> Edibles do nothing for me so I'm hesitant to try again.
I used to run into the same thing. It takes about four or five times more cannabis to get high when taking it as an edible than smoking or vaping. My understanding is that that's because the first stop for blood leaving the digestive tract is the liver, which immediately breaks down most of it. When you inhale it, the THC gets a chance to hit the brain before it hits the liver, so a smaller dose is much more effective. If you want to read up on this, search on "first pass metabolism," (i.e. the liver gets the drug on the first pass, which applies to all drugs given by mouth). So it costs more to dose orally, but it sure is easier on your lungs.
This video gives a pretty good overview of FPM if you're interested:
Muddiest Point: First Pass Metabolism - YouTube
Calculating the Dosage
Edibles have a bit of a rep for being unpredictable, but I have found that I can make a really good guess of how strong they are going to be just by doing the arithmetic. If good weed is 15% THC, then an ounce--28 grams--will be .15 x 28 = 4.2 grams (4,200 mg) THC. I aim for the Colorado/Washington state standard dosage of 10 mg THC per dose, with a dose being 10 mg THC in 1 ml of tincture or about .8 ml of oil (enough to fill a "OO"-size capsule). Using that standard, 4,200 mg divided would be 420 ten milligram doses, so I need about 420 ml of alcohol.
I think you've seen my write up at my grow log. It's all there with photos:
Scientific's Hydro Dwarf Low Flyer 24/7 Illumination Fireplace Grow Journal - 2017
That should get you in the ballpark, but you usually don't know exactly how much THC your pot has or how effective your process has been, so then you have to "self titrate" to see what works. I always try to take edibles on an empty stomach so they hit faster and more predictably. I take half of the expected dose and then keep doubling every hour until I get where I want to go. (I titrated my coconut oil extraction on a very full stomach and had a long onset and really overdosed and ended up tumbling into bed to watch a light show behind my eyelids.
)
Or you can do like they do in that 1916 USP procedure I pasted in earlier and just keep dosing your dog till he gets uncoordinated.
Decarb
Anyway, as you no doubt have heard, the THC in freshly harvested cannabis is actually a (very weak) organic acid, tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA). When THCA is heated it looses the acid part as a CO2 molecule to become the psychoactive form, THC. So the first step of preparing edibles is to decarboxylate ("decarb") it by simply heating it. Like most cannabis processes, there is a lot of discussion, disagreement, and folklore about the best way to decarb (e.g. this never-ending thread:
Decoding The Holy Grail: Terpene & Cannabinoid Retention - Decarb to Extraction).
However, if you just coarsely grind the herb and spread it on a cookie sheet in a 220 F/105 C oven for 100 minutes, that will do the job. That's high enough to decarboxylate but low enough so you don't boil off all of the low-molecular-weight fellow travelers like the terpenes. (And at that temp you don't totally stink up the house.) When it's done, the herb will have changed from a light green color to a slightly brown toasted color.
Tincture
If you want to make tincture, I strongly recommend that you use 190-proof alcohol ("Everclear" or whatever brand you can find). You can use 151-proof if that's all that's available in your area, but that's as low as I'd go for a good product. The downside of high-proof alcohol is that evaporates really fast (which is no big deal--it just make the medicine more concentrated) and it's super runny so it can leak past seals in the bottles you put it in, so make sure to keep the bottle upright until you're sure it has good seals. Keeping the tincture in the freezer will limit evaporation from the bottle.
After you decarb, basically you just pour the alcohol over the herb and let it sit while the ethanol dissolves the THC and other goodies. The longer you let it sit, the better the extraction, but I think a week is about enough. Some people put it in the freezer. I don't. Filter through a coffee filter and you're done. I usually do a "second wash" of the extracted herb by adding more alcohol and letting it sit. The first extraction tends to be a beautiful deep red-brown. The second wash will pick up more chlorophyll and be greenish (and of course weaker).
Oil
Alternatively, you can soak the leaves in anything oily--clarified butter, olive oil, flax seed oil, coconut oil, etc. I like coconut oil because it's a saturated fat that's semisolid at room temperature so it doesn't leak out of capsules, and because it tastes and smells like a Mounds bar.
When I made my Canna Caps, I just let herb and coconut oil sit in a warm, covered saucepan overnight on the stove's lowest setting and then strained through a coarse wire strainer and filled "OO" size gelatin capsules using a syringe.
Of course you can always just go all paleo like an old buddy of mine who just munches the toasted bud, but he is and always has been a wild man.
And of course, you can start small and just make a scaled down prototype batch.
Making tinctures and oils is fun! It always makes me feel like a medieval monk or the village wise woman. Happy cooking!
