Cannabis Concentrates Archives | Page 3 of 4 | The Grand Junction Greenery

Posted on March 31, 2018 - 9:00 am

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The road is a strange place. It’s liminal, neither here nor there, and time morphs when I travel. So, I turn to the radio, and it always disappoints.

You’d think good songs would make it through the ether in the wide-open places, but it’s mostly static. I’ll click the seek button and watch the green digits cycle in a loop, and when nothing comes in, I feel lost. Stretches without reception feel desolate, alien, hostile, and I’ll speed up a little until something comes through. And when my radio finally finds something in the void, the station is usually old and stale: mariachi music, a sermon of some sort, or classical symphonies. I’ll land on the latter and leave it, doing my best to pretend like I appreciate Mozart, and then I’ll drive through the backwoods of Colorado waiting for something better, clicking the seek button whenever the violins get annoying, listening for something familiar the way I look for landmarks.

Granted, satellite radio is an option, but that’s just more of the same stuff I listen to while I’m at home, and it’s best to leave behind the familiar while traveling. Sure, some music is impossible to escape—that “here I go again” song by Whitesnake always comes on at least once during every trip, making me think about fog machines and women with big hair sitting on expensive cars—but without fail, I’ll hear something new, or learn something new thanks to NPR, and that’s the best part: novelty.

Know what I mean? I travel to hear and see new things, and I think it’s the same for all of us. However, that’s not to say there aren’t a few familiar things that come with me on every trip: my cowboy boots, my vintage North Face backpack, and marijuana. Fun, right? But marijuana isn’t exactly travel-friendly, if you know what I mean—the stuff stinks, so I usually bring edibles and my vaporizer, which is also something novel.

It still blows me away that we have marijuana vaporizers nowadays, because the word “vaporizer” sounds super futuristic, like “ray-gun” or “teleporter.” But they’re here now and they’re awesome. I’m in Boulder right now, doing my best to spread the word about The Greenery Hash Factory’s ridiculously good solventless concentrates, and I brought my PAX Era with me, which I love so much that it’s about to become just as necessary as my lucky backpack. And we just started selling PAX Pods and PAX Era batteries at our Durango dispensary, The Greenery, so this week, I figured I should tell you about them.

The vape pens most people are used to have a threaded cartridge that screws onto the battery, but the PAX Era is different in that you just plug the cartridge into the top, no righty-tighty necessary. And most vaporizers use a single ceramic element or a wick to heat the oil, but the PAX system uses two wicks which means you can make the hits twice as strong as usual (if you’re in to that sort of thing). But the best part about the PAX system is the smart battery.

Yes, “they” have officially made a Bluetooth smart-battery for smoking marijuana. There’s even an app you can download for your phone that’ll connect to these batteries, and it’ll allow you to adjust your vape-pen’s temperature remotely, track the number of hits you get per pod, and lock your battery with the push of a button. Isn’t that crazy? That means you can take a hit from your vape pen, lock it with your smartphone, and then leave your PAX Era out on the coffee table. Your kids or your roommates (or anyone else who can’t see the line between “mine” and “yours”) won’t be able to pick it up and smoke when you’re not looking. It’s insane how far we’ve come technologically speaking in this industry in such a short period of time.

But I’ll admit, the PAX Era is a little tricky to figure out in the beginning, so here’re the answers to the two most common questions I get in our shop about how to use the PAX system:

Q: How do I know if my battery is charged?

A: Most batteries come with a partial charge, but to check it, all you need to do is shake your PAX battery. The petals on the front will light up: one lighted petal means your battery is almost dead, and four means it’s charged completely. If you see only one lighted petal when you shake the battery, plug it in with the provided USB charger and let it sit for about an hour.

Q: I’m getting weak hits, so how do I change my pen’s temperature?

A: Most people use the smartphone app, but it isn’t necessary. Just follow these steps:

1.) Insert the PAX Pod into the top of your battery and then give your pen a shake; the petals will light up.

2.) As soon as the petals light up, quickly remove the pod. The petals will start cycling through the temperature settings.

3.) As soon as the petals display the temperature setting you want, quickly put the pod back into the battery to lock in the temperature setting (the setting colors are listed in the pamphlet that comes with every battery).

And frankly, that’s all you need to know. As soon as you master the battery check and temperature change, the PAX Era vape pen is one of the most reliable, user-friendly systems available—there isn’t even a button to press when you’re using your vape pen because these things are automatically activated when you start to inhale. I couldn’t be more impressed.

At The Greenery, our Durango dispensary, we’re selling the PAX Era batteries for $30 before tax (which is a damn good deal), and we’re selling the double-wick pods for $55 before tax. Each pod contains 500mg of concentrate (Sativa oil, Indica oil, or distillate). And if you’d like to learn more about the PAX Era or see a demonstration as to how they work, simply come see Your Best Buds at 208 Parker Avenue, and we’ll show you something new for the next time you go down the only road you’ve ever known (Whitesnake!).

Crystalline in Durango

Posted on March 10, 2018 - 9:00 am

It was only a matter of time before the nerds got into this industry. I say that affectionately, of course, because smart people always make things better, but we’ve crossed a barrier of sorts. Just a few years ago, any of us could’ve made all the marijuana concentrates on the market in our basements if we wanted to, so long as we had WiFi, but that’s not the case with crystalline.

