by Ed Rosenthal
SCREEN RESOURCES
Ace Screen Supply Company
AceScreenSupply.com
Dick Blick Art Materials
DickBlick.com
Howard Wire Cloth Co.
HowardWire.com
Jo-Ann Fabrics
Joann.com
Ryonet
Ryonet.com
MAKING YOUR OWN SCREEN
Equipment
•Thick wooden picture frame, or a frame constructed of wood at least 1" × 1"
•Wire cloth or silk screen mesh cut large enough to wrap around to the underside of the frame
•⅜" wire tacks or staple gun
Cut the wire cloth or mesh to fit over the frame with an inch or more to spare on each side, depending on the thickness of the frame—the screen should wrap around the sides of the frame. For instance, if the wood frame is 15" × 6", cut the wire cloth to 17" × 8", which leaves an extra inch on each side.
Stretch the screen taut and fasten it securely using tacks or staples on one side, then pull it tight and secure the opposite end to the other side of the frame. Repeat with the other two sides.
Screens of varying micron grades from Fresh Headies.
Keep the first sift light and brief, up to a minute. This yields the finest grade of kief, but the yield is fairly low. The biggest, most mature glands are the first to break free and sift through. Only the first few minutes of screened material is pleasant smoking material. The yield from the second sift is still potent but of considerably lower quality than the first. It is greener and has more of a taste of chlorophyll. After the first two sifts the material can be screened a third time for as long as 10 minutes, and the resulting product can be used for ingestion or external purposes, or for further purification.
When screening by hand a soft touch and proper screen are important, as is maintaining the right environmental conditions. Experimentation is easy, low cost, and fun, so even the complete novice can figure out how to create top-quality kief with minimal fuss.
Even if it is not your preferred product, kief is so cheap and easy to screen in small amounts that everyone should try it. For those who appreciate its pure flavor or other uses enough to focus on producing larger quantities, a drum machine or industrial sifter may be a worthwhile investment. There are many kief sieves available, often marketed as pollen sifters.
MACHINE SCREENING
If you have a lot of leaf and trim that you’d like to process for kief, you may soon find manual screening to be tiresome and inefficient. You’d not be the first. For high-volume kief making, simple drum machines automate much of the task. As a bonus, they typically gather a higher percentage of glands from the plant material than flat screening by hand.
The Pollinator
The Pollinator is the original drum machine developed by Mila Jansen, a hash aficionado from the Netherlands who lived for years in the Hindu Kush region. Mila spent her fair share of time manually screening kief in cold weather. Luckily for the rest of us, Mila is an innovator.
One evening after a long, tedious day of screening, Mila was home doing laundry when the clothes dryer caught her attention. In a flash, she realized that the dryer was essentially doing the same thing she had been doing all day! Soon thereafter, she invented an electric-powered tumbler for her personal use. It would be a few years before it occurred to her that this machine might be marketable, but when it did, the Pollinator was the result.
The Pollinator is available in a few sizes to accommodate different needs. You just place the material to process inside and turn it on. The machine tosses it softly against a fine screen, around 130 strands per inch. The amount of time it runs determines the quality of the kief collected. Presses and water hash equipment (like the Ice-O-Lator) are also available through the Pollinator Company.
The Pollinator turns much like a side-loading washer. The marijuana tumbles against a screen and the glands fall through to the bottom of the machine for collection.
Photo: Pollinator
DRY ICE KIEF—THE MANUAL METHOD
Perhaps the cheapest, simplest way to concentrate cannabinoids is also one of the newest. Since 2009, hash makers have been turning to dry ice—which is frozen carbon dioxide—to yield an impressive amount of kief. Dry ice is the fastest way to turn trash into gold. Manual dry ice sieving is very inexpensive to set up, results in very little mess or cleanup, and doesn’t involve explosive chemicals like BHO, or require expensive machinery.
One-Minute Dry Ice Kief is my favorite concentrate. It is very smooth and contains a lot of terpenes because it is made cold and not mixed with anything, even water, preserving the terpenes. It has very little vegetation so you are inhaling only gland products.
Equipment
•Cannabis (1 ounce, dry trim or fresh-frozen)
•Bubble Bags (durable 160- and 220-micron water bubble bags)
•5-gallon bucket
•Clean, sanitary surface area—at least four feet long
•Collection tool (such as a plastic scraper)
•Dry ice—3 pounds, broken up into small pieces
Method
Manual dry ice sieving uses the -106°F (-76°C) temperature of dry ice to freeze the waxy stalks of the trichomes, making them brittle enough to mechanically snap off during agitation. The snapped glands then fall through the 160- or 220-micron bag onto a surface and get collected.
First, designate a clean, sanitary, indoor space with a table with a clean surface. Sanitary conditions are important. You don’t want to find dog hair or other contaminants in the final product. Set up a large table in the clean room, and cover it with some parchment paper.
