What is your way of drying/curing??

I've been botching the dry/cure myself in the past.
This time I took them down a bit too soon and basically finished drying them in the jars using (accurate) hygrometers.
I found this post the other day and turns out, this is pretty much how it's gone so far for me.
Good cure info here

 

I've been using a hanging drying rack from amazon for a couple of years. I trim wet and put long finished colas on the rack. In the winter time I've noticed that since it's so dry the rack dries too fast. It's resulted in a little harshness in my last harvest. I'm attempting to fix this with a longer jar cure and it's coming along.

Because of this my other plants this harvest I resorted to hanging full branches with the fan leaves from a beam near the ceiling. These buds are drying half as fast. I'm anticipating a much smoother smoke out of these.

Talking with a few professionals most commercial ops don't even jar their bud. They only hang dry. What you have to do for best flavor is make sure this hang dry process is not too fast. You need above 50% humidity in the drying room. This will extend the process to about 7-14 days of hanging. During this extended drying time a good portion of the chlorophyll and bad flavors are consumed by the still alive plant before it gets so dry that it stops breaking down bad flavors. If you dry initially too fast you'll have harsh bud.

 

Ideally, I think we want it 62% @ 68F (same as in jars) in the dry room but it is risky for mold... it better be a clean space and it will take about 2 weeks.
That is probably how they get away without jarring it commercially?

 

I've actually heard that 70% is ideal but that is hard for most people to maintain. Above 50% should slow down the hang dry enough to make the end product much more smooth.

 

I would say as long as you have an oscillating fan in the room that the humidity level shouldn't be a problem. Another thing you can do to extend the drying is leave all the leaves on. I tried this as an experiment and the branches dry so much slower it's a little crazy. Half as fast as trimmed colas on the dry rack in the same room. My drying rack has been making buds ready for a jar in about 4-5 days. Hanging full branches with the leaves has taken 8-10 days to dry enough to trim and jar my first buds. That is in the same room as the other drying rack at the same humidity level which is about 40% on average. That's as high as I can get it with home heating and my exhaust fan running.

 

It's harder to trim sort of. If you let it dry to a certain point most of the leaves will break off without much trimming at all with a little work from the hands over the plant. You'll find that your harvest is higher because many of the sugar leaves curl back in towards the buds and dry as part of them. I'm an OCD trimmer normally and I'll take off the tips of all the sugar leaves when wet trimming. Once it's hung upside down it's so difficult to do that you never would.

 

I hang larger branches instead of the whole plant at a time but I suppose if you hung the whole plant it could slow the drying process even further. Most of the larf would just dry first and flake off easy with a pass of a gloved hand once the colas were the perfect dryness to trim. That actually makes the larf taste better too. It's like ready to smoke when you're jaring buds.

 

I smoked some of my hung branches since many are ready for jars. It's definitely smoother at this stage then my rack dried/wet trimmed buds. Those are starting to come around but take much more work in the jars to smooth out.