I’m just gunna plow through all the technical stuff to get it out of the way: to make crystalline, a source concentrate such as high-potency live resin is mixed with hexane and acetic acid. Once everything has emulsified, the solution is filtered, and then put through a rotary evaporator (just like the one Luke Skywalker used on his home planet). The centrifugal force separates the delta-nine THCa from the other compounds, and then a chemical bath is used to purify the THCa further, which brings the potency close to the 99.9% mark.

See? Can you do that in your basement, even now after I’ve given you the instructions? I can’t. And that’s what happens when the nerds get involved. We get things like vape pens and THC inhalers and 99% pure THCa. This concentrate comes in crystals, some as big and clear as the diamonds on rich-people wedding rings, but there’s a drawback: there’s no flavor. Crystalline diamonds give you a mind-bending high, but you don’t get the complexity that comes from a full-spectrum extract, like a solventless hash.

So, the nerds stepped it up and started mixing itty-bitty THCa diamonds with full-spectrum terpene sauce to make FSE Crystalline THCa, which is what we just started selling at The Greenery, a Durango dispensary.

You should try it.

The high is like a shatter high, but higher, stratospheric. And the flavor is better than all the other BHO products, thanks to the sauce. It’s clean like a craft oil but potent like a distillate, and I’m pretty sure the nerds have outdone themselves, because there’s nothing better than FSE crystalline on the new-school side of cannabis concentrates. We sell out of this stuff quickly, so keep checking our menu for availability, and then come see Your Best Buds at our Durango dispensary on Parker Avenue if you’re looking for something new.

Rosin in Durango

Posted on February 24, 2018 - 9:00 am

There are two types of people in this world: people who love Bon Jovi, and people who pretend like they don’t. I’ve done research, and this fact is all-the-way true. And when you think about it, humans are split down the middle when it comes to just about everything—some people like going out, some people like staying in; some people prefer skis, some people prefer boards; some people like mustard, and some people have really bad taste. Know what I mean? And it’s no different when it comes to marijuana concentrates: people either smoke solventless concentrates like Rosin, or people smoke solvent-extracted concentrates, like wax or shatter.

According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, the definition for “solvent” is “a thing that dissolves another thing” (I don’t own a dictionary). But when it comes to concentrate extraction in the cannabis industry, a solvent is usually a gas (like CO2 or butane) that’s pumped through a pressurized chamber to chemically strip the cannabinoids from flower. I know that sounds newfangled, but solvent-extracted concentrates have been around forever. If you soak marijuana in an alcohol bath, it’ll strip all the stuff that gets you high from the flower, and then if you let the alcohol evaporate, it’ll leave behind a wonderful gooey mess that you can smoke. This extract is a solvent-extracted concentrate because alcohol is a “thing that dissolves another thing.” Get it? I overheard my parents talking about this thirty years ago, and the practice is still going strong today, because alcohol-extracted THC is used to make plenty of the marijuana edibles on the market, like the Mountain High Suckers we sell in our shop.

But when it comes to one side or the other, I prefer solventless concentrates because they’ve been around much longer. These are the ones that are made the way they’ve always been made, and I’m talking about eons. I’m talking about the Berbers in Morocco who’ve been making hash for generations; I’m talking about the Lebanese tribes that’ve been pressing kief into blonde bricks throughout recorded history. I know it’ll sound pompous, but I like hashes with a story, and at The Greenery, that’s our specialty.

If you’re under thirty, don’t freak out—at The Greenery, we sell all the modern concentrates like wax and distillate, and I’m pretty sure we’re the only dispensary in town selling crystalline (which I’ll tell you about next week), so we have you hipsters covered. But I’m telling you, solventless concentrates are sublime. They have a flavor that evokes all sorts of tranquil thoughts (the kind that pair well with deep couches and maudlin music), and they’re nearly as potent as their solvent-extracted cousins. We have some Chemmy Jones Moroccan Hash in our arsenal right now that packs a 70% THC punch, and we’ve pressed some Rosin that broke the 90% barrier. I put some of the latter in my Cloud Mini and smoked it right before writing this, in case you can’t tell, and it made me realize that I’ve never told you about our Rosin, which is a travesty. So, here you go:

Rosin is made with nothing more than heat and pressure. Usually, flower is pressed pneumatically between two heated metal plates. The heat gets the cannabis oil flowing, and the pressure squeezes it out onto some parchment. Once the goo cools, it’s called “rosin” because it looks like the rosin violinists rub on their horsehair violin strings. If you were paying attention, you just learned two things. Sorry. Off track.

But at The Greenery Hash Factory, we do things a little differently. Instead of pressing flower, we press kief, which is all the dry-sieved trichomes that live on the flower’s surface. This stuff is potent and flavorful, and I’m pretty sure it’s the stuff Tinkerbelle kept in her bag. When we press kief to make our Dry-Sift Rosin, the goo that comes out looks decadent. It’s dark. When you smoke it, the taste is floral and deep, like the soil we use to grow our flower. It’s best in small doses, like the one that brought me here, and it’s flawless for the times when you need a little inspiration. Rosin is perfect for dabbing in Durango because it’s inline with our natural, earth-loving culture, and if you haven’t tried it, you should come see us. We’ll help you go down in a blaze of glory (we just came full-circle) with some of the most potent Rosin in town, because We’re Your Best Buds!

Wake ‘n Bake

Posted on January 6, 2018 - 9:00 am

Do you remember the Shake ‘n Bake commercials from the early nineties? If not, they were campy and ridiculous and awesome. A woman with a rabid smile would throw some raw chicken into a zip-lock bag full of Shake ‘N Bake and shake it maniacally, maintaining her insane smile throughout, and then she’d serve her stereotypical family while they cheered as if they were eating something other than crappy chicken made with a zip-lock bag. The screen would fade to black, and then boom! The “Shake ‘N Bake” logo would appear with an unforgettable jingle… I might be scarred for life. But that doesn’t matter, because “shake ‘n bake” became a part of our collective lexicon thanks to the affective advertising.

