Questions about kief, shatter, wax, oil?

[ChemPro]

Lots of terms out there, some are slang I imagine

I refer to kief as the powder that passes through the grinder screen or the screen in your trim bin. I get lots of kief. I produced about 13oz of dry bud in a 4x4 tent using a 600W HPS light. The trimmings and the occasional popcorn bud gets made into kief. The method I use (which is friggin awesome) netted about 50 grams of kief just from the trimmings and popcorn buds.

I read that it can sell for $20 to upwards of $40 a gram. The problem is that not a lot of people want it. Everyone keeps telling me “If you can get wax or shatter I’ll take it.” Apparently they love wax and shatter much more than kief.

Questions – please correct or comment on my assumptions

1. I assume kief, wax, resin, hash, oil, and shatter are similar in that they are a form of concentrated THC.
   
   
2. I assumed that kief is the most concentrated form since it’s dry. Unless the kief is some form of microscopic membranous cell filled with liquid THC oil that only seems dry because we’ve yet to rupture the cell and separate out the oil. If that’s the case then I imagine oil would be the more concentrated form and shatter would be somewhere in between kief and oil. Please correct me, I'm ignant.
   
   
3. If kief is more concentrated then I should be able to turn all of this kief into shatter and actually get more weight out of it. As in, 50g of kief could be made into 60g of shatter whereas the extra weight comes from moisture being added back into it through the extraction process. That doesn’t seem right to me as the extraction involves solvents that evaporate away. So I am inclined to think that if I turned kief into shatter I would actually have less weight overall and the moisture would be from the oils.
   
   
4. Can someone comment on the differences between kief, wax, shatter, resin, hash, and oil on the molecular level?

As always, polite pertinent comments are welcome.

 

[Mr.Goodtimes]

1) Kief is just the trichome heads (crystals) that have fallen (or been sifted) off the flower and collected, then pressed. Thc resides within these heads. It's nice.

Hash includes the thc within the resin heads and other plant properties. This is made by hand (For example; scissor hash is the stuff you scrape off your sheers while harvesting, or bubble hash made with ice and water), or by using a solvent such as butane (wax, shatter, oil, etc.) these are more potent.

Resin is the shit you scrape out of your pipe. No good.

2) No.
Iso/shatter, wax, oil, bubble hash, Kief, flowers, dog shit, resin.

In that order of potency imo.

3) in order to turn Kief into shatter you would need to make iso or bho hash with it, then properly vacuume purge the oil until it is shatter consistency. Shatter, wax, budder, etc are all made with solvents. You will come out with less weight but higher potency.

4) Google

If that helps lol.

 

[Qwatch2000]

Yeah what he said. Plus Rosin Pressing. If you don't have access to a few thousand bucks or at least about a few hundred for a vacuum pump and Chamver and lots of know-how I just left a thread bashing DIY BHO and that's not what I'm trying to do here. I love dabs, and kief (the only kief I get is from my grinders right now and I can't wait to have trim to run; may run the trim through bubble bags though)


But...you can make great shatter, wax, dabs, what have you, with heat and pressure. I used a hundred year old vice grip and I've broken five hair straighteners. So I probably could've built at least 2 rosin pressed by now but I'm finally building one. There's a great guide on Reddit, the thing you need to do is to pack the Kief into pressing screen bags. At your local headship or online. 25 micron is what you want. The little yellow bags seem to work beest but I'm only pressing nuggets right now. And you will always lose something when you go higher in the potency chain. I feel rosin is equally as potent as BHO, I know for a fact there's no solvents left in it and it's easy and kinda fun to me. I'm sure it is the most wasteful method but I still smoke the pressed chips afterwards

 

[hyroot]

Kief - trichome heads, trichome stalks, plant matter

Dry sift - similar to kief but ran through 4 screenspure trichome heads but the material is slow dried at cold temps for a month then cured at same temps for 6 months to get the high quality full melt sift.

Ice wax / solventless wax - microplaned full melt bubble hash/ ice water hash. Made with a washer or wooden spoon, bubblebags , buckets , a pump sprayer, and a microplane fine or zester grater.

Rosin - solventless shatter / oil, cannabinoid soluble oils excreted from the waxy membrane of the trichome heads. Done by pressing flowers between parchment with lots of pressure and low heat or pressing hash between a 25u or 30u screen and parchment.


Bho - butane processed extract. Using a closed loop system, distiller and a vacuum oven. If it's not properly made it can be very harmful. It's very expensive to make properly.

Pho- propane processed extract same process as bho

Lho - over the counter limonene processed extract.

Hash - ice water hash / bubble hash that has been pressed after its dried and the cured for 3 months.


Watch hash church on YouTube on Bubblemans channel live every Sunday morning at one 9 am pacific time.

 

[757growin]

Turn 50 grams into 60 grams? Who are you jesus?

 

[caveman117]

Without info on.your screen size and no pics I'd say your kief is somewhere around 30-40% cannabinoids. That being said you could further process or "clean" the concentrate by using a solvent.

Butane is probably the easiest way to make a sketchy extract. But as said above its.very expensive to get the correct equipment. And without that equipment I can't recommend you do it.

ISO would probably be your next best bet. There's a pretty good learning curve to.extracting with ISO so I wouldn't try to do all your material at once. You'll probably end up with a.slightly higher yield than butane but it will be at the cost of being slightly less pure because of picked up chlorophyll (until you get better at using the solvent).

