Builders are in the midst of a race to see how they’ll apply freeze dryer expertise to dry and treatment weed sooner, taking a course of that might have taken weeks into one thing that’s just about instantaneous. Drying hashish after it’s harvested removes the moisture from the flowers to allow them to be correctly smoked or vaporized and usually takes anyplace from 10 to 14 days. After that, the flowers are cured, every week to month-long course of which removes further moisture and helps protect the buds and retain their taste and efficiency. With freeze drying expertise, what as soon as might take weeks may be executed in a day or inside a matter of hours.
Typical drying and curing includes hang-dried buds, Mason jars, burping, and an entire array of economic instruments to make the ending course of attainable, however freeze dryer expertise is altering issues quick. However does the method actually work? Is the bud any good? Will extra hashish firms look to undertake this expertise sooner or later? Excessive Occasions checked in with consultants on this comparatively new technique for drying and curing. There are an array of variations in instruments that can be utilized to dry, freeze dry, treatment, or put together for curing—with some, specifically, designed particularly for drying hashish.
“It’s a unique expertise,” Oaksterdam instructor Jeff Jones tells Excessive Occasions, noting that the freeze-drying course of to historically dried and cured hashish is like evaluating private manufacturing preferences corresponding to hand-trimmed weed versus machine-trimmed weed. The feel of the flower differs, however probably not the scale, efficiency, or nug construction.
Jones taught in regards to the medical hashish discipline in California for effectively over 20 years, co-founding the Oakland Hashish Patrons’ Cooperative (OCBC) in 1995 and serving to to form Oaksterdam. Whereas he admits it’s not the identical as hang-dried hashish and historically cured flowers, Jones believes there’s a place for freeze-dried weed within the hashish house.
A number of firms are main the cost towards discovering probably the most environment friendly options to sooner drying and curing durations. Avoiding hang-drying programs may also assist mitigate different issues corresponding to mildew.
WAVE, an organization constructing freeze dryer machines out of Vienna, Austria, is without doubt one of the firms using this revolutionary expertise. Basic supervisor of WAVE Freeze Dryers USA Alejandro Cerdas is a seasoned vet within the hashish business and says that freeze drying hashish makes the post-production course of extra power environment friendly and supplies different advantages as effectively.
“There are a collection of advantages: power effectivity, avoiding mildew going by way of the method, and preservation,” Cerdas says.
Every firm we spoke to supplies machines with completely different advantages, usually utilizing patent-pending expertise.
The Know-how Behind Freeze Drying
Conventional freeze dryers work with hashish by freezing the flower, then usually decreasing the strain and making use of warmth to permit the frozen water within the bud to alter on to a vapor, i.e., sublimate. With this in thoughts, every firm supplies completely different processes.
“You mainly begin along with your materials after which that’s barely frozen after which put below a vacuum, and mainly sublimation happens,” WAVE CEO Dan Berlin says. “The ice goes straight to vapor. It skims over the water part. And we slowly elevate the temperature by way of the method and gently take away water. And we’re attempting to go away the flower at about 11-12% [moisture] once we pull it out—not like conventional freeze drying if you go and take all of the water out for when you could have freeze-dried berries or issues like that. With hashish, we’re attempting to successfully treatment it so that you simply don’t need to undergo the entire drying and curing part.”
Cryo Remedy’s patented design, then again, has a number of key variations from conventional freeze-drying strategies—one thing the corporate likes to differentiate for people who find themselves new to freeze-drying strategies.
“We’re attempting so arduous to coach the general public on the variations of freeze drying versus Cryo Curing—as a result of each make the most of a freeze dryer, however the ultimate outcomes couldn’t be any extra completely different,” Cryo Remedy CEO Tracee McAffee says explaining that the system retains extra trichomes and terpenes intact than conventional freeze drying.
Based on the corporate, the Cryo Remedy system’s freeze temps and drying instances are extra fine-tuned to hashish than comparable merchandise. The Cryo Remedy course of is to freeze the hashish or industrial hemp to -20 to -30 levels Fahrenheit for a minimum of 10 hours to protect the form and integrity of the flowers, and choose fashions have a built-in freezer for this function. The frozen product is positioned into the fabric chamber below vacuum strain, equally to different freeze dryer fashions.
Keirton Inc. and Trichome Applied sciences mix the drying and extracting course of of their machine whereas sustaining high quality and preserving terps—launching Velos Chilly Remedy course of and Velos Essence. Velos Essence can seize important oils to be used in vape cartridge flavors, edibles, drinks, fragrances, and prescription drugs.
“Velos Essence is a patent-pending course of that we have now on extracting terpenes–the complete terpene profile, so monoterpenes and the whole lot from recent hashish,” Keirton Inc. CEO Jay Evans says.
Terpenes are the chemical properties inside hashish that give the plant its style and odor. These risky hydrocarbons additionally play a task in pot’s results and are labeled by the variety of carbon items they comprise with monoterpenes containing two isoprene items.
“You get about an 80% extraction, so then that flower can be utilized for different extractions and the terpenes may be added in after extraction,” Evans explains. “So a number of extraction processes, the monoterpenes are broken. This pulls all of them off organically.”
Velos additionally has a brand new product up its sleeve, which remains to be in growth. Even burping, the method of permitting moisture and CO2 to flee throughout the curing course of, may be automated.
