Another newbie question

First, please forgive me for being too intimidated by the volume of topics to scroll through over 90 pages of posts.

"Adult use" sales just started yesterday in my state. Yay!!

I kinda understand that shatter, wax and crumble are concentrates, but having come of age in the hash era, I'm really not sure what the difference is.

Is one of them easier to use (i.e. load into a portable vape like a Pax 3 or Magic Flight Launch Box without making a mess or having it fly all over the place) than the other?

Does one give you more bang for the buck?

Is one less likely to give off a visible cloud or noticeable aroma (or is that a function of temperature?)

Thanks in advance for your help.

I hope you all have a better tomorrow than the turkey does.

 

I am interested to learn more about these differences too.

 

Shatter, wax, and crumble are all different consistencies generally produced from the same starting product.
Typically these designations refer to a concentrated produced by solvent extraction. The hashish you are familiar with produced by mechanical separation, most notably is probably Moroccan style hash which is dry sifted and pressed for transport.

Keep your eye out for "rosin" as it is made with just heat and pressure, thus a solventless extraction, closer to hashish of the olde worlde.

True shatter can be harder to load as it can be brittle like stained glass and go flying off a loading tool. The others are easier to load.

You pretty much get what you pay for when it comes to concentrates. Consider that it takes 5-10 grams of starting material to make an extract, so if the price is less than you can buy that much flower for its likely made with lower quality product, such a trim. Which isn't inherently bad, but a whole plant extract is generally superior in my experience.

 

Just my opinion, but I prefer the depth of taste from wax. I find the vapour has a little more body. My 2 cents.

 

I still have yet to try any of that fancy new stuff. I haven't seen hash in nearly 50 years.

 

Thanks for the input, everyone!

 

Ah. Now I get it too. So it is basically the same composition but different appearance. thanks

 

I'd like to add to the question. I just looked at local concentrates to see what kinds are available. I haven't tried a concentrate yet and may want one that I can use on my fury or MVT. I understood several extraction methods from the answers here: CO2 and BHO. But can someone explain what rosin, live resin, kief and distillate are. Which would be a good one to start with in a regular vape?

 

kief traditionally in morocco is a mixture of weed and dark tobacco. I think kief is misused as a name for dry sieved hash often.

rosin comes from an extraction method with pressure and heat.

distillate refers to a purifying/concentration process with heat. distillation.


I do not really know what live resin is. Probably from fresh frozen or freeze-dried plants.

I would like to add a question too. What is absolute, solute? Edit: (I know what a solute chemically is). absolute another word for pure?

Need to ramp up my english

 

Oh yeah, one part of my original question hasn’t been answered yet: is one form of concentrate more amenable to giving off less visible (or even invisible) exhaled vapor and less detectable or undetectable aroma.

Thanks again everyone out there and I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving!

 

smaller hits will make less vapor. no form is inherently less visible. All smell about the same but live resin maybe has more flavor and smell.
Live resin and rosin - in general are the best quality products but that is not a guarantee.
Diamonds and sauce seem big nowadays but not sure how that is different than live resin really.
Harder consistency will have less terpenes and thus less taste. Saucy consistency is preferred as it will have more taste. Live resin is my favorite to work with - slightly soft but not runny - great for pens and such.
the co2 oils I have had taste terrible but I think they are better nowadays. I'd still rather have a quality live resin.
Which is best in a regular vape is really too broad a question. Depends on the specific vape. Wax and live resin can be mixed with ground bud and loaded into many vapes. It will just cause you to get vapor much longer and the load will last much longer.
I put live resin on organic cotton and throw that in my enano. Much easier than a nail for me but you can't do that in every vape
Crumble wax mixes easily with ground bud. Kief is a lower quality product but works the same - just mix it in to extend the load life. Bubble hash can mean a lot of things - it could be a crumbly hash just a little bit better than kief - or it can be top shelf ice wax.
Rosin uses no solvent so is often preferred in safety concerns - and is often of very high quality.
But any form could be of a low quality. Old starting product of low quality will create low quality extracts.
It is true that you usually get what you pay for

 

Raw distillate has had essentially all of the flavor removed, very discrete. Visible vapor is more a function of temperature, but I find co2 oil and distillate great for doing low temp ghost hits with barely visible vapor.

