The Golden Age of Dry Herb Vaping?

[TigoleBitties]

Let's define terms. Oxford Dictionary has this to say about the term "Golden Age"

gold·en age
/ˈɡōldən ˌāj/
noun

- an idyllic, often imaginary past time of peace, prosperity, and happiness.
- the period when a specified art, skill, or activity is at its peak.

My fellow FCers... Are we living in the golden age of dry herb vaping? I submit to you that we are! And I'm loving it.

I bought my first OG Solo in 2010ish. The vapes I'm seeing now just blow me away. The ZX, Tempest, Neo, TM2, Terpicle, Nomad, Firewood... Are you kidding me?

Taste has never been better for me. Vapor production has never been better for me. Convenience, ergonomics and ease-of-use is skyrocketing.

It's a good time to be alive as a dry herb vaper my friends. However, dry herb vaping still really hasn't gone mainstream so can we really say this is the Golden Age?

Thoughts?

 

[EverythingsHazy]

- the period when a specified art, skill, or activity is at its peak.

Does the peak include the future? If not, then yes, and we will probably remain in continuously improving golden age for a long time. If it does, then no, because it's very unlikely that better vaporizer tech won't come out in the next few decades, and much less in the next century or so, if we are still here.

 

[vapviking]

I've been saying that the wave of the end of prohibition has ushered in a Golden Age of Cannabis.
I think dry herb vaping, while fucking awesome, has only scratched the surface in terms of its development.

 

[bhasma]

Now cannot be an idyllic time in the past, but perhaps it will be seen as such in the future. And if now is the peak then it's only downhill from now on, unless we have reached a plateau. Both vaping devices and herb quality are currently better than ever, and it's hard to imagine how things could get much better, but is this the end of improvement? A "golden age" can only be seen with hindsight, and I'm still looking forward.

 

[TigoleBitties]

Now cannot be an idyllic time in the past, but perhaps it will be seen as such in the future. And if now is the peak then it's only downhill from now on, unless we have reached a plateau. Both vaping devices and herb quality are currently better than ever, and it's hard to imagine how things could get much better, but is this the end of improvement? A "golden age" can only be seen with hindsight, and I'm still looking forward.

"It's hard to imagine how things could get better..."

I agree but when I look at the vape tech out there right now, we're already seeing huge vapor production and efficiency... on demand. How much better can things really get?

Of course they will get better but perhaps only very incrementally better? So... maybe we are living the golden age.

We had a good thread about comparing dry herb vaping with brewing coffee. Coffee has been mainstream for some time and one could argue that coffee brewing tech plateaued a while ago. When could we say this for dry herb vaping?

 

[florduh]

I kinda think dry herb vaping is waiting on its "Puffco" moment. Someone needs to make a simple to use cordless vape that can emulate a ball vape hit and (this is the most important part) is stylish and easy to market to normie stoners as something "cool".

 

[Sandrider1962]

Golden Age.... as I see it, in the realm of Ball Vape devices, there still is the DIY attitude, and protections. Mainstream catches hold that will come with all the corporate lawyers and associated headaches, monopolies, & pricing structure. My thoughts on Schedule 1 is simple. Pharma is in the way as they have not bought off enough politico's to corner the market. The Baller's are a risk to deep pockets.... "Hot Balls" / suits. lol.... So.... Golden Age, or age of innocence... maybe so. Long live that Golden Age !!! Baller Tech, I believe is in it's infancy. NEXT UP.... utililize the cheaply available 20x40mm coils w/ 300+ ball - 3mm units. (Flaten the temp curve, thus the end of 600+ degree PID inputs to achieve 400 material temps)

 

[fangorn]

I don't think this is the golden age of vaping.

I have not experienced the Stone Age, but it is certain that the evolution is enormous.

Yet we are a minority among THC consumers, and even more so among the general population.
In other words, there is not enough money to be made for businesses! (Let's not tell them about our VAS, right!)

We must not forget that there is what is happening in North America, in terms of legalization... and the rest of the world... the rest of the world is quite far from legalizing recreational use .
However, for me, this legalization is a prerequisite for education, and therefore for healthier methods of consumption, as well as a significant increase in the number of vaporizer users.

As long as it only affects medical use (which is far from being won in "the rest of the world"), there will not be enough money to be made.

Maybe if we went towards degrowth... then maybe yes, we are living in the golden age of vaping....
but I do not believe that degrowth is on the agenda of the governments in place.

So in my opinion, if we maintain our current mode of operation... the golden age of vaping could arrive within around fifteen years... until legalization affects more countries across the country. the world.
So there, with millions, companies will invest in research and development to create the smallest, most powerful, least durable vape, etc.

But... I'm probably a little delusional, and in 5 years we will realize that global warming is 200 times more advanced than even the most pessimistic imagined... and there will never be millions spent on research and development for vaping!

