Jon's Sneak It In Auto Grow

Jon said:
Sometimes a kief topper or moonrock. Others I mix two strains of weed in search of taste variations or to smooth out a very high thc strain. So sort of I do that, but not scientifically by a long shot.
Click to expand...
Alright @Jon , let's talk kief.

As you may know I recently switched from using olive oil to extract the cannabinoids over to using Dust which is simply ground up buds. I like the new way to use it as it has a broader usage application (ever put olive oil in your cereal? Yeah, me neither...), but the taste of the plant material can be quite bitter and the digestion a bit of a challenge.

But it seems as though your kief gets the trichomes without much of the plant material which is attractive to me.

So my questions are:

- what do you think the most efficient way to produce the kief would be? I know you mostly use trim scraped gently across a screen, but I've also seen bubble bags. Any others?

- how effective are the various methods at extracting most of the trichomes? I'm not all that concerned about having some plant material in the mix since my current approach uses all of it, but reducing the ratio has its appeal.

- I've started to decarb about half of the harvest and use the other half for its acidic qualities. If one wanted to decarb the kief without setting it on fire, do you think decarbing the buds first would work or would they be too crumbly afterward to process properly? Any other way to do it if one wanted to use in edibles?

- I assume you would get all of the strain tastes and smells in the kief but without the bitterness of the chlorophyll in the plant matterial? So does it taste better? I imagine it digests better.

In any event, kief is totally new to me so any light you can shed is very much welcomed! :thanks:
 
Azimuth said:
Alright @Jon , let's talk kief.

As you may know I recently switched from using olive oil to extract the cannabinoids over to using Dust which is simply ground up buds. I like the new way to use it as it has a broader usage application (ever put olive oil in your cereal? Yeah, me neither...), but the taste of the plant material can be quite bitter and the digestion a bit of a challenge.

But it seems as though your kief gets the trichomes without much of the plant material which is attractive to me.

So my questions are:

- what do you think the most efficient way to produce the kief would be? I know you mostly use trim scraped gently across a screen, but I've also seen bubble bags. Any others?

- how effective are the various methods at extracting most of the trichomes? I'm not all that concerned about having some plant material in the mix since my current approach uses all of it, but reducing the ratio has its appeal.

- I've started to decarb about half of the harvest and use the other half for its acidic qualities. If one wanted to decarb the kief without setting it on fire, do you think decarbing the buds first would work or would they be too crumbly afterward to process properly? Any other way to do it if one wanted to use in edibles?

- I assume you would get all of the strain tastes and smells in the kief but without the bitterness of the chlorophyll in the plant matterial? So does it taste better? I imagine it digests better.

In any event, kief is totally new to me so any light you can shed is very much welcomed! :thanks:
Click to expand...
Ha! Okay @Azimuth, you overestimate me but I’ll do my best.

- most efficient way? I’ve not done it yet, but from what I’ve gathered, dry ice and screened bags seems to generate both the most, and the highest quality, that I’ve seen. My Yoda swears by them, even if he doesn’t mess with kief much anymore. My drummer in PA too, and he’s done the Trim Bin like me and the bags and he says no contest. His piles are huge and snowy white. Or super clean variation of off white, depending on the strain. Kief has different colors too of course. I’m sure there are others, but I’m down with the bags as soon as I’m in PA.