Flash forward to a few years later, and we stoners co-opted the term and changed it a bit to come up with “wake ‘n bake,” which is how we refer to smoking pot first thing in the morning. Seriously, there’s no better way to start a Saturday. I like to wake up, stretch, smoke, and then play with the kids, laughing into the early afternoon while cartoons play in the background; it’s the type of morning found at the end of a rainbow. Actually, that’s pretty much exactly how last Saturday went, but I didn’t smoke—I took the edible route, and it got me thinking that you, the ever-intrepid marijuana blog reader, might not know about all the wonderful wake ‘n bake options we have at The Greenery. So, this week, I decided to write about six products we sell that’re pretty much made for mornings because they’re discrete, effective, and easy to use. And here we go…

1.) Clockwork Coffee: Yeah, that’s right, we’re now selling instant, marijuana-infused coffee at The Greenery, and it’s awesome. It’s like a mad scientist sat down to combine THC and caffeine (arguably the two best substances on earth) and nailed it. Each serving contains 10 milligrams of THC, and this stuff stays true to its slogan: “more wakey, less shaky.” We also carry a balanced version containing five milligrams of THC and five milligrams of CBD, so if you’re looking for a little relief with your wake ‘n bake, this is the way to go.

2.) Dixie Awakening Mints: These are perfect for the lightweight wake ‘n bakers out there because each mint contains five milligrams of THC instead of the usual ten. Our Awakening Mints are perfect for the morning because they contain orange-peel zest, ginseng, Ginko leaf, and Matcha tea powder—if these don’t pick you up, you’re probably a zombie.

3.) Magic Buzz Energy Shots: This one might be my favorite. Each single-serving energy drink contains ten milligrams of THC, and these little bottles are bolstered with caffeine, taurine, and a bunch of vitamin B. We keep these chilled in our dispensary, so we sell them cold, and the “tropical blast” flavor pairs perfectly with any breakfast.

4.) Buzz Infused Honey: Never mind, this one is my favorite. Last Fathers’ Day, my wife put a packet of this in my morning coffee, and things got peachy real quick. Each single serving contains ten milligrams of THC and ten milligrams of CBD, and as far as versatile edibles go that can be used with just about anything, honey is hard to beat.

5.) Whitewater Gentle Green Tea. Morning people come in two types: tea drinkers and coffee drinkers, and we wouldn’t dare forget about the former group. Each single serving of this lightly-caffeinated green tea contains ten milligrams of THC. You just drop one of the infused teabags into a hot cup of water, let it steep for about five minutes, and then sip your way into a better day. It’s just good stuff.

6.) Lucid Mood Energy Sipper. As far as disposable vape pens go, this one’s a damn good deal. Each preloaded, disposable vape pen (or “sipper,” as Lucid Mood calls them) comes complete with two-hundred milligrams of hash oil that’s around 40% THC, 40% CBD, and 20% aromatherapy terpenes. The Energy sipper is infused with citrus botanicals, and I swear these things make the daytime brighter.

Fun, right? Here a The Greenery, we have the best assortment of marijuana edibles on the planet—we’ve spent years eating everything on the market and picking only the best for our menu—and if you come in to talk to one of our affable budtenders, he or she can steer you towards the best wake ‘n bake ever. After all, We’re Your Best Buds, and your morning high matters to us!

Mixing Marijuana

Posted on December 30, 2017 - 9:00 am

When it came to buying pot yesteryear, you got what you got. The man would give you a bag full of unnamed weed, and you’d smoke it, not really knowing what was coming down the pipe—that bag didn’t come with a potency profile or a strain name, but that didn’t matter because nothing else was available. Those were dark days.

Seriously, can you imagine what it’d be like if all recreational drugs were sold like that? For instance, if you were in the mood for an indulgent red wine to pair with a ribeye, but booze was only sold out of a van behind Walmart, you might end up with some lukewarm Miller instead of a nice bottle of merlot… there’d be riots in the streets. And by way of analogy, the same rings true when it comes to marijuana, because different types of pot are better for different types of things: some strains work well for relaxation, which is perfect for the dark of night but not-so-perfect when you’re looking for a touch of inspiration, and some strains pick you up and get the thoughts flowing, which is perfect for daytime creativity, but ill-fitting for the moments when you simply want to pass out. Yes, most of these differences stem from the difference between Indica and Sativa, but it’s not always so straight-forward. And in that vein, if you come into our dispensary and tell one of our budtenders exactly what type of high you’re going for, they can point you in the right direction (seriously, our budtenders are like pot sommeliers).

However, here’s a secret: marijuana strain selection can be taken a step further if you dabble in mixing marijuana. As an example, I love the potency of Chemmy Jones, but the taste is a little over the top (as is the manic high that comes after only a few hits). So, whenever I end up with a little Chemmy, I grind it up and mix it with a fruitier strain like Blueberry. And yes, Chemmy is a Sativa and Blueberry is an Indica, so when you mix the two strains together, they meet in the middle and sing “Kumbaya” in your head (or at least that’s what it feels like because the high is so perfect). Anyway, my point in all this is that since we no longer have to buy pot out of a van—now that it’s possible to come into The Greenery and smell the weed before you buy it from a pot expert—mixing marijuana to find the perfect flavor and high is a possibility. These are bright days.