Ok, I'll stop my madness, sorry.

I will just add that I like handmade wooden vapes... Toad, vapman, lotus. But it's archaic technologically. For me, they are treasures... It will be my golden age.
but I own a Proxy, I've owned a Tafee Bowl or a Grasshopper... I'm less sensitive to it, but I think that's where a large part of the industry will go...

In short... Thesis, anti-thesis, and no synthesis...

Happy vaping everyone!!

 

[Shit Snacks]

I think the best way to look at it, is personal rather, it is your own Golden Age of vaping in your own lifetime, I think it is too early to describe it in terms of the entire vape industry as we know it based on the past and present as is... However I definitely can think of the time in my life that was my own Golden Age time period for herbal vaping in particular even though I did not have some of the technological marvels I have currently and collected specifically so I don't even know since everything is so relative

 

[budski]

as I hit my golden years (60s), after decades of burning herb, my 6month old VAS is rapidly descending into the artisan's vision of wood metal and herbal vapors; think I'll just skip ahead and pull the trigger on the tinymight and get in line for a toad.

 

[Timps27]

I have an old VHS of City Slickers recorded off a live NBC broadcast sometime circa 1993. Watching the commercials I can remember being a kid and thinking how could anything ever get better than it was. They are comical to watch now; but that don’t mean they weren’t rad as shit when I was 10!

I definitely feel like that ten year old when building out VAS lists, it’s hard to imagine how things could get any better. But my VW today has a better power to weight ratio than almost every super car I lusted over as a kid, here’s to hoping we are looking back one day laughing at how quaint it was thinking vapes like the Tempest and ZX were sufficiently advanced, let alone peak.

 

[TigoleBitties]

... here’s to hoping we are looking back one day laughing at how quaint it was thinking vapes like the Tempest and ZX were sufficiently advanced, let alone peak.

It's true. I know there will be more advanced vapes than these... but how much will it really matter? We already have near zero heat-up times and super efficient extraction. How much more is there exactly?

There will be more advances but maybe only largely incremental ones. Finer temp control. More miniaturization. Super-ultra-fast heat-up times... Ok, but will it really be a radical change from the advanced vapes of today? I'm not sure.

I know there's a huge leap between the vapor from the OG Solo and a ZX. But can you really make another such quantum leap from the ZX?

The only thing I can think of would be a radically new way to vape.... like some weird nose-plug type membrane you put up your nostrils and snort ground flower directly, where the membrane instantly vapes the plant on contact and filters the AVB?

 

[budski]

you won't need to snort it, cannaorbs are the the future

 

[vapviking]

you won't need to snort it, cannaorbs are the the future

The Future foretold

 

[TigoleBitties]

The Future foretold

Love that movie (Sleeper) but I'm a sucker for slapstick and zingers. Too bad Woody turned out to be quite the deviant.

Remember the Orgasmatron discussion?
Something like..

Girl: "Would you like to perform sex with me?"
Woody: "Perform? I don't know if I'm up to a performance... I'll rehearse with you if you like."
Girl: "Well, I have a PhD in oral sex"
Woody: "Really! Did you have to take any Spanish with that?"

 

[budski]

barbarella was my 1st star crush

 

[Sparkpug]

It's definitely not a golden age for dry herb vaping. No one knows what it is. Since we legalized I've gone to a few shops to expand my range and the one thing I seem to notice every time is that no one vapes their herbs. Most of the time no one has any idea what the hell I'm talking about. I explained this to a new bud tender with at least 20 years on me, and he was... he literally looked up the E-Nano on his computer and said "I've been smoking for 40 years and I had no idea anything like this existed." So I rattled off the names of the Underdog and Ed's TnT and the Couch Log, then I mentioned ball vapes and told him to come here.

It's entirely crazy this particular shop has a Volcano inside its front display that's been sitting there for years now.

To them, vaping is all carts and things like that. Things I don't use /shrug Maybe the vapes themselves are in a golden age but they need people to use them too.

 

[budski]

yep, my local shop in the far corner of Montana (in the capital of mesothelioma) a couple yocan dab pens and cart batteries but not one herb vape. I told them I only vape herb now for health reasons and the guy looked at me like I was a 3 headed martian.

 

[Knewt]

yep, my local shop in the far corner of Montana (in the capital of mesothelioma) a couple yocan dab pens and cart batteries but not one herb vape. I told them I only vape herb now for health reasons and the guy looked at me like I was a 3 headed martian.

Here in Utahrdia combustion is not allowed for medical cannabis users. Vape devices are sold at dispensaries, but most I have seen are the mainstream vapes, not much of a selection. I am sure that most of the flower being sold here is being combusted.