- this question contains an assertion I believe you would be better served to let go. Specifically, this: I'm not all that concerned about having some plant material in the mix since my current approach uses all of it, but reducing the ratio has its appeal. I understand you use it all now. But kief for smoking is different. You want ZERO plant material. Or as close as humanly possible. Here’s why - it tastes like utter crap. Bitter. And it takes a VERY small amount to screw up a batch. If you can taste it, trust me, any person who smokes kief will not want to smoke it. I only bought dispensary kief one time to try it, and mine destroys it, as will yours as long as you keep it clean. I may be a bit fanatical about this, but you tell me. Smoke some clean and less. You’ll see that the difference is dramatic and the kief with leaf material is unpalatable as hell.If I get a load that’s the slightest bit green it gets tossed. That’s when I know I’m done with that batch of trim. Then I bag it for edibles. So how effective are the various ways? I would argue that the way I do it is the worst way. It takes some practice to learn the right pressure and when is best and all that. It’s inefficient and leaves a lot on the table I just can’t get without getting leaf. One way I improve on the yield is to wait until the trim is ultra dry (I put fans on it for days sometimes) then bag it and freeze it overnight. Frozen will drop a lot more trichomes than non, but the leaf also get brittle so you have to do a one first pass only with the frozen, otherwise you’ll get leaf. Again from what I’ve seen, the bags and dry ice seem to max it out best. You’ll get a series in each bag as they get finer and finer. You can see exactly what you’ve removed. And of course dry ice is colder than your freezer. I can’t wait to try it.

- I’ve never decarbed kief. Flower, yes, which I normally do for around 20 minutes at 125 degrees. I don’t know what that would do to the kief standing alone and spread out on a tray I guess. Make it darker I’d guess. And I think it might F up the flavor, but as I say, I never did that. My opinion is that you don’t need to use kief for edibles. I use my kiefed trim, and I still make butter that will rock your world. No matter how you get it off, there will always be enough left on it to make edibles. And when you use the trim for edibles, essentially you ARE using the kief. Might have to adjust your volume a bit to make up for the lost kief, but I never have.

- YES it tastes a world better. It also cures just like weed. It darkens and changes over time. I have jars I haven’t opened in a year. When I do, it has sometimes changed into almost half hash. It also seems to strengthen over time, but that’s probably just me, not sure. Any leaf in it and that entire process is compromised as you cure in the leaf. It gets worse.

I use it to top bong hits and sometimes roll a bit in a joint. It’s important that you dry it after harvesting. It should be bone dry - dust. Otherwise you taste the moisture. So I often dry it in a large bowl before placing in the small tight jars. It also won’t work well at all in a joint unless it’s dry.

That’s what I got Azi. Hope I did okay.
 
If you're mixing kief in with your flower in a bowl or joint, does having plant material in the kief matter (since the rest of the contents is all plant material)?
 
InTheShed said:
If you're mixing kief in with your flower in a bowl or joint, does having plant material in the kief matter (since the rest of the contents is all plant material)?
Click to expand...
You’d be surprised. It’s not the same for whatever reason. That bitter chlorophyll taste permeates the j-bone when you do that. I found out the hard way and it is something you only have to mess up once.
 
Jon said:
You’d be surprised. It’s not the same for whatever reason. That bitter chlorophyll taste permeates the j-bone when you do that. I found out the hard way and it is something you only have to mess up once.
Click to expand...
Otherwise we’d never trim our weed. You know? I’ll sometimes keep some sugars on a trim if they’re WAY coated and sweet, but that chlorophyll taste is what we are avoiding.
 
I thought the point of drying, burping, and curing was to eliminate as much chlorophyll (and other microbe-edible plant material) as possible. Weird that kief would taste worse than whatever green you have left in the buds themselves.

If kief is stripped off the trim early on rather than later on in the process, maybe the microbes that eat the chlorophyll either aren't around or haven't had a chance to do their thing. Might kief with plant material from that stage have more chlorophyll than kief taken after burping/curing?
 
Jon said:
Ha! Okay @Azimuth, you overestimate me but I’ll do my best.

- most efficient way? I’ve not done it yet, but from what I’ve gathered, dry ice and screened bags seems to generate both the most, and the highest quality, that I’ve seen. My Yoda swears by them, even if he doesn’t mess with kief much anymore. My drummer in PA too, and he’s done the Trim Bin like me and the bags and he says no contest. His piles are huge and snowy white. Or super clean variation of off white, depending on the strain. Kief has different colors too of course. I’m sure there are others, but I’m down with the bags as soon as I’m in PA.