But wait, there’s more (did I just sound like a used car salesman?). Now that we’ve opened The Greenery Hash Factory, you’re no longer limited to just mixing pot with pot: thanks to the bowl topper, the combinations are nearly limitless. As a quick aside, a “bowl topper” is any sort of concentrated marijuana product you sprinkle on top of the pot in your pipe to kick thigs up a bit. I apologize for relying so heavily on the cliché “pot and alcohol” type of comparison, but adding a bowl topper to your marijuana is like adding a shot of whisky to your beer, but without the shameful hangover. Anyway, back on track…

At The Greenery, we make and sell three different types of bowl-topping hashes that I would strongly recommend trying. We have Kief Brick, which is the most flavorful bowl topper because it’s compressed trichomes, we have Bubble Hash, which is the easiest to use because its powdery consistency is perfect for sprinkling, and we have Moroccan Hash, which is by far the coolest because it invokes all sorts of nostalgia stemming from the old-school way of concentrating marijuana. I won’t get any deeper into the differences between these hashes because I wrote about this subject in a different blog (which you can read HERE), and this week, I just wanted expand your high-horizons by letting you know that it’s perfectly okay to smoke two different strains of marijuana at once. Exciting, right? And just to get you going in the right direction, here’re three bowl-topped combinations that’re exceptional:

Bio Chem Flower topped with Purple Diesel Bubble Hash: this combo gives you the multiplied energy of two sativa-dominant products, and the rush is insane. If you’re looking for an intense head-high, you won’t find anything better. This flower comes from our own living-soil grow, and the hash comes from our factory, so I can tell you honestly that these products have been cultivated with precision.
Gorilla Glue #4 flower topped with Indica Blend Moroccan Hash. This combo is the polar opposite of number one: you’re gunna get a deep body high that’ll lock you in your couch and bring a good end to any bad day.
Deathstar Flower topped with Sativa Blend Kief Brick. This combination is all about meeting in the middle for the most complex high possible. Deathstar flower is as close as they come to a true Indica, so the body high is all-encompassing, but the Sativa kief brings with it giddiness and bright flavor.

As I’m typing this, all three of the combinations I just listed are available in our dispensary, but things sell out quickly, and our specific stains rotate almost daily so we can keep things fresh and interesting for you. So, if one of these combos isn’t available, just come in and talk with one of our knowledgeable budtenders. He or she will let you know what mixes best with what, and we’ll send you on your way with something new to try, because We’re your Best Buds, and your high matters to us.

A Breakdown of Cannabis Concentrates

Posted on December 2, 2017 - 9:00 am

This week’s post is just gunna be a quick-and-dirty alphabetical listing of all the cannabis concentrates out there on the market, because one of the top-ten questions I hear as a budtender is “what’s the difference?” So, I wanted to write something short and simple you could use as a reference, if you needed to. As to the list itself, it’s important to remember that some concentrates can be dabbed, because they’re “full-burn” or “full-melt,” but some cannot (these work best as “bowl-toppers,” or concentrates you sprinkle on top of pot to kick things up a notch); I’ll make sure to tell you which ones are which. And here we go…

1.) Badder or Budder. This is exactly why things are so confusing when it comes to marijuana concentrates—the terms “badder” or “budder” deal with the consistency of a concentrate, not the concentrate itself. Cannabis oil can be whipped and heated into a consistency reminiscent of cake “batter” or room temperature “butter,” and that’s where the names come from (stoners replaced the t’s with d’s because that’s what you do when you’ve got bud on the brain).

2.) Bubble Hash. There’s no difference between “bubble hash” and “ice-water hash,” so the two terms are interchangeable. We make this concentrate at The Greenery Hash Factory by submerging marijuana in ice water and agitating it. The cold water freezes the trichomes on the surface of the plant matter, and the agitation breaks them free—once this is complete, we drain the slurry and run it through a series of filters. Then we collect, compact, and freeze the hash, before weighing it out and selling it to you for $40 a gram. This concentrate isn’t full-burn, so the best way to enjoy it is to sprinkle it on top of a bowl, or to mix some in with your flower when you roll a joint.

3.) Caviar. Caviar isn’t dabbable (did I just make up a word?) either, but it’s some of the best stuff on earth: a trifecta of potency, as we call it. This is another product we make in-house, and we do so by taking premium marijuana flower, painting it with oil, and then battering it in kief. You simply put it in your pipe and smoke it, and then forget about things for a while… all things. For a long while.

4.) Crumble. This is another one of those consistency-only concentrates: crumble is nothing more than wax with a different, honeycomb-like consistency.

5.) Crystalline. Quite plainly, this is the world’s strongest cannabis concentrate. Crystalline is a purified resin (which I’ll tell you about in number nine) consisting of 99.99% pure THC. Frankly, it’s like marijuana crack (but without the addiction and associated murder rate).

6.) Distillate. This concentrate is made by refining cannabis oil, but for it to be considered a true distillate, a still needs to be used (yes, just like the ones they use in the Ozarks to make moonshine). However, solvents can also be used in some instances. Distilling the oil purifies the concentrate, and makes it more potent. It can be dabbed or vaporized, but this concentrate is also used in many of the edibles on the market.

7.) Isolate. This concentrate is made by using chemicals to “isolate” the THC or CBD from marijuana plant matter. It can be smoked in a number of ways, but since isolates are most commonly white, powdery substances that dissolve instantly in water, this concentrate shows up in infused beverages more often than not.