 

[.brew]

I don't even bother trying to explain my consumption habits to my primary care doc. I haven't smoked anything, let alone nicotine, for well over 20 years now but when I used to say I still "vape" it's obviously understood as a cart, etc., which now that the studies are finally being conducted and published end up being worse, much worse, for one's health than combustion.

It was a funny dance of trying to explain how I consume my medicine via a oven-like type device that simply bakes it like a cake...yeah there's no where to notate that on a medical survey

Anyway, in terms of this being a golden age of vaping the reality is we're still in the Stone Age. Not even fifteen years ago we were cobbling together heat guns and soldering irons. Now we've got "advanced" temp controls (although no one really knows what temps their material is at *or* even what temp to do it at even if they knew) and we're wrapping raw coils around the outside of our "bowls." Our devices are built around four main sources: SS, Ti, glass, or wood with ceramics making a current splash--but we don't know the safety profiles of any of it...with glass as the supposed most neutral material. From a scientific stance, we really have no idea what we're doing or the best way to do it. We're currently talking about "wireless" vapes but it's really just remotely heating the unit and carting it across the desk. There will be a time in the not too distant future when heating elements can be literally charged wirelessly just like an iPhone. There's a lot of technical advancements left to do. Our protections still consist of a medieval barrier around the housing! The next obvious advancement in tech would be to fully encase the ball vape to completely remove the chance of burning/fire.

We're only in the Golden Age in the sense of this being the Wild West in that someone can still build something in their garage and use/share/sell it. There won't be space for that in a decade or two. If you want a historical analogue, compare where we are now to where opiates were in the 1800s. Based on recent trends it's almost a certainty that younger generations, albeit still in our lifetimes, will no longer ingest medicine through their lungs whether it's combustion or vaping. I'll be extremely surprised if pharmaceuticals don't swamp the field within the next two decades if not sooner.

 

[Dressedspring1]

How much better can things really get?

A dry herb vaporizer in a 510 battery form factor that heats up as quickly and produces dense cool vapour would probably be the peak of vaporizer tech for me. We’re still a ways off from that

 

[TigoleBitties]

A dry herb vaporizer in a 510 battery form factor that heats up as quickly and produces dense cool vapour would probably be the peak of vaporizer tech for me. We’re still a ways off from that

You should check out the threads on the Prrl Neo or the BAKx. Maybe they're not perfect but they're pretty close to what you describe, although only the Neo is a mass market device.

 

[BeltedCoyote]

I don't know if I'd say it's a golden age.

In a historical sense a golden age hasn't really been recognized into after the fact.


That said, dry herb vaping has come a LONG way from what the space was like when I was last really present on here. I think it was right around when the cloud evo had been announced.

So yeah.

 

[RogueGuy]

I was thinking about this the other day. When I got involved in the scene in 2018, waaaayyy back when, the "scene" was much more robust. We had more "personalities". It was fun. There were also a lot more devices being developed. But, the vape mail ban seemed to really change things. A lot of the bigger players stepped back, but a lot of small, passionate makers stepped up. Ball vapes, thermal battery vapes, glass & quartz vapes, etc. I think, as a community, once we stopped relying on "Big Vape" to bring us something new, we started to design vapes that really met our needs. The vapes of today are more compact and powerful than ever before

 

[Polarbearboy]

First my bona fides. I've been using the weed since 1967. Mostly as a daily user, though took off a year plus for one job and two years for another. First couple of years I had small-time dealer friends and I was their guinea pig because I had a high tolerance and a natural skepticism. I still remember my only foray into dealing, copping a pound of Lebanese hash in 1971. I spent time back then in Mexico, spending six months just outside of Michocan, Mexico's first "Mecca". I too think this is the Golden Age of Cannabis.

Number one reason this is the Golden Age of Cannabis: Legalization in the states next to me, Mass and Maine, and decriminalization here in NH. As well, I spend nearly half of each year in Canada, where it is legal everywhere. In Mass and Maine and Canada the stuff is not only legal, it is tested for potency and noxious chemicals and biotics. As a testing bonus, some places also list the tested terpenes. Number two reason: the competition in the legal market has resulted in huge increases in potency. First couple of years we'd get 15-18% THC; now I've had 30% and more both in Canada and in Maine. And there's just fantastic tasting stuff. Number Three reason: Concentrates. First there were these fantastic resins, butters, crumbles, sugars, and shatters. Now there's multiple styles of rosins that are even tastier, stronger and possibly cleaner. I couldn't have even imagined some of this stuff ten years ago. Delicious, stony, and extraordinary varieties.

Related to the development of potent, tasty, and interesting product, the vapes have also gotten better. I've been exclusively vaping for ten years now. Each generation of vaporizers seems to do a better faster job of extraction while both enhancing taste and cooling/moderating the vapor. Now if I could only knock a dozen or so years off my life! At 75 I just can't vape the stuff fast enough anymore.