hashish Archives | The Grand Junction Greenery

Communist Cannabis

Posted on July 23, 2020 - 5:34 pm

I want you to picture a naked Russian man standing next to a horse without a saddle (I promise this has something to do with pot, so hang in there). He’s in the Chu Valley, right between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and it’s a nice day. The grasslands around him are flat and verdant—in fact, he’s standing on the border of a large marijuana forest where the plants are ten feet tall. He’s not alone, but everyone is freshly bathed and naked, just like he is.

The naked man gets on his horse, and a few of his naked friends get on their bareback horses as well, but most remain on their feet. And then the whole group starts singing and laughing, calling out cries of jubilation, right before they ride and run with abandon through the forest of marijuana (which, by the way, is called “dichka” in Russia).

The leaves and buds whip the Russians’ bodies and their horses, and soon, everyone is covered with a thick coating of “kief,” which is a combination of trichome heads and plant matter (all the crystal-goodness that covers ripe marijuana). The group of people, some running and some riding, methodically trample the entire marijuana field so they can collect as much kief as possible, and then they ride or walk back to camp, singing and laughing. Once there, the naked, dichka-covered Russians stand on pieces of canvas, and then different Russians (fully dressed ones) use wooden tools to scrape all the kief off their naked friends and their horses. The mixture of kief and sweat is then pressed into bricks and sundried into Russian Hashish, which they call “Plastilin.” And yes, the grossness of this story makes it a tad difficult to believe, but you can read a corroborating article HERE (but as a tip, do not google “naked Russian hash making” on your company computer like I just did, because the images you’ll find have nothing to do with marijuana). Crazy, right?

This has been going on for as long as dichka has been growing in the Chu valley, and to this day, plastilin is still one of the most sought-after forms of hashish in the world. And the name is interesting, now that I think about it, because once it’s dried, this form of hashish looks and feels just like plasticine clay (the colorful stuff you used to play with in preschool). Granted, most of the reason people search for this stuff is that it’s so rare, so if it were widely available, I doubt people would crave it because hash without human and horse sweat is undoubtably better. And that’s where we come in given that we operate our very own Hash Factory that specializes in making international hashish.

But don’t worry, we won’t be making Russian Hash any time soon because I doubt Colorado would let us do anything naked, and we don’t own any horses. Frankly, I just wanted to tell you about this stuff to prove that we know the down-and-dirty about foreign hashes, and to point out that the international hashes that we do make aren’t nearly as gross. You can read about our Moroccan hash HERE and our Lebanese hash HERE, and you’ll be delighted to know that you can try either one without finding a single horsehair in your pipe. You’re welcome.

That being said, all the blogs I’ve written in the past about our traditional hashes have steered you right here to Durango, Colorado, which is the source for classic concentrates in the Southwest. But did you know that you don’t have to come to Durango to try our hashish? In the past, I imagine it’s been frustrating for you out-of-towners to read about our hash without being able to try it, and for that, I apologize. It’s taken me this long to realize I’ve never told you that our traditional hash is available in over 160 dispensaries across Colorado, and all you have to do to find the closest one is look at our hash-finder map that you can see HERE. Isn’t that wonderful?

The reason that our hashes are so much better than everything else out there is that we don’t use hydrocarbons to make our products; we don’t need butane to make concentrates like everyone else because the old-school way is just fine. We tumble our pot and collect the kief, and then we bake it or press it to make the most wholistic form of hashish you can imagine, and our processes stand the test of time because people have been making hash just like we do for thousands of years. So, come see us, or click on the map to go see one of our friends, because international hashes are wonderful, and because We’re Your Best Buds!

Colorado Dark Hash

Posted on April 28, 2018 - 9:00 am

Why is it that only the Middle East is famous for hash? It’s not fair…

Yes, I know that “hashish” is an Arabic word, and I know they came up with it first, but I’m still a little jealous. And I don’t care if it sounds like I’m throwing a fit because I’m allowed to—I’m the Sales Manager for a bona fide Hash Factory right here in Durango, Colorado, and I spend my days selling “Moroccan” hash and “Lebanese” hash to dispensaries across the state (we’re in forty-three of them as of right now). Don’t get me wrong, exotic hashes are wonderful and time-tested, but they’re still foreign; they’re still modeled after the hashes that come from “over there.”

So, what about Colorado? Given that hash is legal here, while it’s still illegal in places like Lebanon and Morocco and Afghanistan, shouldn’t we have our very-own type of hash that’ll put us on the hashish map? Shouldn’t Colorado become famous for a hash that’s named after us? We think so, and guess what? Like I said, I work for a hash factory, a place where we get to make whatever the hell we want, and we decided to come up with something just for the home-team.

But it took us a while to figure it out. All the old-school stuff has been done before: kief has been aged and baked and pressed for thousands of years, and all those methods have been claimed by other cultures for generations. And all that new-school stuff like BHO comes from California, if we’re being honest, so we can’t claim it and call it “Colorado Hash” even though we’ve perfected it. So, we spent quite a bit of time in front of the proverbial blackboard, and we decided to meet in the middle of the two paradigms; we decided to make a mashup of old and new school hashes and call it out own: Colorado Dark Hash.

For the record, Joel Cameron, the man who owns The Greenery Hash Factory, came up with the idea, but I get to be the first to give him credit for it in writing (years from now, I like to imagine that some future stoner just like me will google “Colorado Dark Hash” and read what I’m writing now while he’s chasing down the origin story for the world’s best hashish, and the thought makes me smile). But it took Joel weeks of research and development to figure it out, not to mention a ludicrous amount of financial investment, so I’m not going to tell you exactly how it’s done because I know for a fact that people will try to replicate this concentrate once they figure out how freakishly awesome it is. But here’s the gist:

We bake old-school kief to decarboxylate it (I swear the process is more complex than it sounds), and then we mix it with pure CO2 oil to bump the potency up into the new-school range. See what I mean? It’s a marriage between the old and new, much like the historic state that gave birth to legalized cannabis. And when the first batch cooled into the midnight black hash that we created, it felt like we’d made something special, something novel, and lightning arched across the sky while Joel screamed, “it’s alive!” (that last part isn’t true, but a little poetic embellishment is expected when you’re writing an origin story).

Anyway, the concentrate that lay cooling in front of us was pungent and potent and just as black as the diamonds that mark dangerous ski-slopes. It was the first batch of real Colorado Hash, and it was born just a few days before 4/20, which has to count for something. But the best part is how it smoked. You can’t smoke CO2 oil in a pipe because it has to be dabbed, but you can put this oil-fueled Colorado Dark Hash right in your pipe and light it up to get the potency usually found only in dabs, and you don’t even need a blowtorch. And with this new-school potency comes the old-school flavor: musky earth-tones that come in concert with deep relaxation and a full-spectrum high.

It isn’t hyperbole: The Greenery Hash Factory has come up with a new hash that’s better than anything else out there because it takes the best of both worlds and melds them together into something unique, something truly Colorado. And our egos are stoked because we made it first, we smoked it first, and we’re going to sell it first. The first batch of Colorado Dark Hash is now on our Durango dispensary menu, and we’re selling it for $40 a gram before tax, which is well worth it, and I’m not just saying that because I work here. So, come see Your Best Buds at 208 Parker Avenue and ask to see some of Colorado’s hash, because this is something we’ve made just for you.

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.

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Tag: hashish

Communist Cannabis

Colorado Dark Hash

Kief Brick