“It’s known as the Remedy Puck,” Evans says. “It’s a tool, and it’s not launched but, it’s a tool that connects to a standard bin or tote, that may mechanically monitor the gasses within the tote, together with temperature and humidity, and burp the tote when these gasses attain a sure degree.”
Saving Time & Bettering Effectivity
The ultimate treatment utilizing freeze dryers takes 24 hours or much less—practically all the businesses we spoke with present comparable timetables, starting from about 12-24 hours. Utilizing the expertise normally means cash for companies attempting to enhance effectivity. Getting bud from harvest to the completed stage can now be accomplished inside a matter of days.
“It might be two or three days perhaps, you realize, after which it might probably get packaged,” says Cerdas. “It doesn’t want a lot of the [normal] course of.”
However you’ll be able to’t all the time anticipate the identical outcomes from a freeze dryer system until the settings are set to the particular wants of hashish flower as you don’t need them to dry out as a lot as different historically freeze-dried supplies.
“Conventional freeze-drying strategies, even by utilizing freeze dryers, work so long as they are often managed—if you realize the fitting parameters, so it preserves the terpenes,” mentioned Greg Baughman, who co-founded Cryo Remedy with McAffee. “So in a nutshell, what we do is we’re capable of skip the hanging part of drying and also you go proper right into a ultimate treatment. So our machine replaces that seven to 2 weeks of hanging, drying in a room and takes that right down to between 12 and 16 hours, relying on the density of the cultivar.”
Conventional freeze dryers are designed to take away the entire moisture—not what we would like for smokable flower.
“In order that’s the place our secret sauce lies, is that we’ve dialed within the good recipe to just be sure you don’t take away all any of the terpenes and the entire moisture,” Baughman says. “We began realizing that there’s not that many individuals who manufacture fridges on the market within the choice. You already know, we went by way of each single producer they usually’re all made for various issues they usually focus on completely different industries.”
If an individual makes use of a standard freeze dryer, they’re not going to be designed particularly for batches of hashish flower. And firms like Cryo Remedy have mitigated many of those issues already to develop into a more cost effective buy for growers.
“Downtime equals {dollars},” Baughman says.
The Velos Chilly Remedy course of presents the same timetable, marking doubtlessly enormous enhancements in effectivity.
“We are able to take post-harvest drying from historically 10-14 days, or 10-20 days, relying on the way it’s executed to sooner or later,” says Evans.
What’s the Bud Like?
Whereas the scale of the buds stays the identical, some say that the feel is barely completely different. The freeze-dried flower can vary from a light-weight popcorn texture and weight to being virtually indistinguishable from hang-dried hashish. The flower’s high quality relies on which machine and course of you resolve to make use of.
Cerdas says WAVE shouldn’t be merely freeze-drying the flower as a result of freezing the flower creates irreparable harm to the cell partitions.
Typical freeze drying will “finally produce a flower that has a feel and appear like popcorn, and it’ll crumble,” he explains. “With that harm comes the horrible difficulty of shedding a giant quantity of terpenoids by way of the chilly boil produced by the combo of vacuum and temperature.”
Cerdas prefers to name his hashish “sharp dry” as an alternative of freeze dried.
“Mainly, the sharp dry flower feels, smokes, and behaves similar to common hang-dried flower,” he says.
The distinction in texture won’t be as vital to everybody, significantly these whose main curiosity is maintaining hashish recent for so long as attainable.
“What I can say about this freezing is that it’s not going to seize 100% of the market, however it’ll have a distinct segment very similar to Folgers Espresso and any processing supplies for shelf-ready storage,” Jones says. “As a result of if you happen to needed to place this materials into your bug out bag and have it for 2 years, I’m not going to name my herb that I simply put myself there good as a result of it’s not going to style good. It’s going to be completely stale and the consistency will shift.”
WAVE’s freeze dryer fashions additionally attraction to extraction artists as a result of the feel of the unique flower doesn’t matter a lot.
“We have now some people utilizing the tools for bubble hash within the extraction enterprise,” Cerdas says. “And that’s all the time fascinating as a result of the profit it’ll herald is totally completely different from what has occurred prior to now: As I discussed, we’ve not discovered a approach of utilizing the tools with out utilizing the traditional freeze drying course of—which we discovered damages the flowers. And also you get that bizarre style and really feel that individuals actually don’t like.”
Others agree with the distinction in texture, however think about it to be higher.
“There’s positively a distinction: primary, the colour and the look is a lot better than historically dried flower,” Cerdas says. “The terpene profile is commonly higher. The factor that conventional prospects usually are not used to is the feel. It’s completely different.”
One perk of freeze-dried hashish is its capacity to be saved for lengthy durations of time.
“It’s received to be saved in a lightproof and hermetic container and it’ll final a very long time,” McAffe says. “We have now some samples that we’ve had within the cabinet for about three years. It appears to be like simply the identical. We take little items off. Yeah. At any time when we have now prospects that come over demos, we pull it out and we mentioned, you realize, like, ‘Wow, that’s good.’ And once more, that’s two years previous!”
It stays to be seen how the patron market will react to freeze-dried hashish, however the advantages when it comes to saving time on the producer’s finish are plain.
wave.cc
cryocure.com
keirton.com
This story was initially revealed within the October 2022 difficulty of Excessive Occasions Journal.