This was awhile ago, so I don’t remember what strain. Maybe it was not a good one to wash as I tend to prefer sativa-leaning strains. Good to know that the pulpy buds are normal. Is it one wash only or can you get any return washing the pulp a second time?
I ended up getting rid of my washer when I moved, but maybe I’ll try and do a hand wash the next time I have a good hash strain, just to see.
Do you grind or break the buds up at all before making them into hash?
whole buds just cut into the bag minus the fan leaves and stalks.
Don’t you worry you’re missing trichomes that are buried deep within dense buds?
naw, hell no. If I could squeeze more hash yield out of these nuts buds that would be a crazy world. From my experience you can get an additional 30% yield in oil. Instead I toss that shit in the compost. Yah, I toss out 30%, it’s fuck-all to a big operation. When I initially started growing I would save 100% of everything and extract 100% of all goodies, but now, that’s just a waste of time, toss another kilo of weed on the bonfire.
The objective with the hash extraction is to make such a good extraction, that your friends wonder who made that shit. It’s not about yield, it’s about the melting goodness of it all. But, you will eventually find “that plant” which has a crazy hash yield that melts like the dickens…charles dickens…err or something like that.
If you toss buds right into the freezer right after harvesting them, do you think you could later at some point take them out to dry and cure as if you were doing that right after cutting them?
Also, can they only be in the freezer a certain amount of time?
The freezer does things to plant material, once it thaws out - all cellular structure has been destroyed by ice crystals.
Ok… and can they be stored in the freezer indefinitely?
yep they can be stored in the freezer forever as long as there is power.
Hey Joe, how do you dry your hash? Air dry?
Freeze dryer?
Are you putting it in a press after?
Sorry if you already mentioned these things, I forget.
This is the way I’d do it as well. But I only process further to rosin or use it in edibles, not smoke directly. Dry ice hash is more than fine for making edibles. It’s easy to dose with compared to flower, and has no bitter taste. It makes great rosin as well, and is my preferred choice for an intermediate concentration step, because it has probably the highest yield. I would also choose dry sift for hash that I would smoke directly. But for me personally, I will always prefer to smoke rosin or flower over any kind of hash, unless it is hash from a traditional source using traditional methods on traditional cultivars…
On another note, after having run dry ice enough times, I can easily see when it shifts to plant material breakdown. I’ve done runs where I shake the shit out of it and process the “dirty” greener stuff with a rinse through the bubble bags, and it went quite well. But it’s really the 80/20 rule at that point. 80% of the yield comes through clean with dry ice. The last 20% is 80% of the work to recover to similar quality. I usually just chuck it. Dry ice yields are already massive.
I would love to hear some more about this…
I will probably try both methods and see what I like, but yeah, why you like dry soft for smoking?
why rosin over hash?
and what the traditional way would be(rubbing fingers?) and why that’s preferable?
Traditional methods could be hand rubbing (like in India or Nepal), or dry sifting on silk screens (like in Lebanon, Morocco, Afghanistan, etc). I would only prefer it as a cultural or historical experience, to better understand how it is used or has been used around the world. And also to help better understand how plants are selected in those areas and what impact that has on the kind of hash they produce. Smoking hash is still quite enjoyable, but I wouldn’t necessarily choose it for every day consumption over rosin.
From my experience, dry sift makes the best quality hash, but it is a very low yield. Water/ice hash is somewhere in between, with medium yield and quality. Dry ice hash includes the entire trichome stems, so you will notice that it doesn’t form together as well. For this reason, I think that is why it is the lowest quality, and not because of other chlorophyll containing plant material, which you can easily separate by grading. When you press rosin, it doesn’t matter if you have only the heads or the heads and stems. In both cases, the non-resinous parts are mostly bound inside a matrix of plant matter and kept inside the press bag.
He’s a cannibal. 
So since the non resinous parts are kept in the bag, rosin gives you a more pure product?
Smoother smoke?
How would vaping the any of the hash methods compare to the rosin?
If I wanted to inject some product into a Pax Era pod, would rosin work /be the best choice?
I do all of those processes. I freeze dry some, I can quick dry some in the dehydrator, or shelf dry it for a long time. Even micro plane it in water and dry it overnight. I never press it, but sometimes I roll it into a ball.
Can you give a lil more insight into them? Like maybe convenience, speed, quality etc?
What do you think about SuperiorBuds420 curing his rosin?
I like to cure it in my brain.