Cannabis Extraction at Home

By Michael S. Lazar

We support everyone’s right to grow their own cannabis. We are also big believers in sharing the tools and expertise for successful, sustainable home cultivation. And of course, that extends into home extraction and making edibles and topicals that are tailored to your, and your loved ones’, personal needs! We’re just getting going and can’t wait to share more, so please stay tuned! Here’s an Intro to Home Extraction from our very own extraction expert and plant medicine sage, The High End Director of Operations, Mike Lazar.

❤️The High End

Why Extract?

There are plenty of reasons why you might want to extract your own cannabis at home. On one hand, cannabis enthusiasts and purists can really enjoy the fruits of home extraction because it allows for a pure experience, the terpenes and effects unadulterated by the other plant compounds that you might be burning when smoking. Those who can’t smoke and would prefer to consume their cannabis orally or topically would perform home extraction, condensing even entire pounds of flower into a small amount of usable oil.

Methods of Extraction

Generally, extraction is performed by using a solvent. A solvent is something that dissolves the specific product that we want to remove, while also leaving the rest of the components that we don’t want. Alcohol makes for a great solvent for THC, and you’ll often hear about things like butane, hexane, pentane, and other organic compounds used to extract THC commercially. You don’t need anything like this for home extraction – even coconut oil or butter can be considered solvents. Oils like that are great for things like edibles or topicals because the fats bind to THC very readily, but it would be difficult to remove the THC from those kinds of oils afterwards. Alternatively, grain alcohol makes for another great home solvent for THC because by using a still or even just leaving your extract in the open air, removing the alcohol from what you extract is a simple process. I can’t recommend what’s referred to as “blasting” for home extraction because of the danger involved. That is best left to the professionals, I think. However, you can also fairly simply create solventless extracts with nothing more than a bucket, some mesh bags, some ice, cold water, and a spatula. (This is our favorite! – T.H.E.)

Edibles

Probably the simplest way to extract at home is making edibles! This is a time-honored tradition that we now can perform with ease thanks to the early brownie-making pioneers (like Brownie Mary!) coupled with our knowledge of the chemical properties of THC. First, you need to decarboxylate, or “decarb”, your cannabis. THC naturally occurs as something called “THCa” which is its “inactive” state. This means that there’s really no psychoactive effects that will occur upon digesting the compound. In order for our edibles to have an effect, the cannabis must be decarbed. We do this as a simple function of heat and time. I find that the best method of decarbing is to just spread your cannabis flowers across a baking pan and placing the pan in your oven at around 220F for an hour. Your flower should smell nice and toasty, and depending on the THC content it may be crisp or even a little sticky now. Next, you’ll want to get some sort of fat, whether that’s butter, coconut oil, olive oil, whatever you’d like to use. Some oils are more effective at THC transfer than others but this is up to personal preference and really won’t make much of a difference if you decide to keep your flower in your final product. Place your butter or oil in a saucepot, enough to cover the amount of flower you want to extract. Simmer for about 30 minutes on low heat, stirring occasionally. You don’t want it getting too hot, no boiling! (Boiling will start to break down the now active THC even further into a molecule called CBN, which means it loses its psychoactive properties and now will just make you very sleepy.) Once simmered, you can strain out the flower with some cheese cloth and your infused oil or butter is ready to go! You can use this infused oil or butter on its own, or to infuse into any recipe.

Alcohol

Another very simple at home extraction. (Bonus: home growers who’ve experienced hardships with their plants becoming infected with bud rot or powdery mildew would otherwise have to throw out their plants, but with alcohol, you can perform a simple extraction that would sterilize the plants and make them able to be used topically. We don’t recommend ingesting or inhaling alcohol extracts made with moldy or infected flower! Leave that kind of remediation to the experts.) The easiest extract to create is a product known as “green dragon”. Just place your flower into a mason jar (decarbed or not) and cover with an alcohol of your choosing. Lower proof grain alcohol like vodka means that you can drink your green dragon straight but it is less effective at dissolving THC. Higher proof alcohol like everclear allows for greater THC saturation, but will need to be cut with other things such as water to make it potable. Just keep it in your freezer and give it a shake every day for at least 2 weeks, strain out your flower, and your green dragon is good to go! If you want, you can remove the alcohol to make good old Rick Simpson Oil, a strongly concentrated full-plant extract that can be used to infuse edibles or as a medicine on its own. The legendary Rick Simpson himself created this oil in order to cure his skin cancer and spread it directly onto his body. The safest method is to just leave your alcohol THC mix out to open air to allow for the alcohol to evaporate. If you’re feeling really adventurous, you can use a still to recover your alcohol. However, alcohol creates very flammable vapors and so the utmost caution should be used whenever creating alcohol extracts! I don’t recommend anyone go past the green dragon step without training, but I can always recommend that folks read up on the subjects to familiarize themselves.

Ice Water Hash

Something near and dear to my heart, and one of the easiest ways for folks to enjoy good grade hash at home, is ice water extraction. To do this you will need a 5 gallon bucket, a spatula, ice, water, and something called “bubble bags”. Bubble bags are mesh filter bags that catch the good stuff - trichomes. Trichomes are the tiny glands covering cannabis flowers, and they contain the lion’s share of THC. So when you put your flower into a bucket filled with ice and water and start to stir it with your spatula, what you’re doing is breaking off those trichomes and, since they sink in water, you’re separating them from the rest of the flower. The mesh bags will catch these trichomes as they sink. You want to keep everything cold when you do this, so adding ice as you see it melt might be necessary, but keep stirring for about 15 minutes. Remove the flower and collect your hash! Spread it out and let it dry (in the open air is fine but it’s best to keep it cool). Once dry and sandy, you can collect it to smoke or infuse into edibles. Alternatively, you can turn it into...

Rosin

This might be the best way to get the true essence of whatever cannabis you’re enjoying. Quite simply, the only thing you need to do to create rosin is to squeeze your flowers or your ice water hash. The easiest way to do this without investing in expensive machinery is to get yourself a sturdy hair straightening iron, some parchment paper, and mesh rosin bags (if you want to press hash). Take the flower you would like to extract, place in an appropriately sized piece of parchment paper, and then squeeze the flower bundled in parchment inside of your straightening iron. You might have to play around with temperatures and pressure but you’ll see a ring of yellowish oil around the flower that you pressed. You can do the same with hash that you’ve placed in a mesh bag inside of parchment in the same way. After a few moments the oil will harden, and then you can collect it by using whatever dab tool or stainless steel implement you’d like! Because rosin is so pure and lacks any plant fats or other components, it can be smoked or dabbed directly, perfect for folks who like to enjoy the true essence of their favorite flowers!

Happy experimenting!!