Ardent Lift Decarb - do you still need to infuse?

[JR]

Newb, so I apologize for such a simple question.

If I decarb (using the ardent lift), can I actually just grind/eat the dry herb, or is there a benefit to infusing (using the Levo infuser) beyond just taste?

Thinking of making gummies, but wondering if just sprinkling fully decarbed flower onto some toast is just as effective?

 

[jeffp]

i have read that you can just eat the decarbed bud without infusing but I don't. I use the Ardent as an important preparatory step for edibles, for fresh bud firecrackers.

 

[ClearBlueLou]

If it were me (and it may yet be) I would powder some and mix it with butter, and spread that on my toast.

I actually enjoy the flavor in butter: mix that butter with some cream and milk, warm it good, stir in some honey, and you’ve got a nice lifting drink. Great in the evening!

 

[JR]

Love both of those. Think I’ll make a butter coffee like that and sit down to read up on how to make fresh bud firecrackers!

Gracias!

 

[jeffp]

read up this for fresh bud firecrackers (FBF):

drop some bud into the Ardent and let it do its thing.
when done, grind up the amount you're going to use, finely, and store the rest.
preheat the oven to 305 to 310. you really should use an oven thermometer, you'll be surprised how inaccurate oven dials can be. wait until the temperature is stable within that range.
now for the fun part:
get yourself some good graham crackers and peanut butter. i recommend Trader Joe's cinnamon graham crackers because they don't break as easy as their regular graham crackers. i like the unsalted creamy organic peanut butter that they sell as well, but Smuckers garners very good results as well. Just go for creamy not crunchy.
Also, get some coconut oil for this, but it's not essential but I like it; it's a good fatty oil to add.
Now, tear off a fairly narrow sheet of aluminum foil - less is more as you'll see when you wrap it up at the end.
Spread a nice gob of peanut butter on each cracker. Add a sheen of coconut oil on top of each after.
Sprinkle the amount of bud you want to use on each firecracker.
Then with a knife or toothpick sort of bury the peanut butter over the bud on each cracker.
Join the graham crackers together and fold it up tightly with the foil. You'll get a tighter fold with less foil.
Now you have a nice silvery little sandwich treat all wrap up tight so the vapors won't be able to escape so easy.
Drop it in the oven - I use a convection oven but whatever..
Set it for 23 minutes.
As soon as it's done open the oven door so the baking subsides.
Then throw it in the freezer and when you're ready, you'll have it to enjoy.
Takes about 90 minutes for liftoff to begin so be patient.
Soon, with this method, you'll be floating through the keyhole and seeing God in colors.
Well, not exactly.

This is exactly how i make them and they're consistently fantastic.

 

[JR]

Thank you Jeff!

 

[virtualpurple]

@jeffp how much flower do you like to use in your typical dose?

 

[jeffp]

@virtualpurple i never measure it, I just eyeball it. hard to say but i guess about a joint's worth or less.

 

[Daijyobudave]

A good option is to decarb with the nova and then make an alcohol tincture with high proof alcohol. You could also use Vegetable Glycerine or any fat or oil. MCT oils like fractionated coconut oil work great.

From an alcohol tincture it is easy to make sugar - you just mix one cup of sugar with up to half a cup of the tincture and then heat it in an oven (about 90 degrees C) until the alcohol evaporates and the sugar is dry. It will be e bit clumpy, so just mash it through a sieve for superfine sugar. You can put it in tea or coffee or bake with it etc. Keeps forever !

 

[HarkW2000]

I take it there aren't a lot of people just straight up eating decarbed flower, then? I've got decarbing odor-free down to a reasonable science but I have less confidence (and kitchen hardware) to try to cook with weed odor-free.

I've been finding my results eating decarbed cannabis (on peanut button on a cracker say) inconsistent in results (like, very, apparent 4-5 hour onset vs. getting pretty high vs. not getting high at all for the same .12g doses) and I'm wondering if there are fundamental reasons why it's better to have it infused, like, it being evenly distributed in a larger volume of food and not some fragments that might digest funny, etc. But then on the other side, I thought there were people who were taking dry cannabis in gelcaps? Which seems like it would be quite similar to just eating the weed. Is there any science on the value of 10mg of THC in decarbed flower in a smoothie differing from that of 10mg of thc in canna-oil in a smoothie?

