Cannabis concentrates are becoming more popular all the time. For some, getting the biggest possible kick out of weed is about buying the highest-THC concentrate their budget can stretch to and going nuts. For others, there’s so much more enjoyment in cooking up DIY cannabis concentrates at home.
The only slight issue is that with most cannabis concentrate extraction methods, there’s a danger of doing yourself serious damage. As in, the kind of damage that could explode you and the home you live in.
Hence, unless you know exactly what you’re doing, most commercial/industrial extraction methods are to be avoided at all costs.
However, there’s one approach to cooking up concentrates at home that’s not only safe but also spectacularly easy. It’s simply a case of collecting enough kief to get the job done, after which the door to experimentation is wide open.
What Is Kief?
Rather than getting too technical with the whole thing, kief is basically just another word for trichome dust. Trichomes are those wonderfully resinous glands that give cannabis buds and leaves their distinctive frosty-sticky coatings, along with all those fantastic fragrances and flavors.
This is also where the lion’s share of THC, CBD, and other precious cannabinoids can be found.
All extraction methods for the purpose of creating cannabis concentrates follow the same basic principles. You separate as much of this high-potency resin as you can from the rest of the plant matter, ultimately producing a product with a much higher potency. Cannabis concentrates routinely test for more than 50% THC - some taking things to extremes with more than 90% THC.
Kief tends to err more toward the mid-reaches of the scale, but with the added bonus of not risking blowing up your entire home during the production process.
How to Collect Kief
Cannabis flowers need to have been properly dried and cured to produce enough resin to be useful for kief collection. However, it’s much easier to produce kief using buds that are seriously dry - any moisture in the buds will make it difficult to separate the trichomes. In any case, collecting kief is as simple as picking up a grinder with multiple chambers. You simply toss the bud into the top chamber and grind it as normal, after which it gradually makes its way through the small holes in each layer to collect in the bottom chamber.
Slowly but surely, a decent pile of dust will begin to accumulate in the bottom of the grinder, which is kief. The residual plant material can subsequently be discarded or used to make some low-strength edibles if preferred.
How to Consume Kief
Once you’ve whipped up a batch of kief, there’s no shortage of consumption methods to experiment with. Though the three most popular uses for a batch of high-THC kief are as follows:
- Sprinkle it in your joints. If your objective is to simply get as high as possible as quickly as possible, simply sprinkle a little kief into your joints for an added kick. Keeping a small jar of the stuff on standby for when you’re craving something seriously strong is never a bad idea.
- Cook up some edibles. You can also use kief in place of standard weed in any of your favorite cannabis recipes. Though it’s important to remember that a little goes a long way, particularly when lacing edibles with these DIY cannabis concentrates.
- Vape it. Last up, you could always find a decent recipe online and knock up your own vape liquids. This can be a great way of bringing out the subtler nuances of the kief’s fragrance and flavor profile, in order to gain maximum enjoyment from all those tasty terpenes.