 

Thanks. I noticed sauce products but I will start with live resin and try the cotton in one of my logs. The price and thc vary a lot which I assume indicates the quality. Lots of black friday sales.

 

From someone who started using a log vape (my nano) to vape wax with cotton on a more regular basis. I will add that I had inconsistent results at first because I didn't mix the wax around enough in the gong. I would add the wax to the small piece of cotton and then vape away. After a few hits I'd pull the cotton out and pull it apart with my fingers and it would pull apart like strands of taffy, but still the hits were not very satisfying. Then one day after taking a first hit where the wax would melt, I then took my dab tool (or a toothpick) and began mashing that piece of cotton around in the gong. This caused the melted wax to evenly distribute and coat all the fibers of the cotton. My next hits were tremendous! .. and the rest was history.

You want just enough cotton to bury the wax and not get it on your fingers. Just a small little piece and not a big glob of cotton.

Enjoy!

 

these are good tips on cotton use. use just a little cotton and then just enough wax to soak across the cotton when heated. after the wax melts into the cotton - I hit it until vapor gets thin. or sometimes it stays thin at the start and I stir the cotton with a 7th floor pointed tool to mix the hot wax into the cotton. too much wax and the air flow gets blocked - too little and you just taste toasted cotton
I think good live resin has slightly lower thc (like in the 70% range) as it has more terpenes. A good trade off I think. I find straight thc distillate kind of boring without being mixed with terps

 

I've only used concentrates in my desktop vape. Is there a big difference in the experience/high when using a vape versus a rig?

 

I don't understand the rosin gimmick.......pressing under heat degrades taste a full melt dry soft is far superior in my opinion.

 

Yield? I wonder too.

Edit:
It depends on the strain and what you want, i think.
Alot of the traditional preparations involve heat at some point, so It could be good for some resins.
More heat changes/removes terpenes.
I think I would prefer unchanged, IF full melt.

 

Most certainly yield. Folks static bounce a pound + of material for 1-2% dry sift full melt yield. You break the material up in this process, so the leftovers need to be processed with water in bubble bags, other solvents, or in cooking.

You also need to invest in several different micron meshes and either build or buy frames to stretch these across. These frames are usually pretty large, so you have a lot of surface area to bounce material on. Then you need to figure out another system, (bubble bags, ethanol, butane, butter, etc.) to capture the rest.

Or... you can squish that same pound for 20% + yield in rosin. The process is much quicker/simpler than attempting to static bounce for full melt, and it can be done with less equipment/investment/learning curve if you are just using an old hair straightener and some parchment. You can also use the rosin chips in cooking if desired.

So yeah... of course true full melt is going to take the cake in the flavor department, and is a very special treat... But it isn't really comparable to rosin if you are looking for reasonable taste and excellent volume by material used.

 

I assumed it is hard to get a good yield with ice wax

oops go posts above.

 

I don't use water or ice my yields average 12 to 15% and most of what has been stated as fact is in fact not.............lolz.

 

And what are you referencing the melt on? A quartz banger?

Your flowers would have to be like 50% resin if you were getting 15% just in full melt lol. Not sure if we are talking about two different things here cause true full melt is 99% pure trichome heads. How do you achieve 15% full melt yield doing dry sift without getting any plant contaminant? Please share your secrets if you got some cause that's unheard of. Hell, many great strains don't give me 15% yield in rosin!

Not a gimmick at all, more like a game changer! Rosin turns the whole rest of that pile of dry sift that WASN'T full melt, into full melt.

Although I quite like vaping kief and sift, I think it's the way to go over vaping ground flower.

 

I base my returns on the weights going in and coming out.........how else can you?
Not uncommon returns at all given I use high quality indoor as my start.
I base "melt" on how the material reacts under heat.........as in does it melt like beeswax.
Not into a liquid state like a concentrate wash nor does it bubble like a wet water or ice process.

 

I don't grow, sift or otherwise make concentrates and have no special knowledge. But, I don't think anyone's numbers are crazy.

https://www.alchimiaweb.com/blogen/bubble-hash-fresh-frozen-vs-dry-flowers/