Eskander
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Lol… I think my trimming skills need work looking at that.I dont do extraction but slower dry at higher humidity is key to having very tastey smoke. I do humidity 55-60 and temp at 60f for 10-12 days. Then into buckets that a check twice daily. If the humidity in buckets is above 62 then i leave them open till it drops to 60. I do this till the buckets stay at 60-61%. At that point they can stay in the buckets or get trimmed snd put into jars
These were 3 weeks in the bucket thrn trimmed and put into jars
First and foremost. Jesus titty fucking christ, that is a shitload of weed. It's like seeing a prepper who has decided that they will endure the soul crushing boredom of being in a box for several years by ensuring that they can be stoned off their ass for 100% of it...This article goes over some of it. I honestly believe good curing is better for quality smoking but the drying processs affects the quality of the weed itself. I have been learning to dry slower and slower every year and it has greatly improved my herb https://www.greenhousegrower.com/production/why-curing-cannabis-is-critical-to-plant-quality/
These are the buckets i use, after its been hung dry for about 10-12 days
I like the way you think, and haven't ever really found a solid explanation for why the slow dry does what it does. I know first hand that too fast of a dry results in product that smells like hay and tastes like fresh cut grass when smoked. I also know first hand that weed allowed to hang dry for 10 days in 60F @ 60% RH, then progressively dried to being smokeable, and further, six months in a sealed jar, retains many more of the terpenes that make weed so good.First and foremost. Jesus titty fucking christ, that is a shitload of weed. It's like seeing a prepper who has decided that they will endure the soul crushing boredom of being in a box for several years by ensuring that they can be stoned off their ass for 100% of it...
That link's explanation is essentially one line:
"Curing is a process that involves aging/drying harvested plant material to fine-tune the moisture content and allow for the decay of sugars and chlorophyll before consumption."
So this is what I've seen again and again. FWIW, chlorophyl itself tastes slightly minty so everything you think of as green flavors isn't chlorophyl. From the charts I've seen, even drying at 60%, the plant looses the majority of the weight it will on the first day. At that point, nearly ever cell in the plant has been torn open by the drying process and all metabolic activity from the plant essentially stops. What cells don't lyse are still at a metabolic standstill because the enzymes within the cells require an aqueous environment within narrow constraints to work. I can buy into sugars and glycoproteins degrading over time but only if the driving force is either bacterial or yeast. This would play reasonably well into why water curing works because all that stuff is water soluble and once the cells lyse that crap can simply go into solution and be washed away rather than digested by microbes. Wild yeast and bacteria are HIGHLY regional though and often impart distinct flavors and I've never seen people say that weed cured in X region is better than Y region. Nor have I heard "weed from Z region tastes like sourdough or blue cheese or my ex girlfriends crotch..." This sort of leaves oxidative decay as the major force left that makes any sense. Sugars are pretty stable though so I have a hard time buying that explanation too. Plus, if you have ever smoked hookah you'll know that sugars are stable enough at the temps we burn stuff at to carry over as a sweet rather than acrid smoke.
As a scientist my first reaction is to call bullshit on the standard explanation. There is very likely a good explanation out there, I just think this one is wrong.
-Eskander
Yeah, I froze more than half to do extraction fresh. It will be interesting to see what the results are and how they compare to the dried stuff.I like the way you think, and haven't ever really found a solid explanation for why the slow dry does what it does. I know first hand that too fast of a dry results in product that smells like hay and tastes like fresh cut grass when smoked. I also know first hand that weed allowed to hang dry for 10 days in 60F @ 60% RH, then progressively dried to being smokeable, and further, six months in a sealed jar, retains many more of the terpenes that make weed so good.
That brings me to the conclusion that it's not necessarily to do with the plant cells or degradation of sugars or offgassing. It has to do with preventing the more volatile terpenes from doing what volatile things do. That's likely why freeze drying is so effective, or processing frozen product is something some do. Volatility tends to drop with temperature, and if the product being processed was cut then immediately dumped into a sub-zero F environment, theoretically more of the terpenes are retained, then when processed, so long the temperature differential isn't significant, or by using solvents of comparable temperature, all those terpenes could be captured, concentrated, and you make some fuckin good concentrate.
Just a thought though. I write software, this organic chemistry shit is near greek to me, though I'm also a hobbiest and want to learn more.
That's an excellent point. There are some rather stubborn organic compounds that require ridiculously high temperatures to disperse, and perhaps there's some oxidative process that occurs helping them breakdown. Which lends some credence to the low and slow method of drying, where obviously oxidation is going to occur, ripping at some of those carbon bonds of the more stubborn compounds, while retaining the more stable volatile terpenes. Now, if one introduces a vacuum and dries in similar conditions, it would be quite interesting to know what happens across temperature grades. f temperature at r humidity over t time under v mmhg vacuum by starting plant mass should yield some interesting results. even better would be setting a baseline of a lab tested compounds at the time of cut compared to post dry process. Then we might be able to identify what exactly is happening when drying in traditional fashion.Yeah, I froze more than half to do extraction fresh. It will be interesting to see what the results are and how they compare to the dried stuff.
Low temps for terpene retention makes all kinds of sense but if that was the majority of it then drying fast and cold would preserve more than slow and cold. I guess what throws it for a loop is the freeze drying which is colder, faster and drier than anything else and yet is relatively smokable as I understand it. So that eliminates every aspect of metabolic, microbial or oxidative decay being critical. It pretty much means outgassing is the bigger part of it. Unless of course freeze drying bypasses something like reactive phenolic release and the subsequent pile of random organic compounds they would create. But those are also stable enough that time wouldn’t change their concentration that much after they’d formed… sorta leaves outgassing or ???
I’ll toss some dry stuff in a vacuum chamber tomorrow and see what it does. Who knows…
-Eskander
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