- this question contains an assertion I believe you would be better served to let go. Specifically, this: I'm not all that concerned about having some plant material in the mix since my current approach uses all of it, but reducing the ratio has its appeal. I understand you use it all now. But kief for smoking is different. You want ZERO plant material. Or as close as humanly possible. Here’s why - it tastes like utter crap. Bitter. And it takes a VERY small amount to screw up a batch. If you can taste it, trust me, any person who smokes kief will not want to smoke it. I only bought dispensary kief one time to try it, and mine destroys it, as will yours as long as you keep it clean. I may be a bit fanatical about this, but you tell me. Smoke some clean and less. You’ll see that the difference is dramatic and the kief with leaf material is unpalatable as hell.If I get a load that’s the slightest bit green it gets tossed. That’s when I know I’m done with that batch of trim. Then I bag it for edibles. So how effective are the various ways? I would argue that the way I do it is the worst way. It takes some practice to learn the right pressure and when is best and all that. It’s inefficient and leaves a lot on the table I just can’t get without getting leaf. One way I improve on the yield is to wait until the trim is ultra dry (I put fans on it for days sometimes) then bag it and freeze it overnight. Frozen will drop a lot more trichomes than non, but the leaf also get brittle so you have to do a one first pass only with the frozen, otherwise you’ll get leaf. Again from what I’ve seen, the bags and dry ice seem to max it out best. You’ll get a series in each bag as they get finer and finer. You can see exactly what you’ve removed. And of course dry ice is colder than your freezer. I can’t wait to try it.

- I’ve never decarbed kief. Flower, yes, which I normally do for around 20 minutes at 125 degrees. I don’t know what that would do to the kief standing alone and spread out on a tray I guess. Make it darker I’d guess. And I think it might F up the flavor, but as I say, I never did that. My opinion is that you don’t need to use kief for edibles. I use my kiefed trim, and I still make butter that will rock your world. No matter how you get it off, there will always be enough left on it to make edibles. And when you use the trim for edibles, essentially you ARE using the kief. Might have to adjust your volume a bit to make up for the lost kief, but I never have.

- YES it tastes a world better. It also cures just like weed. It darkens and changes over time. I have jars I haven’t opened in a year. When I do, it has sometimes changed into almost half hash. It also seems to strengthen over time, but that’s probably just me, not sure. Any leaf in it and that entire process is compromised as you cure in the leaf. It gets worse.

I use it to top bong hits and sometimes roll a bit in a joint. It’s important that you dry it after harvesting. It should be bone dry - dust. Otherwise you taste the moisture. So I often dry it in a large bowl before placing in the small tight jars. It also won’t work well at all in a joint unless it’s dry.

That’s what I got Azi. Hope I did okay.
Click to expand...
Last thing - I call my Trim Bin the “lazy man’s kief method.” It’s definitely the quickest and easiest way. Just dump the trim into the Bin, let dry, and screen. The Bin was $40. Not putting bags inside bags, accessing dry ice, or whatever. Just quick and easy. I almost always have enough trim that it works for me this way, but like all things pot, I want to make the best of I can. So the Trim Bon retires when I move.
 
InTheShed said:
I thought the point of drying, burping, and curing was to eliminate as much chlorophyll (and other microbe-edible plant material) as possible. Weird that kief would taste worse than whatever green you have left in the buds themselves.

If kief is stripped off the trim early on rather than later on in the process, maybe the microbes that eat the chlorophyll either aren't around or haven't had a chance to do their thing. Might kief with plant material from that stage have more chlorophyll than kief taken after burping/curing?
Click to expand...
Hmm. Interesting question. This is why I told Azi he overestimates me. I honestly don’t have a clue. To try that would mean sacrificing perfectly good buds early. Or, if you mean like wet timming compared to dry trimming (wasn’t quite sure which you meant), that I haven’t tried. Never thought of it and I rarely wet trim. But that would be what, a week or ten days difference? Would it make a diff? Idk! Might try that one though, that’s a good kief experiment.
 
