how do you know if concentrates from dispensaries are well made?

darbarikanada

darbarikanada

Well-Known Member
I'm in a legal state, but the quality control and lab oversight is supposedly pretty lax. is there any way to determine if butane has been properly purged from wax? people say to avoid darker wax, which is easy enough, and I have yet to encounter wax - even cheapo stuff - that doesn't taste good and is potent. maybe producers have gotten better at the game - you can even get light (e.g. straw-colored) wax for cheap these days, but I kind of feel like the state (washington) isn't really looking out for consumers, so I'm wondering if there's any way of assessing concentrate purity.

fwiw: I watched a youtube video of some guy making wax with really minimal equipment, so maybe it's just not that hard to purge the butane and you'd have to be seriously shady to skip what looks like a pretty simple purging process.

any thoughts?
 
Hackerman

Hackerman

User
I am not sure if this is valid but I used to put a tiny, tiny dab on a pin and put a flame to it. If it 'sparkles' when it burns, it still has butane.

Again, no clue if this is accurate. I remember it from the very few times I made BHO. I switched to rosin almost immediately and never went back to solvent based concentrates.
 
davesmith

davesmith

Well-Known Member
Glass Blower
So butane is the absolute least of your worries and these days its unlikely anything, even straight sauce, would hold enough butane to spark.

Id be 100x more worried about how the plants were grown. Theres plenty of things you can spray on plants which are highly toxic (abermectin comes to mind) and lots of people use it. Extracts are more than just thc and high concentrations of those things. This could quite easily include some of the treatments, mould, mites etc that was present on the plants.

Its easier to hide bad practices with extract than flower.

Im in the uk and its a different ball game over here but id avoid cheap stuff myself. If i could find oil where the extractors and growers have some respect in the industry id trust them over any rebrand or white label stuff.

Good luck!
 
Farid

Farid

Well-Known Member
I hesitate to even say this, as it tends to ignite a circular discussion, but....

Dark color is not necessarily an indicator of low quality extract. Color can be strain dependent, and is generally driven by harvest time. Late harvest will lead to a dark amber color, early harvest will lead to a clear or lighter color. Many commercial growers like to propogate this belief because it's better for buisness to have as short a cycle as possible.

Green on the other hand is a color that is good to avoid in general.
 
davesmith

davesmith

Well-Known Member
Glass Blower
Farid said:
I hesitate to even say this, as it tends to ignite a circular discussion, but....

Dark color is not necessarily an indicator of low quality extract. Color can be strain dependent, and is generally driven by harvest time. Late harvest will lead to a dark amber color, early harvest will lead to a clear or lighter color. Many commercial growers like to propogate this belief because it's better for buisness to have as short a cycle as possible.

Green on the other hand is a color that is good to avoid in general.
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I agree whole heartedly and with colour remediation a thing now it matters even less.

People have atarted cropping super early just to get that light colour, the producta worse but people see a blond oil and think its somehow better
 
Bologna

Bologna

(zombie) Woof.
davesmith said:
I agree whole heartedly and with colour remediation a thing now it matters even less.

People have atarted cropping super early just to get that light colour, the producta worse but people see a blond oil and think its somehow better
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Taken even a step further with the continued overall popularity and prevalence of totally clear, one-dimensional, boring, and usually terribly artificially flavored, distillate... :puke:

Edit: for some reason, many still think it's somehow better cuz it's "pure" and "clean" etc... :mental::disgust:
 
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darbarikanada

darbarikanada

Well-Known Member
davesmith said:
Id be 100x more worried about how the plants were grown.
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agreed. as I mentioned in my OP, washington's oversight of testing labs is (last I heard) pretty bad, so whatever bad behavior exists on the part of growers would affect concentrates proportionately, i.e. we're in a 'caveat emptor' situation here, which is why I'm wondering if there's any way, short of paying a lab, to do QC.
 
darbarikanada,
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Hackerman

Hackerman

User
It's probably going overboard to really care but it's the same reason I don't eat foods that use canola oil. The process (most often) used to extract the oil from the rapeseed seeds is by using hexane based solvent.

After all the horrible things I have done to my body over the past 70 years, I suppose it's really too late to worry about stuff like this. LOL
 
badbee

badbee

Well-Known Member
Vacuum purging equipment is expensive for the old school illegal basement extract makers but all the commercial businesses have it. There may be quality control issues, but it's unlikely to be a left over butane issue.
 
darbarikanada

darbarikanada

Well-Known Member
badbee said:
Vacuum purging equipment is expensive for the old school illegal basement extract makers but all the commercial businesses have it. There may be quality control issues, but it's unlikely to be a left over butane issue.
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thank you!
 
darbarikanada,
S

someguy

Active Member
badbee said:
Vacuum purging equipment is expensive for the old school illegal basement extract makers but all the commercial businesses have it. There may be quality control issues, but it's unlikely to be a left over butane issue.
Click to expand...
I'm just curious, what kind of vacuum purging gear would be necessary for an illegal op? You can get a vacuum chamber on Amazon with pump for under 100 and add a heater to the bottom for another 100. It might be difficult to run enough quantity through that I guess but it's affordable enough.
 
someguy,
Farid

Farid

Well-Known Member
Does "how the sausage is made" matter? To make an analogy to food: if the end product tastes good and is totally safe to eat, is it "quality"? What about how clean the kitchen is, how the ingredients were manufactured, etc... those things may not be detectable at all for the end user. For example, what if you went in to the kitchen of your favorite restaurant only to see rat droppings, mold, etc. Would the food taste the same after that?

When it comes to cannabis (really both flower and concentrate) the same phenomenon applies. The end product could be delicious, and completely safe, but the process to get there could be full of unsanitary conditions that would impact your perception of quality if you knew about it.

When you consider this, the larger scale the operation, the much higher chance that the process has some element of "gross factor". The only way to really eliminate that would be to have an intimate relationship with the manufacturer, or better yet, do it yourself.
 
Okla68

Okla68

Well-Known Member
During the past cple years that I have been pressing and growing my own, I have found the Color and Consistency of the final product to be GREATLY effected by the time of harvest and Strain...Early-Light...Later-Darker, all things else the Same !!!
 
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