Dry Ice Sift and How to Make It
Dry Ice Sift and How to Make It
Dry Ice Sift is a concentrated cannabis product similar to dry sift or water hash. It can be graded by using different micron sized bags or timing your agitation and separating the sift into their own timed/graded piles. The finished product is very loose and fluffy, it should be blond to yellow in color with little to no green coloration to it.
Dry Ice Sifting is one of the fastest ways to extract resin off of flowers. As the flowers are agitated with the dry ice, the sub-zero temperatures cause the trichomes to break away from the stalks and fall down through the screen to the workspace below.
Before you begin, we need to discuss safety and purchasing of Dry Ice. Dry Ice is extremely cold, generally around -100F/-78C.
Care in handling is necessary.
- Advisory – Dry ice must be handled properly, it is advised to use either tongs to pick up the dry ice chunks to add them to your bags, or wearing suitable thick leather gloves. Failure to protect your skin from dry ice contact can result in considerable injury similar to a burn.
- Purchasing/Transporting – Dry ice can be purchased at many big box grocery stores and warehouse clubs. Dry ice should be transported in an insulated cooler.
Dry Ice Sift is produced by placing dried, cured cannabis flowers along with dry ice chunks, into a bubble hash bag and agitating them over a clean flat workspace such as a glass table top or mirror, in which you can observe the sift collection below.
The longer you agitate, the lower the grade of material becomes as you progress. It is advised to have a large workspace available to move your piles and check for color changes. As you start the color will be a pale cream to blonde color. As your agitation continues, you may begin to notice the sift on the workspace to take a green hue. This is when you are introducing more contaminant and plant material, so it is advised to sift that into a separate pile or decide that the dry ice extraction is complete.
Tip: Freezing your buds prior to dry ice sift extraction will help speed up the sifting process as the resin will be more delicate due to frozen temperatures.
Many sifters will grade based on time. They will agitate gently for 1 minute and consider that their top-grade sift. Followed by another 2 minutes in a separate pile, that will be their mid-grade sift. Finally, a more vigorous 2 minute agitation to finish off with a low-grade sift or kief like product.
As for grading your sift with individual bubble hash bags. Agitating in a 73 micron bag will yield the highest quality sift comprising of mostly resin heads. The 160 micron bag will give you a mix of resin heads and some contaminant. The 220 micron bag will give you the best yields with the most amount of contaminant mixed in with the resin heads.
Notice: Water is not used in the dry ice sift extraction process.
Dry Ice Sift can be vaporized in many dry herb vaporizers, especially when capping flower bowls.
It can also be used to squish into rosin.
Why would we squish sift into rosin when we could have just squished the flowers to begin with? One of the benefits of squishing dry ice sift versus flowers is that you can press your sift at a much lower pressure than flowers with a much lower temperature. The finished product often times has a different consistency such as a budder or wax instead of a sap or shatter.
Enjoy fast resin extraction using affordable dry ice for sifting!
This next sessions for you! Cuvee rosin, just what the doctor ordered 
It was a horizontal bag build and the rosin was really really good, sweet and sour fuel (sage n sour strain). I feel like it was a technique issue. Unfortunately that's not yet been confirmed, as soon as I get my press fixed I am going to give it another shot bottle tech style with 65% RH buds. All I gotta say is I hope it ain't true that it's a low yielder =/