Rosin will be.the safest route. All you need is heat and pressure. It will however be the lowest yielding method.

That all said, you can't extract more cannabinoids than what's there. So say your kief is amazing and at 50% cannabinoids. At that level put.of 50grams of kief you could potentially get 25g of oil out.of it.

Now as for those prices, up here on maine anyway youd never sell kief for 40$+ a.gram. and you'd be lucky to get 15-20$ for it. I can personally get kief for $5 a gram right down the street. Oil however will go anywhere from 35$-65$ a gram depending on quality.

 

[ChemPro]

Turn 50 grams into 60 grams? Who are you jesus?

I realize that. Never claimed I could. I just didn't know whether the moisture in shatter was because of added moisture from the process, (in which case mass would be added) or simply releasing the oils in the trichomes in which case mass would decrease. I prefaced this post with my ignorance.

 

[757growin]

I realize that. Never claimed I could. I just didn't know whether the moisture in shatter was because of added moisture from the process, (in which case mass would be added) or simply releasing the oils in the trichomes in which case mass would decrease. I prefaced this post with my ignorance.

There should be no moisture in shatter. It is also the highest of thc content of all hashes.

 

[ChemPro]

There should be no moisture in shatter. It is also the highest of thc content of all hashes.

All cystal products, whether it rock hard honey, or maple sap have water. It may not be wet but the H2O is needed to surround the molecule in question to form a crystalline structure. If there is no water in shatter then maybe some people are incorrect when they refer to it as a crystal. As a chemist I may be taking people too literally with the use of slang words which is why I've been confused

 

[757growin]

All cystal products, whether it rock hard honey, or maple sap have water. It may not be wet but the H2O is needed to surround the molecule in question to form a crystalline structure. If there is no water in shatter then maybe some people are incorrect when they refer to it as a crystal. As a chemist I may be taking people too literally with the use of slang words which is why I've been confused

As a chemist it should be real easy for you to research the answers to your first post. Ive never heard of shatter being refered to as chrystal. I wouldn't call the terms slang but actual industry terminology.

 

[ChemPro]

As a chemist it should be real easy for you to research the answers to your first post. Ive never heard of shatter being refered to as chrystal. I wouldn't call the terms slang but actual industry terminology.

You'd be surprised how little academic journals there are for cannabis. There's plenty of info out there. But mass spectrometers, TGA machines, and other qualitative devices are pricey. And since it's illegal in most states the typical university doesn't invest much (if any) time in exploring it.

 

[757growin]

You'd be surprised how little academic journals there are for cannabis. There's plenty of info out there. But mass spectrometers, TGA machines, and other qualitative devices are pricey. And since it's illegal in most states the typical university doesn't invest much (if any) time in exploring it.

I wouldn't be surprised. The usa government only does any experimenting at University of Mississippi I believe . Because of the classification of marijuana the government makes research near impossible. Israel has been leading the forefront as far as government /scientific research. That may be a place for you to start. Or start digging deeper on sites like this.

 

[hyroot]

There should be no moisture in shatter. It is also the highest of thc content of all hashes.

Not true at all on thc content. There is no highest thc content extract. They're all around the same. It depends on genetic mostly. Lab tests have proven that. Rosin and dry sift and fresh frozen ice wax have the highest terpene profiles. Rosin having the most.

 

[D_Urbmon]

Not true at all on thc content. There is no highest thc content extract. They're all around the same. It depends on genetic mostly. Lab tests have proven that. Rosin and dry sift and fresh frozen ice wax have the highest terpene profiles. Rosin having the most.

flower rosin to be specific? or just rosin in general?

 

[757growin]

Not true at all on thc content. There is no highest thc content extract. They're all around the same. It depends on genetic mostly. Lab tests have proven that. Rosin and dry sift and fresh frozen ice wax have the highest terpene profiles. Rosin having the most.

If you get higher terpine wouldn't that lower the percentage rate on thc?

 

[757growin]

Also can't rosin be shatter? I thought it was describing the consistency kind of like crumble.

 

[D_Urbmon]

Also can't rosin be shatter? I thought it was describing the consistency kind of like crumble.

Rosin can have the consistency of shatter, but generally when people say shatter they are referring to BHO shatter and a shatter like rosin product will usually be referred to as rosin still.

 

[hyroot]

If you get higher terpine wouldn't that lower the percentage rate on thc?

No. Terpenes are the flavors and smells and delivery systems for the cannabinoids. The variation in terpene profile can determine the effect. But not the cannabinoid % you can have 2 strains with the exact same cannabinoid profile but different terpene profile and have a different high from each

The cannabinoid profile is the amount of thc, cbd. cbn, cbg, cbc, thca, thcv

During curing or decarboxylation, thca converts to thc. Then as thc degrades turns into cbn

The higher the brix level in a plant the higher the terpene profile.

 

[hyroot]

flower rosin to be specific? or just rosin in general?

Rosin in general. There's dry sift rosin, full spectrum bubble rosin, kief rosin, the separated screen bubble rosin an flower rosin. Depends on process and environment. Colder environment you won't lose the volatile terps when making bubble

 

[D_Urbmon]

Rain in general. There's dry sift rosin, full spectrum bubble rosin, kief rosin, the separated screen bubble rosin an flower rosin.

I was just wondering because I would have expected water hash turned rosin might be lower in terps. Everyone talks about those water solubles being lost in the process.