Place trim or ground bud in the bucket. Add dry ice. Tightly affix the 160-micron bubble bag over the top of the bucket using large rubber bands so that when you eventually turn the bucket upside down, the dry ice and trim fall onto the screen.
Pick up the bucket and gently shake to help distribute the cold. After a minute, turn the bucket upside down and hold it over the parchment paper. The dry ice and trim fall to the bottom of the bag.
Lightly shake the dry ice and trim mix up and down, moving longitudinally along the surface of the table so the falling kief creates a trail several feet long.
As you do this the kief dust will fall down from the bag onto the paper, amid little puffs of evaporating carbon dioxide. Keep shaking for 30 seconds to sieve the trichomes through the filter. You will notice that the first glands are a pale golden-yellow and that as the process continues the trail of glands gets greener, because more vegetative material is in the mix. The first material to fall, the golden glands, is the highest quality.
Use a scraper to collect the kief, which should smell phenomenal, and store it in a clean, glass jar.
Repeat the process using the 220-micron bag, and collect the kief.
One ounce of dried sugar leaf trim yields about four grams of kief at 160 microns, and six more lower-grade grams of kief at 220 microns.
Tips
•Dry ice sieving kief sends weed dust everywhere unless the bucket bottom, where the screen is, is kept close to the table surface.
•Avoid working in areas with breezes.
•Use thinner chunks of dry ice and less agitation for purer kief.
•Use quality nylon mesh bubble bags. Plastic mesh bags degrade under the brutal cold of the dry ice.
•If you are making your own device, use stainless steel mesh rather than nylon. The nylon wears and chips when it’s frozen by the dry ice. Stainless steel lasts indefinitely.
•You can use either dried or fresh-frozen trim. Both kief out nicely, and the fresh-frozen contains more terpenes.
How to Make Dry Ice Kief (Hash)
1.Place 4 oz brittle dry grass in a 5-gal bucket.
2.Add 3 lb of dry ice—it should be ice cube size or smaller. Let the mixture cool for 2 minutes.
3.Place a 220-mesh screen bag over the bucket top.
4.Turn the bucket upside down and start shaking
it vigorously, moving down a 6- or 8-foot table or countertop in about 2 minutes.
5.The powder changes color from a golden to a greenish tint over the table length—golden is the purest, highest quality. The powder was separated into higher and lower quality portions.
6.The two piles—they are ready to be smoked, pressed, or used in recipes.
7.A pile of fine, blonde, dry ice hash beckons all to take a toke.
Photos: The Friday 420 Show Produced by Ryan Munevar (See the “Dry Ice Hash Demo” video on YouTube by the Friday 420 Show.)
DRY ICE KIEF—THE MACHINE METHOD
Moving to a larger scale, Friendly Farms of California makes a portable extraction machine for dry ice sieving cannabis.
Equipment
•2 lb of fresh or several ounces of dry trim
•Extraction Contraption cone with bracket
•Portable electric cement mixer
•10 lb of dry ice
•Cold-resistant gloves
Method
This method is very simple. Fill the mixer with 2 lb of any mix of dry leaf/trim/ground buds and 10 lb of dry ice cubes or small pieces. Affix the Extraction Contraption cone with a bracket.
The Extraction Contraption flash freezes the trichomes on the plant, knocks them off, filters, and then collects them. Adding the Reflux Tower allows for steam distillation and the ability to distill high-grade alcohol from a variety of products giving the oil maker options on flavor/taste. This alcohol can be used to wash the heavier waxes and oils to achieve a clean extract.
Photo: Friendly Farms
Turn on and angle the mixer so the cone faces down. The device will turn, mixing the dry ice and trim. The Extraction Contraption comes with screens of 75 through 150 microns to allow the glands to pass through while catching everything else.
After one minute, turn off the mixer. Remove the catcher, and open it up. The fine dry powder inside may be the finest kief you have encountered. This is the notorious One-Minute Dry Ice Kief. It contains almost no vegetation, only the pure glands. It glows pale yellow. Remove the kief just extracted.
Return the cone to the extractor several times for two- and three-minute hash. By the fourth cycle the hash is seriously green and no longer a pleasurable smoke. It can be used for further extractions and cooking. After turning for 10 minutes almost all the glands have been removed.
This method extracts THC from 3% leaf to create 30% kief. It yields between 60 to 112 grams of kief per pound of material. It has one of the easiest cleanups, since dry ice evaporates into the air and leaves nothing wet behind. A wipe down is usually all that is necessary. If convenient, extract the kief in a greenhouse or grow room during the lit period. The plants will use the evaporating CO2.
The Extraction Contraption pairs with a still that uses grain alcohol solvent to create more refined, dabable products.
Tips
•Different strains yield kief with slightly different odors, flavors, tastes, and colors.
•This method works with dry trim, but works best with fresh sugar leaf.
•Yield and quality remain inversely related. Slight agitation and narrow filtering result in the purest kief, but yield less. Lots of agitation and a wide screen results in the most yield, but the resulting kief has more impurities and is less potent.
