I was surprised recently to find out that I am allergic to cannabis. However, I am not allergic to concentrates. We’ve been smoking concentrates exclusively since last year’s DGC cup. Tried some flower from The Herbal Cure recently, nope. So concentrates it is.
We have a Nugsmasher and are looking into the purchase of a freeze dryer for processing. Can you share your tips, reviews, experiences? Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
i own a nugsmasher OG myself.. nothin like pressing your own rosin! the only freeze dryer i know of and seen ppl in the industry using is the harvest right freeze dryer. there about 3000$ but pretty sure they do financing. i know people are using those to make live rosins. freeze fresh harvest then making ice water hash then freeze drying the hash in the harvest right then pressing that into rosin. not sure if anybody uses it to actually freeze dry the fresh harvest though before ice water extraction.. think it is only used to freeze dry your hash. somebody correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure the freeze dryer is only necessary if your trying to make live rosins with the whole ice water hash process:)
Sorry to hear you are dealing with allergies. Glad rosin is still working for you tho! Does flower rosin work for you? or do you need to have hash rosin to avoid allergy issues? Flower rosin is just so much simpler to make than hash rosin… I’d be tempted to stick with squishing flowers if thats working for ya.
Personally I think the fancy hash community has kinda exaggerated the importance of freeze dryers when making bubble hash. Not saying they aren’t awesome, but they start at like $2K and most people just dont need one to make great hash at home. All the big commercial folks are using them because it makes sense at that scale, but for the average home hash maker, investing in something like that just isnt necessary unless you’ve got a huge budget for building a fancy personal hash lab.
You can make super amazing full melt bubble hash just by micro planing or sieving and allowing it to dry properly. It takes a little practice and it helps if you have a cold place to work, but its not that hard. Lots of good bubble hash drying and micro planing videos and guides online. check out bubble mans tutorials or some of the other guides.
In my experience, making great bubble hash isn’t about having fancy tools, its about attention to detail and starting with quality material. (Best hash I’ve ever smoked was some stuff I made with $20 bubble bags, a bucket and a wooden spoon.) The only real advantage to the fancy tools is they make it easier to scale up if you are running a lot of material.
If you do have the budget for a freeze drier, I would consider upgrading your rosin press first. The nugsmasher seems great for squishing personal flower, but I suspect you’d get much better yields from a larger press if you are pressing bubble hash. Not sure its a good investment to spend $2-3k on a freeze drier until you’ve got everything else upgraded to the max.
From what I hear, the Harvest Right freeze driers are the ones to get (if you’ve got the $$$):
https://harvestright.com/product/home-freeze-dryer/
Soup – yes, flower rosin still works. We’re still working on that process as well, and an upgraded press is probably going to be in the works eventually. Basically we are looking at the various techniques available. We’ve decided not to use the alcohol extraction method; experiments in that area were not good. We’re looking at dry sift, but that seems like such a time-intensive process. Right now dry ice dry sift looks very promising. But are folks putting fresh cut plants into a regular freezer first?
It just seems like the processing for concentrates is totally different than processing for smokable flower.
Glad you can still consume flower rosin. Pressing flower is always gonna be the easiest simply because there’s less steps in the process. I’m still investigating if doing more processing is really worth the effort. So far I’m kinda thinking it’s not worth it in most cases.
I’m considering trying a run where I turn the whole crop into bubble hash and then into rosin, but it just seems like a ton of work and I’m pretty lazy…
I’m thinking fresh freeze plants overnight, then run through the bubble hash washer and bubble bags. Then microplane and let the hash dry before pressing it all into rosin.
I’m sure it would turn out great… I’m just not really sure it’s worth all the extra steps. I’m pretty happy with my simple flower rosin.
Ya the dry ice makes it rain trichomes lol. I believe Guru mentioned that dry ice shift ruptures the trichome so terpenes becomes very volatile, free to escape as things warm up. That’s why he wants the freeze drier so he can bubble bag the fresh frozen. Just trying to stabilize those terpene and cannabinoids as much as possible. Then to dry the product into freeze drier. Can be regular frozen and micro planned thinnest layer as possible in lowest temps possible with low enough humidity to remove moisture or just spread thin and dried. Many different techniques in pressing the material times, pressure or temps and strain dependent.
https://www.dudegrows.com/dry-sift-vs-bubble-vs-dry-ice-vs-no-preprocess-making-rosin/
Found this link lots of interesting views.
I like dry sift but like you said lots of work, plus humidity dependent and doesn’t work with fresh frozen. I like dry material on a low humidity cold day with some bolts or something to smash up the mix in a small bubble bag. Oh ya they mentioned in the posts about co2 breaking up the plant material as well more contaminant. So best bet is to just dry out bubble in low temps then press when dry. If you look up shango los on youtube and look under his videos one of the oldest ones is a cool long video on bubble with lots of tips.
Hey there. thats crazy your allergic but i have heard of it. Anyways i dont have a press yet but ive been doing tons of research and plan to get one soon.
I like PurePressures website because it has a info section which is suuuuper informative.
Basically if your pressing flower then i wouldnt worry too much about the freeze dryer unless you can afford it without it affecting your budget really. The freeze dryer mostly reduce time so unless you need it fast or get off a grow rotation then you will be fine. Instead of i think 2-5 days you can dry it in hours with the machine.
Now for hash rosin pressing it might make a better quality outcome but i dont see yields being improved.
IM with SOUP on puting that 2.5k towards a better and bigger press.
for 3100 you can get the base purepressure helix which is soooo nice.
check out this article
https://gopurepressure.com/blogs/rosinpress-tips-tricks
the first section is about cold.
says to keep room cold as possible. using insulation on the bubble hash machine.
but thats just for hash.
the flower pressing section just mentions BUD humidity, quality and correct micron bag.
just an opinion from a fellow noob.
short answer, spend that money on a upgraded press.
We’re still looking at our options, thinking about a chest freezer for freezing the fresh plant, and then a combination dry ice / vacuum chamber for drying the hash. It would be nice to go with one of the Pure Pressure presses, but we’ll probably stay with the Nugsmasher for now. As Dear Dabby reminded me, we’re trying to do industrial-type projects on a modest budget.
In the 7 months since posting this we picked up a sweet LowTemp Plates V2 4”x7” press. Been doing some experiments via pulling a vacuum on small batches of ice water hash. It works nominally, in that it still takes well over a week to dry it. So we want to take advantage of Harvest Right’s Black Friday sale. Do we *have* to get the pharmaceutical model, or can we use the food grade model? I don’t see what the difference is, other than more trays (and more cost) for the pharmaceutical model.