8.) Kief, or Kief Brick. Kief is sometimes referred to as “dry-sift” because that’s the way it’s made. We make this one as well, and we do so by tumbling marijuana in a filter drum. Then we collect the kief (trichomes) and compress it into a brick which we sell for $30 a gram. This concentrate isn’t full-burn, but since all the marijuana terpenes live in the trichomes, kief is by far the most flavorful concentrate.

9.) Live Resin. This concentrate is made by flash-freezing an entire, living marijuana plant, and then by using a chilled solvent (butane) in the extraction process. I’m not going to get too deep into purge times or extraction techniques because your eyes would glaze over, but basically, frozen pot is stuffed into a huge metal tube through which cold butane is pumped. They open it up and scrape up the live resin, which once dried, looks like little crystals mixed with honey. Sometimes, you’ll hear people talk about marijuana “sugar,” but that’s just a form of live resin that has the consistency of granulated sugar. All live resin is full-burn.

10.) Moroccan Hash. This concentrate is made by decarboxylating (heating) kief, and kneading it with a little water. The final product is a darkened ball of awesomeness that’s enjoyed best on top of a bowl (you can’t dab it because it’s not full-burn). This one is my personal favorite, so much so that I wrote an entire piece about it you can read here.

11.) Oil. You’ll see many types of oil on the market, and they’re separated via the differing chemicals used during the extraction process; CO2 and Butane extracted oils are the most common. And you’ll hear a bunch of other names for marijuana oil like “CO2 oil,” “BHO,” which stands for “butane hash oil,” “hash oil,” “dragon tears,” which is just a proprietary name, or “dragon balls,” which is just a unit of measure (given that a dragon ball is a ten-thousand-dollar glass ball filled with 3,000 grams of high-THC oil, I doubt that you’ll get it mixed up with the other concentrates). Oil can be dabbed just like all the other full-burn extracts, but it can get pretty messy, so most people prefer to use a marijuana vape pen when smoking cannabis oil.

12.) Resin. This is the black stuff that accumulates inside your pipe that you scrape out and smoke with shame when you’re too broke to buy pot. We’ve all been there.

13.) Rosin. This stuff is way better than the last one, and it’s one of the only full-burn concentrates on the market that’s made without solvents. We make this one in our factory by compressing cannabis flower between two heated metal plates. The heat and pressure work in concert to squeeze out all the cannabinoid-rich “rosin,” which looks like light-brown tar. This one is dabbable (I’ve decided officially that “dabbable” is a word), and we always have rosin on our menu.

14.) Sap. This one is just oil with a thicker consistency—this stuff has the viscosity of tree sap, and that’s where the name comes from. Totally dabbable.

15.) Shatter. This concentrate is made in a tube or a vacuum purge oven just like live resin, but the temperatures are different. Butane is used when extracting this concentrate, and the final product is an amber, translucent sheet that looks like hard candy. And it’s easy to break, which is where the term “shatter” comes from. Also, totally dabbable.

16.) Wax. Wax looks and feels like wax, and it’s extracted just like shatter. Different temperatures in the purge stage produce differing consistencies, and wax is just shatter that was produced at a temperature leading to a fluffier, wax-like product. Technically, both “wax” and “shatter” are consistency-based names, and both concentrates are actually subsumed under the “BHO,” or “butane hash oil” category. But yes, you can dab wax all day long.

That’s it! I guess the list didn’t end up as “short and simple” as I planned, but worse things have happened. And as always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to give us a call at (970) 403-3710, or come in and see us at 208 Parker Avenue, right here in Durango, Colorado. We’re Your Best Buds, and we’ll tell you all you need to know about the differences between cannabis concentrates; all you need to do is ask.

moroccan hash, hash, durango, concentrates, The Greenery, dispensaries, dispensary — Moroccan Hash by The Greenery Hash Factory

Kief, kief brick, hash, marijuana hash, The Greenery, dispensary, Durango — Kief Brick by The Greenery Hash Factory

bubble hash, ice water hash, hash, Greenery Hash Factory, The Greenery, Durango, Colorado — Bubble Hash at The Greenery Hash Factory

Dabbing Marijuana

Posted on November 11, 2017 - 9:00 am

rosin, marijuana concentrate, concentrates, extracts, marijuana extractions

This newest generation seems to think they came up with “dabbing,” but maybe that’s just the way it’s always been—maybe the youth has always sapped credit from the people who came before thanks to short memories. After all, “Flatliners” is in the theaters again, with a new cast of pretty millennials acting out a carbon-copy plot from the eighties movie I remember, and Disney just announced that they’re remaking “Flight of the Navigator,” which is simply sacrilegious, if you ask me. Actually, “The Magnificent Seven” just came out for the third time, if you’re keeping track, and something was stolen from my father’s generation that they stole from the generation before. Everything old is being made anew, and it’s no different when it comes to smoking pot.

I’ll take a step back and explain: “dabbing” is the newest term for smoking full-burn marijuana concentrates. And I know this subject can get a little convoluted, so I’m going to walk through it step by step just in case you’re a complete newbie. A “full-burn” concentrate is something like rosin, shatter, wax, or live-resin. I’m not going to get into the specific differences between these four concentrates because that’s a subject deserving a separate blog, but basically, these concentrates are made by extracting the cannabinoids (the stuff that gets you high) from all the green plant matter you think of when you picture marijuana. When you smoke a full-burn concentrate, all of it evaporates and nothing is left behind, ergo, “full-burn.”

