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Two New Ways to Dab

Posted on January 26, 2019 - 9:00 am

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I like whiskey, but I like sipping it; it’s probably been a decade since my last shot. And maybe that’s why it took me so long to get into dabs—the idea of smoking a quarter-gram of live resin all at once seemed superfluous, just like chugging scotch. But taking dabs is a budtender prerequisite because we need to know what we’re talking about when customers ask, so I started with a wax pen (just like most older smokers). But after a while, I found myself wanting just a little bit more with each hit because wax pens are mild and convenient, but they don’t deliver that robust hit for which hash smokers are looking. I thought about buying a dab rig, but that would be taking things too far the other way; I needed to find that goldilocks middle ground. So, I did a little research, and I found (and tried) two new ways to dab that every smoker should know about because both methods are awesome. And as our staff blog-writer, it’d be amiss to not share my discoveries with you, so that’s exactly what I’m doing this week—if you’re looking for a whole new way to dab, try one of these methods:

1.) Reverse Dabbing, or Cold-Start Dabbing. Frankly, this method is slowly but surely becoming the preferred method for all dab-heads, not just those of us who don’t want huge hits, because a reverse dab preserves the concentrate’s flavor. Let me explain. Usually, when you take a dab, you heat the nail or banger with your torch before applying the dab. But with reverse dabbing (which works only with a banger), you put the dab into the banger while it’s cold (ergo, “reverse”). Then you hold the torch flame about an inch away from the bottom of your banger and slowly heat it until the dab starts to bubble before inhaling. It’s important to make sure your banger is clean before starting this process for the best results, but because of the gradual build to vaporization, you don’t miss out on any of the flavor, nor do you overheat the banger and cough your head off with a hit that’s too big. See what I mean? This is like sipping whiskey instead of shooting it.

2.) New School Hash Bowls. We tell our customers over and over that new-school dabs cannot be smoked in a pipe because the dab will liquify when you try to light it with your lighter and then pool in the bottom of your pipe, but with a little skill, this isn’t true. And for the record, the term “hash bowl” has been around forever (it’s when you mix old-school hash with flower and then smoke it in a pipe), but a new-school hash bowl brings together the best of both worlds, and if you do it right, this is one of my favorite ways to smoke dabs.

Step one: grind some flower and fill your pipe halfway. Step two: put a small dab right in the middle of your pipe. Step three: put more flower on top of the dab until your pipe is full, and then press it down gently. Now here comes the important part: light the bowl and inhale until a cherry forms, and then stop using your lighter. The heat from the cherry will melt the dab, the liquid will infuse the remaining flower in your pipe, and then it’ll stay lit until your bowl is empty (it takes a little practice to do it just right). For real, if you haven’t tried this method, you need to—a new-school hash bowl gives you the complexity of a flower high and the potency of a new-school dab, which is simply awesome.

There. Now you know everything I do about these two new dabbing methods. But the best part about either of these ways to dab is that they let you stick your feet in the pool before jumping in. Most people who haven’t dabbed before shy away from the idea because going from smoking flower to taking dabs is like going from zero to sixty instantly, but both reverse dabbing and new-school hash bowls let you gradually build to that insane high you can get from a dab instead of diving in with a full-blown dab hit. And the best part is that we sell everything you need for either of these methods right here in our Durango dispensary. So, if you’re over twenty-one with a valid I.D. and you’d like to try one of these new ways to dab, come see us at 208 Parker Avenue and we’ll get you set up, because We’re Your Best Buds!

A Breakdown of Cannabis Concentrates

Posted on December 2, 2017 - 9:00 am

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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

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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.

Marijuana Vape Pens

Posted on May 13, 2017 - 6:31 pm

Open Vape Marijuana, The Greenery, Durango

I’m old, or at least it feels that way when I walk into a marijuana dispensary. When I was a kid, pot was a plant you lit on fire, and that’s about it. We’d hear stories about exotic sounding hash or kief, but we could never get our hands on it, and “pot brownies” were a rare luxury. But now, I’m a budtender at The Greenery here in Durango, and things have changed dramatically.

It seems as if there’s no limit to the variety of ways one can consume marijuana—we sell every imaginable sort of edible, from caramel-coated lollypop to THC infused root beer, and we have on our shelves a veritable panoply of concentrates ranging from simple hash to carbon-dioxide-extracted live resin. And as a newcomer entering into this industry with not much more than the memories I brought from my misspent youth, it was all a little overwhelming the first time I stepped behind the counter; I can’t imagine what it might feel like to a first-time customer.

However, The Greenery is different from the other local dispensaries for one simple reason: our knowledgeable, friendly staff. As a new employee, I’ve been testing the depths of their collective knowledge with my incessant questions, and on a daily basis, our budtenders have been thoroughly impressive. These young men and women have been able to answer all my questions in a way that doesn’t leave me guessing, and I’ve seen them extend the same professional courtesy to every new customer who walks through our door. But just in case you haven’t yet visited our dispensary, I’d like to share one of my favorite new discoveries with you: the O.pen disposable vape pen.

As I alluded to earlier, until recently, I’ve only smoked flower or enjoyed the occasional edible; I’ve never ventured into the world of concentrates because I was a little ignorant. So, for my first experiment, I asked Clay (one of The Greenery’s friendly budtenders) about the easiest way a newbie such as myself could try hash oil. In case you’re just as ignorant as I was, “hash oil” is a concentrate made by extracting with carbon dioxide all the wonderful cannabinoids that live in marijuana plant matter (hash oil is most commonly enjoyed through a vaporizer similar to an e-cigarette).

Clay told me all of this and I’m sure my eyes glazed over a bit because he slowed down and started showing me all the options, the simplest of which was the O.pen disposable vape pen I mentioned earlier. Basically, the disposable vape pens we sell at The Greenery come preloaded with one-hundred milligrams of hash oil. Each one is about the size of a cigarette, and all you do is take the vape pen out of its child-resistant packaging and take a puff. It’s that simple. Each eight-second puff contains about two milligrams of THC, and each disposable pen contains roughly fifty puffs worth of concentrate; once it’s empty, you simply throw away the vape pen and move on with life. These pens are discrete and convenient and affordable; we sell three varieties (indica, sativa, and hybrid) for $25 each before tax.

Frankly, after I bought and tried my first vape pen, I felt like a fool for waiting so long. These things really are as convenient and discrete as they’re advertised to be, and the effect was perfect. My wife said the vapor smelled nothing like marijuana, but the high was one of the cleanest and quickest I’ve ever experienced. The only drawback I noticed was the fact that if I turned the pen upside-down, some of the oil leaked out of the mouthpiece, but Clay warned me about the possibility and I left The Greenery fully educated vis-à-vis the new product I was about to try. It was a perfect experience, one that was both easy and comfortable, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in branching out.

And that’s all I have for this post. Please, if you’re like me—a creature of habit who’s stuck to the same way of smoking for years—come down to The Greenery, even if it’s just to ask questions. We’d love to show you all the new things that’re coming on the market monthly, because we’re your best buds.

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Tag: exotic carts vape pen

Two New Ways to Dab

A Breakdown of Cannabis Concentrates

Dabbing Marijuana

Marijuana Vape Pens