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Totally diggn your set up there!
Question for ya...... do you find that paint mixer a little too aggressive for mixing with? I did the same thing for a while and found the leaf material would break down as well degrading the bubble hash. I read up on it and found guys saying too just use your hand to swish it around (makes for a freekn cold hand) and run the material multiple times over, they say like 3-4 times. I did this and wound up with less hash but way better quality.... I m guessing less because less leaf material?! Oh my reference for making the stuff primarily came from Jorge Servantez ( I m sure I slaughtered the spelling of his name) I d love your opinion on the topic
Hey BB- I'll just address this post as is. Skunkworkz' take on it is a bit different in a couple details so this will give you something to bounce off of. I've had the Bubble brand bags for about eight years and have run a lot of hash making sessions through them in that time. Not 'hundreds' - but still a lot. In my early days the bubble bags got even more use because I was growing a lot of inferior bud and would scrap it to make good hash.
I've read the same stuff, online everywhere and from Jorge, about gentle agitation, and that was my MO for a long time. I used to just stir it gently by hand with a large wooden spoon.I did that for years. I was suitably horrified at the thought of being this rough with the process.
The paint mixer routine is just one I evolved into in the last couple years. Nowadays I just turn it on full blast and let it run to do its thing, and beat the crap out of the mix.
No I do not find that there's excess chlorophyll in the hash. Maybe it's because I'm using wet trim, consisting of mainly bud with higher grade sugar leaf- no leaf. It is a nice pale grey colour when it comes out. The third run is slightly darker grey than the first one, which is whitish. But there is no green colour, and the quality is great.
If you use dry trim and crushing it up fine into powder first before beating the crap out of it, you'll get much more extraneous plant matter in the hash. It's not necessarily anything terrible*- basically, it creates more bulk and your hash will be milder. It can still be very nice for smoking after a cure. Basically, you'll have hash that is about the same quality as the charas you get all over India and Nepal. It's pleasant but weak. You can smoke fairly large amounts of it.
* this may not be the case if you're using leaf. I'm not sure- I've never used leaf. I mostly use just bud.
Go to the other extreme- use frozen green bud and gentle agitation, and you'll get a smaller amount of higher grade hash. It will be stronger and gooier (never can figure out how to spell that word) with a better texture.
Now the big factor here is that I'm not setting out to make a tiny amount of AAA grade hash. If I was going to go that route I would make shatter or honey oil. I'm setting out to make a small- medium amount of A grade hash. It's still very good hash, believe me. Certainly better than 90% of the hash I've ever bought, and certainly the best hash in the land here locally. It's just something I make tiny amounts of, a few times a year.
So it's kind of a sliding scale of what quality you're trying to produce. But to answer your question- no I don't find the paint mixer too aggressive.
Curing is very important, of course. Uncured hash will tear your lungs out.
I use the 220 and 190 bags to strain. Then the 73 and 45 bags for collection. I usually do three runs.
Sometimes I'll run the 25 micron bag at the very end of the process. It's a real pain to use and I don't like the quality of the hash that comes out of it as much as the other bags. I used to assume that because it's the finest- it would be the best quality. Not so, at least at my place. More and more I lean towards just throwing out everything below 45 microns. Maybe I'll start making wine with it instead now.....
The formulations we've worked out in the study hall make the oil better than twice as bioavailable, so you get the healing on much less product.
