by Tumbleweed adding his perspective:
". . . I didn't rush the process at all, I actually found I needed to let it sit a little bit longer before pouring off the excess liquid. Also, if you kind of gently tap the bottom of the jar on the table, it seems to get some of the floaters to settle to the bottom. Afterwards, I just scrapped it off the paper filter and formed a little pyramid with it in my fingers and let it dry over night . . . . [What follows may be a post by someone else ]:
"It is really easy, you can't hardly mess up. First, put 16 oz or so, of water in a blender. Add a large handful of leaves, put in 3 or 4 ice cubes. Blend at medium-high speed for 3-4 minutes or so. Just make sure everything is chopped very finely. You should now have just under a quart of slush. Second, you will need a gold reusable coffee filter, I got mine at K-mart for about 6 dollars. Get a large mouth quart mason jar, and strain your Slurpee mixture through it. Once you have strained all the liquid through, run some more water through the leaf material to wash any extra trichomes through, go ahead and fill up the quart jar.
"After a few minutes you will notice a white collection at the bottom of the jar, this is the trichomes, let the trichomes settle to the bottom for about 20-30 minutes. Next, pour off the top 2/3's of the filtered green water, leaving the settled trichomes on the bottom. Add more ice water to get the green stuff out, and again let the trichomes settle to the bottom for about 20 minutes, repeat this step one more time. Pour off as much water as you can without pouring off trichomes, filter the resulting trichome/water mix through a paper coffee filter. The trichomes will not go through the paper, but the water will. When all water has gone through, you will be left with slightly wet, cold, mass of trichomes, they will be easy to work with and press. Hint: I use some toilet paper to absorb the water from the coffee filter as a last step, this helps it to dry fast. If I made this sound more complicated than it is, sorry. It's really easy and hard to mess up."
Thanks, Tumbleweed. The blender hash method isn't a controlled process, so you get what corresponds to a fairly loose mesh hash from a skuff machine, a little dark green color possibly, but certainly a fair amount of hairs and mineral trichomes. I'm not knocking it, mind you, it's basically the same quality hash I prefer to smoke most often. It's just that with the skuff machine screening you can control the output by varying the mesh size and the time the unit is running to get various grades of hash. And, I can’t speak for the blender, but a drum machine is nearly completely efficient at extracting the drug potential from the plant.
Bulk methods
One of the methods above is probably best for small growers with a few ounces of skuff to deal with at a time. Commercial growers could build a large drum machine, but other methods, similar to that used in hash commerce, may be more suitable. Ganja Baron describes his method:
" First I rub [the skuff] hard through a wide mesh screen made from silk stockings. You will get a mixture of fine plant material and resin glands, which you put on a fine silk screen. You tap the screen lightly and the resin will fall through the screen, and the plant matter will stay on top. You can do this several times with the same material until you notice that the quality is not sticky enough after it has gone through the second process."
He goes on to discuss the usual method for pressing hash using heat:
"You take the powder put it in the cellophane bag, or fold a bag out of the cellophane. You can wet the cellophane at the edges to make it stick. Close the bag and distribute it evenly. The powder should be about a quarter inch thick. It doesn’t matter if the cellophane is put once or twice around the material. Fold it nice and evenly. With a needle you make a few holes into the cellophane bag about 1 inch distance to each other. Put the bag on the table. Wet a few pages of the newspaper and put it on top of the cellophane It should be wet but not soaking wet. A clothes iron is set at low to medium heat. Now put the iron on the paper and press it down for about 10-20 seconds. If the bag is bigger you have to move the iron and press it down again until you have plaited the whole bag. Take the newspaper off and turn the bag, which now has gotten a bit thinner and changed into a hashish loaf, put the wet newspaper paper back on and plait the other side. If you like it you can now take a bottle and roll it with force forth and back from both sides. Let the bag cool down for a minute or two and remove the cellophane. If you want that your loaf looks really nice you take a knife and straighten the edges, by cutting of the hashish at the sides where the loaf tends to get a bit thin."
"Opinions vary on the use of heat and pressure, some prefer loosely pressed stuff, others the dark stuff pressed with a bit of heat. I like this method because it produces nice looking, darker colored, easy to handle loafs."
Loafs of hash. Big growers make me jealous! Ganja Baron also suggests freezing skuff if the pot is of a type that produces chunks of glands stuck together, like Northern Lights. Pictures I have seen of some of the "Whites" shows long stalks that lay down and tangle over each other. Perhaps a gentle drum skuffer would have a problem with this type of pot as well.
Conclusion
I hope this survey has been useful. Thanks to many growers who provided indirect input, especially the ones I stole from directly, and to Michael Starks’ book "Marijuana Chemistry" for the botany (great book). And thanks, of course, to oldtimer1 who provided the inspiration to get me into the drum game.