A PRESSING ISSUE: KIEF AND HASH
Kief can be used in a number of ways. The glands are delicious smoked fresh and loose and have a lighter, distinctively different flavor than the whole bud. Some traditionalists insist that kief is best pressed into hash. Smoking hash made with first-grade kief is an excellent experience. Many manufacturers now produce small cylindrical metal devices marketed as “pollen presses” that make clean and easy work of the process for small amounts. Just fill the press with kief, close, and apply pressure. The harder the kief is pressed, the darker the final product. The pressure creates chemical changes in the kief as the glands rupture, which alters the taste and even the effect.
This punch press from Wacky Willy’s allows you to personalize hash blocks with different embossed designs.
Chapter 4 explains how to make hash from kief, which is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to make hash at home. Kief can be processed into tinctures (chapter 9) or capsules (chapter 10). Kief is also great for cooking (chapter 11) because it lacks the strong green flavor that some people find unpleasant in cannabis foods and it is easier to digest.
Screening for kief, whether manually or with the help of a machine, is a fabulous way to recycle plant material that was destined for the garbage can. It is less labor intensive, less expensive, and less time consuming for the yield than most other processes.
Bowl of Hash.
Photo: Ed Rosenthal
Chapter 3.
Water Hash—
How It All Works
Water hash is a favorite method of making concentrates all over the world. Its name comes from the efficient water process that is used to collect glands from the trim, leaf, and bud bits. Water hash is actually a loose, kief-type product that can be smoked as is, or pressed into traditional hashish form. Either way, many people are quickly converted once they’ve experienced this pure and potent product.
Water hash can be made in small or large quantities. Ready-made systems can be purchased to simplify the process. These systems have increased the precision and efficiency of the water hash process, and contributed to its surge in popularity. It is also possible to make water hash using home-gathered equipment.
Purple Emergency bubble.
Photo: Nadim Sabella Photography
Water hash’s two-decade run of dominance is now being challenged by the rise of solvent hash. Wax, shatter, budder, and oil have muscled aside bubble hash on many dispensary shelves in the United States over the last few years. But the competition from solvent hash has also forced water hash makers to up their game. Ultra-fine water hash is now being pitched as “solventless” wax, reflecting the level of distrust about poorly made butane-tainted products. High-grade water hash is also great for edibles, and the best of it is indeed dabable. It’s hard to get hurt making water hash because the method doesn’t cause explosions and doesn’t involve sketchy chemicals.
HOW WATER HASH WORKS
The water hash method uses a combination of water, ice, and agitation to separate glands from the plant material. Ice, water, and plant material are placed in a bucket that has been lined with bags. These filtration bags are similar to the screens used in making kief. They filter the glands by micron size, separating the trash from the hash. A micron is one-millionth of a meter, or .001 millimeters (see Glands and Screens for more info). The material is stirred to knock the trichomes free. Plant material is trapped and floats in the top bag, while the glands, which are heavy and sink, are collected in the lower bag.
Ready-made systems use multiple bags that sort the glands into grades. Unlike kief making, the material is separated in one step rather than through repeated sieving. Usually the material is processed once. Some commercial hash makers process it a second time to capture more of the THC.
Water hash 20X magnification.
Water hash 200X magnification.
Photos: Steep Hill Halent
The ice serves a dual purpose, as an agitator against which the material is rubbed, and to make the material very cold, so the glands and the plant material remain brittle. After the material is agitated in ice water, it is allowed to settle. Then the bags are separated, and the glands are removed from each one. After the water hash is dried, it is ready to smoke. (See the “Ask Ed Grow Tip: Hash Making” video on YouTube.)
Bubble Hash (water).
Photo: Ed Rosenthal
Water hash varies in color, much like kief. The finest grade is typically a light tan, while the coarser second-tier material is slightly darker and may be a little green from plant material contamination. Many people are surprised by some fine hashes that melt and bubble when smoked.
The quality of water ha
sh, especially from the finest grade material, is impressive. It can test as high as many solvent hash products, up to 80%. Of course, the high produced from water hash depends upon the strain and quality of the plants being used. Processing plant material with water yields hash that has been washed free of contaminants: green plant matter, mold, fungi, and chemicals.
It is possible to extract a quarter-ounce to 1 ounce of hash from every 8 ounces of plant material. The yield depends in part on the number of glands present on the material. Buds and A+ trim have a higher concentration of THC trichomes, so their yields are higher.
The entire process takes three to six hours to complete. The bag method is kind of like doing the laundry; it does not require constant attention, but it is something that you keep coming back to at regular intervals. This chapter covers the main methods for making water hash. The next chapter covers pressing it.
You can make water hash without a bag system. One method agitates the material in ice and water. The bulk of the plant material floats and is removed with a colander. The material that sinks to the bottom of the container is mostly glands. It looks grayish or tan in the water. It is rinsed out of the container and captured in a coffee filter.