Harvesting fresh frozen material (including buds) for concentrates - no solvents, full yield

If you are viewing this thread, do not take this guide seriously. There are major errors. I will redo something accurate later, probably after my next grow finishes. Biggest mistake IMO was wet trimming. I will never do it again. With that said, there is some useful info in here.

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This is how I harvest my fresh frozen material for concentrates.

I am a concentrates guy and have lupus so I don't care to mess with smoking buds much. It is a blue moon / occasional thing for me.

When I harvest I don't have the biggest trim job or drying work because I don't dry. I just bag up the buds and throw them in jars then they go overnight in the freezer. I don't care about trimming nice sugar leaves, they stay on. I rip the garbage leaves right off. You can rip off the sugar leaves / trimming / mediocre trimmings into its own pile if you like for a strict bubble run. I don't care for this though.

I jar those buds up and freeze them overnight. The next day they are processed into fresh frozen bubble. I give one, maybe two runs maximum, no heavy agitation. Just a wooden spoon and I mix about 10 - 12 minutes by hand.

After this is done and I collect the fire, I look at the buds after I recollect them. It is smart if you squeeze a good bit of water out when you recollect them. Of course I refreeze them. If they are anything worthwhile and have trichomes all over it still, I will make fresh frozen dry ice the next day. If they are weak, I will make a nice batch of cannabutter.

With the dry ice, if you are lucky you may get some high quality melty sift in lower micron bags shaken lightly and a short time in the initial run. If you squeezed enough water out, froze it overnight, and put enough dry ice to keep the water frozen off the buds before agitating, you will have no issues. The buds will still break like glass. Be careful of getting too much water over the screen it is wise to do shaking it a seperate container before filtering through a bag. If you keep your stuff frozen you will not have this problem though. It is a good precaution however. The non-melty grades I end up collecting them and saving them for rosin hash bags which I then obviously squish into rosin. When it is terpy I use unbleached, unchlorinated parchment, press, freeze immediately, as soon as frozen, transfer to oil slick sheet paper / glass (more reserved for full melts). Very low grade material will just possibly be reserved for edibles or thrown out. The green waste garbage I just chuck out.

The nice thing is if you do this bubble processing before you dry ice and everything else, you collect the fire melts, and you also wash the material from a lot of contaminants and water solubles.

You also, of course, yield fresh frozen, extremely terpy highest quality material. Granted you did not blast your plants with poison during your grow.

I am doing this process now and will post some pics as I go along, have a couple full melt shots for now, I'm busy with other things so it will take me a little time.

 

First pic I made some stable material by lightly heat pressing the full melt when it was collected. Other picture I did no heat press, just squished in my hand / paper, all bubble hash.

 

As you can see here is a bud after processing it with the bubble hash method, it would be crazy to discard this, it has more processing to do with dry ice and a significant yield to obtain.

 

I can't believe it's not BHO! (or rosin!)

Strain I'm working with is Magilla's Choice (Platinum GSC X Grape Pie [Grape Stomper X Cherry Pie]), Cannarado Seeds.

 

Lotta updates tomorrow haven't gone anywhere just busy.

 

Couple updates, some things I learned :

If you yield very high quality full melt, do not leave it on the drying screen for a long time. Microplane it very very quickly. It will lose the moisture rapidly and you will lose a small amount to the drying screen like I did.

The other thing I learned is that fresh frozen dry ice is bullshit. The nug gets as hard as a rock from the water freezing into ice and will NOT break up. The material must be dried afterwards for this step, which is what I'm doing.

 

Updates : I dried the nug that I used for bubble. The plant was so entirely stripped of trichomes that I could not make 1 drop of rosin from it. I also overestimated its weight, my original estimates when it was growing on the plant were correct. So I was happy with the grams of some of the best full melt oil I've ever had in my life that I got out of it. It was my baby plant, so it was a good tester strain.

To be fair, the stuff I used for dry ice was very trichomeless, so I can't entirely claim it is "bullshit" yet, but I would like to believe it is because I still can't imagine the nugs being broken up but staying frozen.

So I'm trying something different, I'm currently drying a good bit of my top shelf nugs and trimming the trim out of it for fresh frozen bubble, as well as some smaller popcorn nugs for bubble. I'm gonna test to see whether classically drying them and saving them for flower rosin / edibles old fashioned way is most optimal, or if I can sift / dry ice / rosin a portion in a practical manner.

I'm still testing the theory too of budwashing / "hash washing" with water to help purify, and then dry. It obviously works well for bubble, but I think I'll experiment with a small batch of nugs / kief.

The first time I ran the baby plant nugs / trim into bubble, I used the powerdrill on the 3rd run as a tester and I got a small yield of "pea soup". I think before that I didn't have anything left anyways, I was just trying to get the rest. So I am going to test a small "popcorn / trim run" one time with my 1 gallon bags and and a wooden spoon and see if there is anything worthwhile to collect afterwards. This will prove how useful / useless processing after bubble is.

If there was anything in my earlier pictures, it was just frost / sessile trichomes / plant material, because they are very hard to find now dried.

All I have to say is I don't think I will use a powerdrill for making bubble ever again. And when I'm done I will revise everything, this is my rough draft.

Here's a shot of some tester nugs I had drying, now curing, very happy with them.