Jon said:
Hmm. Interesting question. This is why I told Azi he overestimates me. I honestly don’t have a clue. To try that would mean sacrificing perfectly good buds early. Or, if you mean like wet timming compared to dry trimming (wasn’t quite sure which you meant), that I haven’t tried. Never thought of it and I rarely wet trim. But that would be what, a week or ten days difference? Would it make a diff? Idk! Might try that one though, that’s a good kief experiment.
Click to expand...
@InTheShed, I’d like to hear that you actually smoked weed and or kief more than I ever wanted to turn a lesbian cuz she was so hot, and I wanted that bad when I was a dumb kid. Lmao!! (That is not intended to be offensive, I’m as Blue as it gets and very heavily support that community).

:rofl:

But joking aside, I know it’s weird, but even your first time ever smoking kief, in a side by side you would taste the difference.
 
Let me see if an example helps explain what I mean. Last weekend I took the trim from the 5 Killer Cookies that was a week old and ran it through my 80 mesh screen (which you pointed out probably lets plant material through). Today I pulled out two jars of trim from my Trainwreck that was harvested about a year ago and did the same thing.

I'm wondering if my week old 5KC trim, which has barely had time for the chlorophyll to burn off (much less get eaten by microbes), has more chlorophyll than the year old trim from the Trainwreck. This assumes the same amount of plant material through the screen in both.
Jon said:
I’d like to hear that you actually smoked weed
Click to expand...
I smoked weed from around 1972 to 1981, when I gave it up because it I started waking up with a weed hangover! Closest I came to smoking kief was the blonde Lebanese hash we would occasionally get, and we obviously had a lot less of that to pass around than the joints rolled from a nickel bag!
 
InTheShed said:
Let me see if an example helps explain what I mean. Last weekend I took the trim from the 5 Killer Cookies that was a week old and ran it through my 80 mesh screen (which you pointed out probably lets plant material through). Today I pulled out two jars of trim from my Trainwreck that was harvested about a year ago and did the same thing.

I'm wondering if my week old 5KC trim, which has barely had time for the chlorophyll to burn off (much less get eaten by microbes), has more chlorophyll than the year old trim from the Trainwreck. This assumes the same amount of plant material through the screen in both.

I smoked weed from around 1972 to 1981, when I gave it up because it I started waking up with a weed hangover! Closest I came to smoking kief was the blonde Lebanese hash we would occasionally get, and we obviously had a lot less of that to pass around than the joints rolled from a nickel bag!
Click to expand...
Ha! Again, great question and now I get exactly what you mean. Unfortunately my answer is still idk. Lol. But surely you have a current kief smoker somewhere in your circle, no? Get them to do the test! They’ll let you know. I can’t do it cuz I never have enough trim to leave be for a year, lol.

I figured you did, just ribbing you a little. How could you not have? But yeah, that’s a while ago. I didn’t smoke my first time until 1982 as a junior in HS. I was a goody goody sports and academics type kid until then. Then everything went to hell. :rofl:
 
Jon said:
Ha! Again, great question and now I get exactly what you mean. Unfortunately my answer is still idk. Lol. But surely you have a current kief smoker somewhere in your circle, no? Get them to do the test! They’ll let you know. I can’t do it cuz I never have enough trim to leave be for a year, lol.

I figured you did, just ribbing you a little. How could you not have? But yeah, that’s a while ago. I didn’t smoke my first time until 1982 as a junior in HS. I was a goody goody sports and academics type kid until then. Then everything went to hell. :rofl:
Click to expand...
Just realized one other thing I do with the Bin that helps recover trichomes without leaf. I don’t smash the trim on the screen. It’s a gentle thing. A circular roll if you will. But when the trim begins to break down (this is when you begin to be in leaf danger), I stop the rubbing of the trim on the screen. Instead, I finish a batch by tossing it. Just like a chef flip a pancake in a pan. Toss the trim up as high as you can and let the force of it hitting the screen on the way down get the remainder. This is why an actual Trim Bin works better than a homemade screen setup - they have real high walls. You can toss trim a foot high easy. It’s fun and it allows you to harvest trichomes without creating leaf dust.
 