But you can’t smoke a full-burn concentrate conventionally because it’ll just melt—if you try to smoke something like wax with a pipe and lighter, it’ll just turn into liquid and pool in the bottom of your pipe, which is nothing more than a messy waste of money. So, you need to “dab” it. And this is where we get back on track: my generation called dabbing “knife hits.” We’d take two butter knives and get them red-hot over the stove, and then we’d press them together with some hash in between. The hot knives would vaporize the hash and we’d breathe in the smoke. And yes, we even knew how to make full-burn hash with an iron and wax paper, so you whippersnappers didn’t come up with that, either.

Anyway, a decade or so after knife-hits faded in popularity, the Atlanta hip-hop scene started to mature. A new dance came out in 2012 called “dabbing,” wherein you’d duck your forehead into the crook of your arm while sticking your other arm straight out to the side; Cam Newton made the move famous because he did it every time he scored a touchdown for the Carolina Panthers. But the “dab” didn’t come from sports or hip-hop, because the gesture is meant to look like what someone does after taking a huge concentrate hit: you turn your head into your elbow and cough like the world is ending, and you hold the other arm out as if to say, “dear god, keep that stuff away from me” (or at least, that’s where most people on the internet think it comes from). “Dabbing” was associated with smoking marijuana long before the dance came out (regardless of what the dance’s inventor, “Skippa Da Flippa,” might have to say about it), and the move is just another dance in a long line of dances meant to emulate everyday motions, like the “running man,” the “lawnmower,” or the timeless “bump-and-grind.” And it’s not even the first marijuana-related motion dance to pop up because people have been “passing it to the left” ever since that reggae song came out in the eighties.

However, when it comes to dabbing marijuana, I must admit that this newest generation has taken something we invented and made it much, much better. Now, instead of knives and a cooktop, we use a dab rig. Basically, these rigs have a “nail” that you heat up with a small blowtorch (these nails can be made from glass, ceramics, or metals like titanium). And then you “dab” a little of your concentrate onto the nail (which sits where the bowl of a pipe or bong used to be) and inhale the smoke. It’s easy and clean and ridiculously potent. Since all of the plant matter has been taken out of the equation, a few of the concentrates currently on the market come close to 99% per THC content, and that’s insane. The high is mind-bendingly intense and it hits you quick and pure, like only a concentrate can. At the Greenery, we have basic dab rigs that start around fifteen bucks and a complete line of full-burn concentrates. If you come in, we’ll show you how to put the two together.

But quite a few people are put-off by the idea of using a blowtorch to smoke pot—to them, it feels a little superfluous and strange, a little over-the-top. And because of this, I’ve noticed that most dabbers over thirty prefer a handheld vaporizer like the Cloud V that we sell in our store for around sixty bucks. Frankly, I’m one of these “people over thirty,” and I doubt that I’d dab if I had to use a blowtorch. I prefer discretion: the Cloud V is battery-operated and it fits in your pocket. It has a little ceramic bowl and a heating element; all you do is load it and push a button and inhale. It couldn’t be simpler.

But just like with everything else pot-related, it’s what you put in your pipe that matters, not the pipe itself. You’ll hear me talk about this quite a bit from now on, but recently, our company expanded to include The Greenery Hash Factory, and we’ve started making our own concentrates. And just like the flower that comes out of our grow, our concentrates are the best on the market. But we’re doing it the old fashion way—without the use of caustic solvents that’re inimical to flavor—so only one of our concentrates is full-burn: our Rosin.

We make our Rosin with nothing more than heat and extreme pressure: premium flower is squeezed with a heated pneumatic press (it’s an amped-up version of the iron and wax paper I told you about previously) and the thick, gooey goodness called Rosin seeps out of the flower. We sell it for $60 a gram before tax, and it’s worth every penny. The batch I have loaded in my Cloud V right now comes from Chemmy Jones flower, and it comes in at 75.9% THC, which is incredible because we didn’t use the chemicals commonly associated with high-THC concentrates. But it is what it is, and at close to seventy-six percent THC, just a little dab will do ya’ when you’re smoking our Rosin (and yes, I know I just stole an advertising slogan from my parents’ generation, but whatever).

Our Rosin really is worth trying if you’ve never “dabbed” as the millennials are calling it these days, because the flavor, convenience, and potency surpass old-school hash by a country mile, regardless of who thought of it first. So please, come in and let us show you what you’ve just read about—let us introduce you to something new, something better than what you’re used to. We’re Your Best Buds, and when it comes to dabbing, that’s what we do.

Caviar Marijuana

Posted on October 21, 2017 - 9:00 am

People get pretty pretentious when it comes to fish eggs. Think about it: the only true “caviar” comes from the critically endangered beluga sturgeon—a monstrous fish that swam alongside dinosaurs—and it sells for $290 an ounce. It’s salty and black and usually enjoyed by people who wear suits and snobby expressions, like James Bond. I’ve only eaten it a couple times, and I didn’t understand the hype; it didn’t taste any better than the fish eggs you get at sushi restaurants for a fraction of the price. But that sushi stuff is just called “roe,” and to some people, that matters, I guess. And to these people, it’s annoying when the rest of us refer to garden-variety roe as “caviar,” but really, we only do so because it’s a crap-ton easier than saying “salt-cured fish eggs that come from a species outside the acipenseridae family of fish.” Know what I mean?