 

[HarkW2000]

As a sort of self-update, I tried two .15g samples of the same decarbed flower, one just mixed into a smoothie and one mixed in after being infused in some oil (given the trivial amount I just left the flower in) and it was markedly more effective on the second run.

 

[ClearBlueLou]

How long between attempts?

 

[HarkW2000]

48 hours more or less. I was optimistic about the decarb (and don't have much tolerance) so even though it was labeled 14.8% THC (<.1% CBD) I started with .08g (optimally, 11.44mg of THC) and tried incremental increases on different evenings.

The results were so poor (and so hit and miss, in spite of precisely measuring the flower) that I started to think it was a matter of not getting the plant material from my stomach to my upper digestive tract in an timely way, or maybe bits of flower getting encapsulated in the wrong lump of hard to digest food or floating or something. (I know that there are a lot of variables involved with edibles and that people experience curious underwhelming or overwhelming results, without getting into weird theories about where the weed went. But it's hard not to wonder about something getting lost when, sometimes, the expected effects show up.)

I decarbed the other 2.5g I had, and I think I'll infuse the lot into oil rather than experiment further with eating flower on top of food or with just added dry to smoothies.

 

[ClearBlueLou]

Actually, using it with fats is a requirement for liberating the cannabinoids and getting them to digest fully, so your idea of oil infusion is good. I like to steep an eighth in a couple tablespoons of butter or ghee, heat and cool until it turns green, have a half-teaspoon at a time. At the least, I get more out of what I vape doing this, in terms of noticeable effect...and great on biscuits!

 

[HarkW2000]

I infused into 60ml (4 metric tablespoons) of oil at just under a boil for 45 minutes and will see how it goes. If I've underdone it I should be able to revisit the infusion, at the price of a "oily wet grass clippings" feast for the senses.

Compared to the huge tincture thread on GC I haven't run into a lot of stuff about the specific requirements of infusing decarbed flower into oil. There are a lot of recipes that involve very, very long infusion times, I have to think unhelpfully long in a lot of cases. The Ardent blog mentions both a very short infusion on an older blogpost (15 minutes in a double boiler!) and then makes a much bigger deal of decarbing with a full cycle in the machine, ie an hour and 20-40 minutes at the quite hot temperature of 239F.

How long in a gently boiling water double boiler configuration (in a sealed mason jar) I'm less sure.

 

[ClearBlueLou]

Dispersion is the big trick, that means grinding/crushing your flowers before infusion.

Given that oils can go rancid and produce free-radicals, good idea to keep it in the cool and dark.
No idea how long would be good, honestly.

 

[HarkW2000]

Well I had an encouraging start, tried 2.5ml of the plant-oil mixture, nominally a maximum of 15.41mg of THC, but that's assuming a 100% decarb and that the oil-plant mixture didn't skew anything upwards or downwards; got an acceptable mild high. (I feel like the amount I would have to smoke to get 15mg of THC - in the case of this 14.8% weed, about a third of a gram - would really, really sit me on my ass. By myself I usually smoke .3g joints in two halves.)

The following day I tried 3.53ml and it was a near total squib, slight dryness of the eyes. Added another 2.5ml after 3 hours and it didn't rescue the evening. Nominally 37mg of THC. I feel like the mix of plant and oil was even enough that, even if the infusion was incomplete at 45 minutes of double boiling, the cannabis should have been near to on target. Even if I was somehow worse on the decarb than I thought it's still making me think me and edibles may not be a mix.

At some point I'll have to try a commercial edible, but the hours and grams I've put into almost total failure have me looking at the remaining, god knows, more than 2g worth of goop I've made with disfavor. I guess there's always tinctures and vaping, if I just have a shitty liver or something.

 

[ClearBlueLou]

I’d suggest working your way up to 100mg: there are edibles on the market (or were) of that dose IIRC.

Unless you’ve had *your* herb tested, there’s no real way to estimate THC percentage; even if you have, it’s also a fact that the effects of cannabis depend on the overall cannabinoid profile more than on THC % (terps, while important, don’t determine intensity, elevation, or duration).

Your goop sounds unpleasant? Kinda why I like butter. Grab another piece of toast and smear it on!

