Is it a good idea soaking the herb before making cannabutter ?

NOPE!

Mix herbs into the butter as it melts down. Then stir and simmer for a while, making sure all your herbs have been covered and simmered all the THC into the butter. Once you are done cooking it into the butter. Then you strain all the weed residue out of your butter and save your now to be cannabutter.

 

You could break the bud down in a grinder or hand fingers broken down... or you could drop it in the butter as buds and smush it into the butter until its a green paste look to it then strain to get leafs out of the butter. Add buds to water will probably make your butter weaker and runnie... I would just stick to butter and buds no water. There's lots of threads about making eddies and butter on here. Everyone will answer no to the water idea... might dilute your THC percent @@!

Send me a sample!

 

What you're thinking of is water-washing prior to cooking, to reduce the chlorophyll/salt content of the resulting canna oil. It doesn't help with your oil or extraction potency-wise, and in fact can result in free-floating (and ultimately, the loss of) a number of trichomes during the wash and soak, unless you take measures to collect and preserve them afterwards.

So long as you fully dry and decarb the material after the water soak, before adding the material to the oil, you're good to go.

 

Aside from removing some of the inert 'icky' tasting plant matter, if that's not your aim, it's actually a little counterproductive

Decarboxylation, or activation must occur prior to consumption, this is the process of removing the carboxyl group in the form of carbon dioxide and water vapor, this causes cannabinoid conversion from their less potent acids, to their active delta forms. And in simple terms (read the stickies for more detail) you decarb, or activate your material, by drying it even beyond the point where it is smokable.

So making it wet, just means you've got more drying to do before processing, which is perfectly fine if removing chlorophyll and salts was your true intent, but if that's not your intent, there's no point. That being said, it's worth noting that if the soaking isn't thorough enough, you can wind up loosening and inviting even more inert plant matter into your oil than you would have had, if you'd just dried well, and used a pure oil source to begin with.


If you wanted, or if you're concerned with separating glandular material from the plant matter beforehand in order to make a more concentrated oil, you could make ice hash and extract the trichomes before using them for making your oil. But if the water is not very cold during manipulation, the glands actually become even more stubborn towards removal or separation, than they would be if you'd opted for dry-sift hash. This is where it becomes counterproductive, if loosening the glandular material was your aim!
So that's ice-water for making hash, and room-temp water for keeping the glands in place (for the most part) and washing away the 'green' flavor.


Anyhow, long story short, the drier the material is before processing with oil, the better.

 

He was still right