 

Pressed out 2.5 little baby nugs from the previous picture to test out the rosin last night, I like it as much as I like the bubble. Stuff was stable glass at room temp. Not "optimally cured" but I couldn't help myself. Single press only, no double press, these nugs are amazing for rosin, very easy to squish it all out. I pressed it on unbleached, I just transfered it to white bleached parchment for visual purposes. Thinking about putting it on PTFE after big squishes, but it's pretty stable so that might be pointless.

I'll be back later for a final update once my stuff cures and show some more melts, rosin, sift, etc. and say what I thought was the best. And redo my rough draft.

Happy dabbing!

 

I have a Remington hair straightener, 2 inches wide. I set the heat to 300F and turn it off until I think its a good heat. I could use a infrared thermometer but I am experienced enough. I pre-press my nugs by wrapping them in parchment and smashing them into solid baseballs with my hand or shoe. Clean your soles please, or use clean shoes!Works better than all "pre-presses" Ive ever tried. Not that you can't find a good one, just works for me. I don't press this much cause I am scared of waste from the occasional blue moon blowout, but I can probably press between 1 - 2 grams at a time. Ive also tried the machines. While they are definitely convenient for commercial grade, I get the same or better results. Maybe a little less efficient but whatever.

I either use a clamp or I just use the power of my leg to press. I think I like my foot presses overall better lol. Use something to cool it down afterward immediately, makes a huge difference.

I also ran some lower grade bubble that I yielded a little of through rosin bags, worked fine. I used 45 micron and thought it was too fine of mesh, and this was from stuff I pulled off the 25u screen.

I may make a little sift too and collect / rosin the lower grades too ill see, Ive got a mini dispensary of cookies now aha.

You can't go wrong with the rosin, I like it as much as the bubble. I am starting to do it to my curing nugs now. Near 0 waste if you extract properly.

I will never waste my time with expensive joker concentrates ever again after this. Im only buying a gram at a time of reasonably priced CLEAN fire. Anyone can do this themselves.

 

I have no patience I will just dab my bubble or rosin right off the wet material / wet bubble lol. I'll take some baby nugs right off the plant to test it early too, so if you have some popcorn testers go right ahead. In my opinion the rosin process burns a little water off anyways.

 

Press I did earlier with just two presses.

 

Gonna take a moment and thank users :

@Tbone Shuffle
@jerry111165

These guys are a seedbank of knowledge. I've made concentrates forever, but these guys helped me make my last hump to get over, and ended up assisting me to have a very nice first personal home grow. I've got enough meds to last me until next harvest, can't understate my gratitude.

Thanks to this my mother is currently almost done with her prescription opioid medicine and able to quit, and I have plenty of edibles to pass off to my buddy with brain cancer. And a bit to share with the friends and some others in my family. And of course a constant supply of high quality clean medicine for myself.

 

Before I tried making my usual rosin butter, I decided to make some cannabutter from some fresh frozen trim / larf. I decided to apply the same principles I used earlier and it worked out very nicely.

The first step I did to the fresh frozen material was put the leaf / nug in a big bowl and run warm water all over it, mix it around, then strain the water from the material several times until I decided the material was stripped of anything water soluble. The next thing I did was decarb in the oven, which also removed the moisture. Then I knocked my oven down from 240F (I decarb 45 mins) to 170F, and mix for 15 - 30 minutes in 100% butter until I feel it's all infused, then filter with the usual methods. I add water to the finished butter before I put it in the fridge the last time to make sure the water is crystal clear and it's all oily stuff in there.

Resulting butter is potent, seems lighter colored and less green that most batches I've seen too. Very minimal "plant" taste.

 

My theory was to get it out before hand, and I think it worked out good. I figured it would make the mixture dissolve faster since it is overall more "oily". I also figured I would wash it before hand to strip the butter.

The result of me added the water at the end seemed to show it worked out pretty good. It was clear. Didn't bother to taste it but probably wouldn't have been too bad.

I've done this process with cleaning it up with the old mixing in water with the cooking butter-weed mix, it just took a lot longer and a bunch of freezes and pours to get the water completely clear.

I guess it's possible. I've never noticed any difference. I've smoked my rosin chips, which have tasted horrible and have done nothing beyond gave me a headache and bad breath. I do know that there are .5% of cannabinoids left in the plant that are not found in the resin glands. The remaining 99.5% is found in the resin glands. The resin glands seem to separate completely intact in the ice water method. The lab tests are telling since hash oil possesses all of the known cannabinoids we desire, that are found in dried flowers, as well as live resin. There are a smaller number of known water soluble terpenes, there is a name for them, but they are usually found in small quantities and get dissipated away from dried herb. It's possible some water soluble cannabinoids could in theory be washed out from the typical drying process. Live resin are the only way these are kept.

Maybe deeper research on the .5% of cannabinoids left in the plant material could be telling. I doubt it is much of anything different. Alcohol based extracts seem to just have more unwanted elements such a chlorophylls and plant waxes. I've heard of pharmaceutical cannabinoids being water soluble, but not from cannabis. These .5% could be all oil as well.

If you want CBD, CBN, CBG, THCV, CBC, your typical terpenes... they are all hydrophobic.

 

Research is also starting to show that not all of these amber / yellow trichomes that develop are CBN (which isn't a bad cannabinoid anyways), so I believe people who harvest early are missing out on some valuables.

 

There is also a little bit of moisture in rosin too, otherwise it would come out as the most ridiculously brittle shatter that would be very hard to collect without it flying everywhere. So if there are any, they're still present (though very minimal amounts).