 

[HarkW2000]

I'm not positive how the labeling system in Canada is regulated; I do notice that the THC and CBD percentages are often odd tenths-of-a-percent numbers like "THC 14.8% CBD <0.1%" and those numbers often differ from what the product line is pitched as being in advance, so a local strain will be in the newspaper or a website, "Brand X, 20%" and then in the retail outlet it's 18.8% or whatever.

But yeah I definitely put a (?) after all of my numbers. There's no way I can be sure something in my oven decarb setup isn't subtly wrong, nor is the labeling the same as doing my own reliable lab testing. FWIW 7.5ml ("46.25mg THC") seemed better than prior attempts. Something still seems basically off about the order of magnitude of supposed THC involved (that amount of smoking required to get 46mg to the bloodstream would green me out, no ifs ands or buts) but at the very least if I can get that effect out of that volume reliably I won't be worse off on this purchase than if I'd just smoked it in joint form.

Your goop sounds unpleasant? Kinda why I like butter. Grab another piece of toast and smear it on!

I mean, I'm not that fussy, my main thing was I didn't want to discard the plant material when I didn't know if I'd entirely infused the cannabinoids. It's no hardship putting 7.5ml in a 300ml smoothie.

 

[CVC4455]

You can just eat decarbed bud but it's alot better if you infuse it into a type of fat or oil or alcohol.

As far as infusing oil I usually don't heat it much anywhere from 170-220 degrees in my oven in a sealed jar for anywhere from 15-40 minutes and it works great.

If I want the strongest potency then I decarb it, add oil and lightly heat it and then I leave the bud in it because if you remove the bud from the oil your going to lose some cannabinoids

Also adding a small amount of soy or sunflower letchin(might be spelled wrong?) to infused oil can make your oil more potent for many people

 

[ClearBlueLou]

“Lecithin”

Yes, I add lecithin to my butter and herb, with a tiny pinch of kosher salt. Lecithin, as an emulsifier, helps the fats to penetrate the vegetable part and dissolve the good stuff.

If you’re bringing your oil up to 220F, then your herb will be 90% decarbed; beyond that, I would just let them stay together, ‘steeping’. Oil and other fats don’t strip the herb the way butane or alcohol do - ideally, I think you’d want to crush/grind/pulverize the herb before adding it in, smaller bits being easier to extract this way. The herb bits will soften as the oil permeates and lifts out the goods, and it will turn green(er).

 

[HarkW2000]

Yeah, I decarbed in a mason jar (itself in a metal roaster, which complicates the temperature over and above using a sealed jar, but if the darned thing ever blows up on me I don't want to deal with a mess, much have anything damaged.) ~240F for an hour, on the assumption that the roasting pan/jar combo probably makes for a slow start. My oven thermostat is terrible but I've gotten the hang of keeping an in-oven thermometer close to 240, which seems like about the best I can do without getting oil baths involved.

I then did a quite fine grind and then infused 2.5g of flower in 60ml of canola, in the same sealed jar in a saucepan of water higher than the level of the oil, on a cloth pad and with the water just off the boil, for 45m. So it sounds like it's in line with what other posters are thinking here. Not a very pronounced colour change but some, maybe.

I wasn't sure about the lecithin stuff, but I'm still intuitively convinced that as much as 7.5ml doses are effective and (at a bare minimum) more economical and healthful than smoking, there's no way I'm actually metabolizing 46.25mg of THC each go (or something near to that) or I'd just be greening out hard. So I guess if I go this route again I should try lecithin and see if it makes a difference.

 

[ClearBlueLou]

As you can see by the chart below (table 4), at the 30-minute mark, THCA is already 87% decarbolated.

Getting that last 10% requires cooking your herb another couple hours. Personally, I think it doesn’t help to do so, especially since THCA has its own medicinal value; that extra hour or two wrecks the flavor and the content, IMO, as you’re cooking off terpenes and converting THC to CBN.

 

[HarkW2000]

Just as an update, while I found the canola + plant material method worked nicely as a smoothie additive, there was a sort of "kief settlement" effect in spite of my attempts to mix it up every time I used it. As a result (whether or not this was partly down to too little infusion time) the last few doses were overly strong; one was so obviously kief soup that I decided to go with 5 rather than 7.5ml and still came close to greening out.

A point in favour of solid-at-room-temperatures versions of the same idea.

 

[Samson]

Anyone get the Levo II? Wonder how its decarb compares to the ardent nova?