And in a way, it’s ironic, because just as “caviar” has become a blanket-term for fish eggs, so too has it become a blanket-term for infused cannabis flower. But then again, people get pretty pretentious when it comes to pot as well. Technically, the only true caviar marijuana is made by soaking a bud of Grape God in Grape Rhino hash oil, and then coating it with Grape Rhino kief. If a different flower, oil, or kief is used, the end product is just an unnamed variety of “infused flower.” But the confusion doesn’t stop there: instead of “caviar,” some people (usually from the west coast) use the term “moon rocks,” or they think that moon rocks are buds coated with cannabis wax. But that’s not accurate either—true moon rocks are made by soaking buds of Girl Scout Cookies in an oil made from the same strain, before coating it in more GSC kief. So, thanks to all the vagaries and confusion, the three terms have become somewhat synonymous, and frankly, here at The Greenery, we don’t have a problem with that: “moon rocks” is just the Californian way of saying “caviar,” which is just the Coloradan way of saying “infused flower.” At the end of the day, none of it matters because caviar marijuana is ludicrously awesome and it gets you high as hell, so who cares what it’s called?

Anyway, at The Greenery, we’ve always sold caviar, and our customers love it so much that we’ve started making it ourselves. For our first batch, we used Dark Star flower from our own grow, but instead of dipping it in hash oil that’d been thinned with alcohol like most places use, we painstakingly painted each bud (yes, with an actual paintbrush) with pure hash oil that’s just as thick and golden as the gooey-goodness in Winnie the Pooh’s honeypot. And then we battered each sticky bud in our own kief, just like fried chicken, before letting it dry. The result was wonderful: our caviar came in at over 55% THC, which is mind-blowing, but the best part was the texture. Most caviar is oversaturated with oil, and when you try to grind it, it clogs up your grinder and makes a hot mess. But our caviar crumbles perfectly and it’s easy to handle or roll into joints: it’s the perfect trifecta of potency, and just a little bit goes a long way. The high is quick and potent, the flavor is rich and decadent, and the best part is that you don’t need to be James Bond to afford it: before tax, our caviar sells for only $25 per gram, or $20 for a one-gram, pre-rolled joint, and we always have plenty in stock.

So please, come into our dispensary at 208 Parker Avenue and come see this stuff. Come ask one of our budtenders to show you a sample or let you smell it, and we swear that you’ll understand the hype (unlike with those snobby fish eggs), because We’re Your Best Buds!

Kief Brick

Posted on September 30, 2017 - 9:00 am

Thirty years ago, my father had a poster hanging on the inside of his closet door: it said, “a puff of kief in the morning makes a man as strong as a hundred camels in the courtyard.” The poster was warped and creased with age, the font was straight out of the sixties, and a tall hookah was pictured on the left with smoke wafting from the bowl at its crown. And as a child, I had no idea what it meant. I assumed it had something to do with drugs, because those are the things you “puff,” but I ruled that out quickly because my father didn’t do drugs; he loved his polo shirts and his hard-to-read books and his government job. However, the years passed, and I finally figured out that the poster was indeed a relic from my father’s hippy youth. But I still didn’t know what “kief” was.

Fast forward to my freshman year: a guy named Drew gave me a homemade kief box as a gift. As a side note, they call them “pollen boxes” now because kief is still illegal in most backwoods states, but that’s irrelevant. Anyway, when Drew gave me the box, I opened it and looked inside. There was a fine screen in the bottom with another compartment below it. I asked Drew what the hell a “kief box” was, and after giving me an incredulous look, he told me to keep my weed in the box and shake it gently from time to time—Drew told me that the “kief” would fall through the screen into the compartment below, and that I could take it out and smoke it.

So, I did exactly what Drew suggested. And after an eighth or three of that good west coast weed, I’d collected a decent dusting of kief in the bottom of my box. I took it out, sprinkled it on top of a bowl loaded in my bong, and I smoked it. I sat back in my dorm room and I waited for the strength of one-hundred camels; I waited for the superpowers promised by my father’s poster. They never came, of course, but at least I figured out the riddle to that poster (by the way, Google says it’s worth $1000 now), and at least I discovered kief.

Kief is an Arabic word meaning “pleasure” or “intoxication,” which, if you think about them, are two pretty damn synonymous words to start with, so it makes sense that the Arabs would use only the one word. But the kief I’m talking about is something you smoke: it’s a naturally-made marijuana concentrate formed from the dried trichomes found on cannabis flower. And frankly, kief is one of my all-time favorite ways to get high. But it’s always been difficult to find, just like all the good stuff in life, because most kief is homemade and so good that most people won’t share it. However, that’s an annoyance from the past because The Greenery Hash Factory has started manufacturing and selling old-school kief right here in Durango, Colorado.

We make it simply and naturally—we put premium, boutique flower in our dry-sift machine (using a 150-micron filter), and we let friction do the work. The flower tumbles around for a while and all the wonderful kief falls into a collection bin below (it’s like that little wooden kief box of mine, but on steroids). We take out the powdery kief and compress it into a brick with a pneumatic jack, and then we cut it up into grams of “kief brick” that we sell for $30 before tax at our local dispensary. The batch I smoked just before writing this (yeah, that’s right) was made from Indiana Bubblegum flower, and the numbers are incredible: the THC came in at 44.9%, and the CBG came in at 3.1%. At this point, especially if you’re a regular reader of marijuana blogs, you’re probably bored to tears when it comes to information on cannabinoids like THC and CBD because it’s ubiquitous, however, CBG is an up-and-coming cannabinoid you should pay attention to—this odd little chemical is actually the parent of both THC and CBD, it’s thought to have anti-inflammatory properties, and it might even be a neuro-protectant (smoking high-CBG concentrates might actually protect your brain, despite what your mother told you).

