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Two New Ways to Dab

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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!

Changes in our Durango Dispensary

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Change really is the only constant here at The Greenery, even though saying so sounds like a platitude. But change is a good thing because it means we’re listening to you, our customers. And you’ve been asking for all sorts of things, from flavored exotic vape cartridges to more affordable dabs to fast-acting edibles, so this week, I wanted to check in and tell you about all the new stuff that’s popping off here in our Durango dispensary.

First, let’s talk about people: Jen and Porter are the two newest additions to our team. Jen is the calm, professionally-dressed woman who seems to be catching onto the whole “budtender” thing more quickly than humanly possible, and Porter is the young gentleman with an excited smile who’s probably sold to you more than once if you’re a regular. And I wanted to start off by talking about these two because they’re both wonderful additions to our team, and they’ve made it their personal goals to give you the kind of experience that keeps people coming back to our Durango dispensary.

But if I’m being honest, I know you come here for cannabis, and the good service is just a bonus, so let’s talk about what’s new per the products we’re selling. For one, we’ve added House Wax and Shatter to our shelves. These products are exclusive to The Greenery because they’re made from our boutique flower, and the price is phenomenal—the House Wax sells for $30 per gram after tax, and you can walk out our door with a gram of House Shatter for only $35. Seriously, you won’t find a better dab for a better price in Durango.

Secondly, many of you have been asking for one-gram cartridges, and we listened. We’re selling 1000mg carts filled with terpene-rich distillate for $85, and even though that might sound like a large investment, it’s a wonderful value. Most 500mg carts are priced in the $60 range, so these 1000mg carts save you money if you look at it like you’re buying in bulk, and the distillate inside these large carts is as potent and tasty as it comes. You’ve also been asking for flavored cartridges as well, so once again, we listened, and were now selling distillate PAX Pods that come in an assortment of flavors like Creamsicle and Lime Sherbet (pot has never tasted so good).

And yes, the “fast-acting edibles” I mentioned in that first paragraph do in fact exist. I’ll tell you more about those next week, but we’re now selling gummies and powdered drink additives that are made with a water-soluble THC distillate, which means that these edibles can take effect in as few as thirty minutes. If you’re a fan of edibles, I don’t have to tell you that this is a gamechanger.

Now, if you’ve shopped here before, you know that we have a loyalty card program wherein you can get deep discounts the more you shop (for instance, your tenth pre-roll in our shop will cost you a dollar out the door). But many of you have been telling us you’d like more freedom with your rewards, so once again, we listened, and we rolled out an electronic rewards program. Aren’t we fancy?! I’ll write a dedicated blog about it when the time is right, but basically, we’re using an electronic system that tracks your purchases (so you don’t have to keep a punch card in your wallet), and you’ll be able to use your discounts on just about anything, which wasn’t the case before. Trust me, it’ll be much better.

Okay… that covers all the new stuff, but some things will never change, just like Tupac said—we still have the best cannabis in town, our budtenders are still about fifteen times more knowledgeable than the other guys, and your experience in our store matters to us just as much as the product we sell. And most importantly, we still listen to our customers and make the changes you request. So, if you’re over twenty-one with a valid I.D. proving as much and you’d like to see these changes for yourself, come see us at 208 Parker Avenue, because We’re Your Best Buds!

Vape Pens and Vape Cartridges

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The very first blog I wrote for The Greenery was about vape pens—that was seventy-five blogs ago, and I told you how old I felt on my first day working here, because in my day, all you could do was smoke pot, but now, you can vaporize distilled CO2 cannabis oil with a ceramic atomizer… If Luke Skywalker enjoys cannabis, this is probably how he does it. And even though I wrote that first blog only a year and a half ago, things have changed drastically, and it’s obvious that you care because 1,200 of you read that first post (I’m famous!). So, this week, I wanted to revisit cannabis vape pens and oils to let you know what’s new.

For one, we now sell Bluetooth-capable vape pens. Seriously. If you buy a PAX Era battery (we sell them for $33 out the door), you can download an app for your smartphone and do all sorts of cool things: you can lock the battery from your phone and then leave it on your coffee table without worrying about roommates smoking your oil, you can adjust the heat remotely from your phone, and you can even play a few vape-themed games on your phone, if you’re into that sort of thing. But you don’t need the app to use the PAX Era pen (I don’t have the app, and I use my PAX all the time), so don’t worry if technology isn’t your thing.

Now, as to the cartridges or “pods” the Pax uses, I’ll simply say that they’re awesome. We carry all the exotics, like pods filled with Live Resin or Budder or Distillate, and you need to try these things. The Live Resin pods are full of terps and they taste and feel just like traditional marijuana, the Budder pods pack a punch, and the distillate pods are filled with naturally-occurring terpenes for a wonderful taste and a clean high: right now, we have blueberry, orange creamsicle, and lime sherbet—giving these exotic vape products a candy-like flavor.

And then there’s Evolab; these people are straight-up scientists. They’re the only company out there who has managed to create a “cannabis-derived cutting agent,” or CDCA. You see, all oils need to be thinned with something to make them smokable, because most oils and distillates are nearly solid after processing, so something needs to be added to make them viscus. PAX pods use PG or MCT, some companies use terpenes, but Evolab can claim that 100% of the oil in their carts comes from the cannabis plant thanks to their CDCA. We sell 500mg distillate cartridges that’ll fit on any universal 510-threaded battery, and that’s a good thing because the Chroma carts are as clean and pure as they come. The Alchemy Balance carts deliver high percentages of both THC and CBD, and the Evolab disposable vape pens we sell contain 250mg pure CO2 oil.

Third, we carry the full gamut of pure CO2 oils from Sweet (which stands for “southwest expert extraction technology,” because this oil is produced right here in Durango). We sell their cartridges and disposable vape pens, but for those of you who like to dab oil or fill your own cartridges, we also sell one-gram syringes filled with Sweet’s potent oil; the value and convenience is unbeatable. And speaking of value, we also sell 500mg carts from V3 Oil, and you need to come check these things out because you wouldn’t believe the price if I put it in this blog.

And lastly, we need to talk about O.pen. We still sell this company’s standard and Reserve cartridges (the ones I talked about in that first blog), but now, we’re selling their terpene-rich distillate as well—this product is ludicrously good. The distillate is CO2 derived, but the problem with most distillates is that they don’t contain any terpenes, so the high is potent but it isn’t complex. So, O.pen started including up to 13% strain-specific terpenes in their Craft Distillate, which was already one of the best products on the market. Now, when you smoke the Craft carts we’re selling (which will soon be available in a one-gram version!), you get the familiar type of high and taste you’d get from flower.

There! Those are the all the new and exciting things you need to know about the world of vaporizable cannabis oils. So please, if you’re twenty-one or older with a valid I.D. that proves it, come see Your Best Buds at 208 Parker Avenue if you’re interested in vaping marijuana, because there’s no such thing as a Durango dispensary with a higher-quality selection than The Greenery!

PAX Era in Durango

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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!).

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Dabbing Marijuana

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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.

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