InTheShed said:
I did all of the above. I want maximum results and will take some plant matter if that's what it takes to make sure I leave no trichome behind. :cheesygrinsmiley:

There are no connoisseurs in my house!
Click to expand...
Heh. Whatever works for you Shed. My kief generally is just for me as not too many of my friends are into it. For me, I want what I want. Lol. I can’t focus on pain relief if I’m focused on chlorophyll taste. Lmao!
 
Acapulco Gold seems very in fashion ATM and nearly thought about it for the Canuk grow but then 12 weeks… in the Dispensary last night they didn’t have flower but do have AG kief (and moonrocks) I could accidentally run sn experiment 🤣

After I found out how this happened

IMG_6087.jpeg
 
InTheShed said:
I thought the point of drying, burping, and curing was to eliminate as much chlorophyll (and other microbe-edible plant material) as possible. Weird that kief would taste worse than whatever green you have left in the buds themselves.

If kief is stripped off the trim early on rather than later on in the process, maybe the microbes that eat the chlorophyll either aren't around or haven't had a chance to do their thing. Might kief with plant material from that stage have more chlorophyll than kief taken after burping/curing?
Click to expand...
Thought about this. I think the difference may be due to the % of what you’re actually smoking. With kief, it’s either one thing or two: clean just trichomes or trichomes and some volume of leaf. So you taste the leaf and chlorophyll so much cuz there’s only the trichs to compete with that taste. With bud, every bit of green is not bitter and chlorophyll filled. Not nearly like the leaves. Remove the kief from a sugar leaf and it’s the same as a fan in terms of unpalatability. But much of the bud itself, if you could remove all the kief and keep the bud intact, would likely not taste bitter I suspect. So the taste competitiveness with bud is different. It’s a much more sweet green heavy flavor vs chlorophyll flavor, and there’s much more of it. So maybe you simply don’t taste the chlorophyll, or maybe you got rid of it in the dry, but either way, perhaps that’s one explanation?
 
Jon said:
Thought about this. I think the difference may be due to the % of what you’re actually smoking. With kief, it’s either one thing or two: clean just trichomes or trichomes and some volume of leaf. So you taste the leaf and chlorophyll so much cuz there’s only the trichs to compete with that taste. With bud, every bit of green is not bitter and chlorophyll filled. Not nearly like the leaves. Remove the kief from a sugar leaf and it’s the same as a fan in terms of unpalatability. But much of the bud itself, if you could remove all the kief and keep the bud intact, would likely not taste bitter I suspect. So the taste competitiveness with bud is different. It’s a much more sweet green heavy flavor vs chlorophyll flavor, and there’s much more of it. So maybe you simply don’t taste the chlorophyll, or maybe you got rid of it in the dry, but either way, perhaps that’s one explanation?
Click to expand...
I don't smoke at all, so I'm more looking for an efficient way to extract the goodies without some elaborate machine setup for use in edibles and tinctures. And for both trim and flower.

Interestingly, my first run at making the Dust was with cured and well dried bud, while my second was a rush job to try out my new CBD harvest. It's the second that is quite bitter, no doubt based on your comments to be the unprocessed chlorophyll. It also was much fluffier, likely because it wasn't as dry to begin with.

So maybe my conclusions are misplaced and I just have to be more patient with curing before processing into dust, though I do like the idea of using pure trichomes rather than a mix with them and plant material.
 
Jon said:
Btw - anyone see on the news about the killer who escaped from Chester County Prison in Pennsylvania and is now 12 days on the loose? That prison is two miles from my high school, and about three from the house I’m moving back to. I grew up exactly there. I actually spent 113 days of my life in that very prison. Lmao.
Click to expand...
So you’re the felonious type too I see, wonder how many of @420 Magazine members are? I’m sure glad I got smart enough to stop doing things that got me there. lol CL🍀. :thumb: :cheesygrinsmiley:
 
Back
Top Bottom