However, just like I said in last week’s post, the numbers don’t matter much, nor does the science—it’s the experience that counts: our kief is incredible, and I’m pretty sure this is the stuff Tinkerbell sprinkled on the Lost Boys to make them fly. And smoking kief is like eating the frosting first and leaving the cake behind, because you’re smoking the trichomes without the sticks and stems you’re used to. It’s flavorful and rich, and the smoke expands in your lungs, like a genie trying to get out of his claustrophobic lamp. The high is complex and long-lasting, with warm body notes and a cerebral giddiness that seems way too intense for something that costs only thirty bucks per gram.

But it’s the flavor that’s remarkable.

All the terpenes for which marijuana is famous are found in the trichomes—these terpenes are what give marijuana its smell and taste, and when you’re smoking pure trichomes, the flavor is multiplied exponentially. You can taste all the fruit and citrus and pine notes as if they were highlighted by a big marker, and all the subtle nuances that were hinted at before in plain flower stand out in kief like the stars they truly are. And this stuff smells exactly like it tastes: pungent, like intoxicating potpourri.

Actually, you just need to see it for yourself. You need to smell this stuff in person. You need to smoke it and sit back, and experience if it’ll make you feel stronger than one-hundred camels in the courtyard. So please, come in to The Greenery and ask one of our budtenders to show you our kief; this stuff is just as good as it sounds, and we’ll share it too, because that’s what Your Best Buds are for.

Moroccan Hash in Durango

Posted on September 23, 2017 - 9:00 am

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The Berbers are a people of ancient Arab stock—they’ve lived in the mountainous Rif region of Morocco for as long as records have been kept. Their eyes and hair are deep brown, their traditions are exotic, and they paint their houses and streets blue to mirror the sky, to be reminded always of a god living above. And they make hashish, just as they always have, because it’s a part of Moroccan life.

In the Rif, the soil is red and rich, and the air smells salty because the Mediterranean Sea starts where the mountains end. And hidden in the highlands are terraced hills covered with flowering marijuana. The Berber men tend their crop until it’s time to harvest, and then they reap their fields the way their fathers taught them to. The harvested marijuana is set aside to cure for a month, and then the flower is trimmed from the stalk. The green bud is ground gently, and then placed on a silk drum—the silk acts as a filter: the pollen falls through while the plant matter stays trapped on the surface. The Berber men cover the flower with a tarp, and then start beating on it rhythmically with bamboo canes; they call this “making music.” When the hash-song is done, the men uncover the beaten flower and throw it away. They take the silk head from the drum and look inside; the brittle trichomes that filtered through the silk sit in the drum’s bottom. Light brown, pungent, intoxicating.

The men press the powdery hash by hand, heating and kneading it gently, and they smile as their Moroccan hash darkens. They roll it into balls, keeping the best for themselves, and then they send their hash out into the world; these Berber men make half the world’s supply. But oddly enough, marijuana is illegal in Morocco. Lenience is given to the Berber tribes because it’s easier than policing them, but once their hash leaves the mountains like snowmelt flowing downhill, it loses its protection. It’s coveted and fought over just like anything else that makes you feel good, and it’s always been ridiculously hard to come by in the States. I’ve only had authentic Moroccan hash twice in my life—I could tell by the tribal stamp pressed into the bricks I bought—and I didn’t want to think too much about how I got what I got, because most of this hash is smuggled out of Morocco in a very… personal way. But each time I smoked it, I loved the feeling Moroccan Hash gave me, and after each time I ran out, my smile turned upside-down.

But that’s over: now, The Greenery Hash Factory is making their own Moroccan Hash, and we’re selling it at The Greenery for thirty-five bucks a gram. And the craziest part is that the stuff we’re making is better than the stuff I’ve smoked before; maybe we should call it “Durangan Hash” and smuggle it into Morocco so they can see what they’ve been doing wrong for centuries. For one, we use the best marijuana in Colorado to make our hash—our cannabis is grown in a controlled environment with living soil by a badass Master Grower, not out in the wind and rain of a Moroccan mountainside (and we don’t have to worry about goats eating our pot, which is nice).

Secondly, we use modern technology to make our “music”; quality control is much easier to achieve when you’re using a dry-sift machine instead of bamboo canes. And when you do everything scientifically, from using an exact heat to caramelize the hash to testing the hash in a modern laboratory, you end up with a superior product. Our most recent batch of Moroccan Hash is simply awesome: we made it from Skunk #1 flower, and the THC came in at 65%, the CBD came in at 1.3%, and the CBN came in at 2.3%. Today, when most marijuana concentrates are made using a chemical extraction process, these numbers are exciting because we did it the old-school way, naturally.

But in the end, it’s the experience that counts, not the numbers or the three-letter-acronyms, and I swear to you that to smoke our hash is to know perfection. The flavor is deep and musky, like a velvety dark chocolate or a fragrant black tea. The high is focused and intense, with profound relaxation and a centered calm. It’s the high I’ve been looking for through the years since I held those tribal-stamped bricks of the real deal, but taken to another level in the hands of our hash craftsmen. So, come in to our dispensary and ask one of our affable budtenders to show you what I’m talking about; you can smell it and see it for yourself. From now on, we’re offering this Moroccan Hash to Durango and our neighbors because it’s just better than what has been offered before—that’s what you’ve come to expect from Your Best Buds, and that’s what you’ll get if you try our house-made Moroccan Hash.