How to Cure Cannabis? | Drying and Curing Fast
After months of hard work carefully tending your plants, you’ve finally harvested a crop of frosty, fragrant cannabis buds that you just can’t wait to try. But first, they need to be dried. While you may be tempted to dry your cannabis as quickly as possible, curing, a prolonged process of removing moisture from the flowers under controlled environmental conditions, will provide a much better product for multiple reasons.
As you’ll be well aware, cannabis plants produce varying levels of tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) and a number of other cannabinoids such as CBD and CBN. These compounds gradually transform over time, with THCA eventually becoming converted into THC through a process of biosynthesis as your plant grows.
Interestingly, this process of biosynthesis continues after you decide to cut down your plant and, fortunately for THC lovers, the non-psychoactive cannabinoids in your buds will begin to convert into THCA when kept in the right conditions. Namely, this means keeping them at temperatures that fall between 60°F and 70°F and humidity levels of 45% to no more than 55%.
Dry Your Cannabis In A Climate Controlled Room For Success
Drying is as important as growing, and a bad drying process can ruin even the best buds. Drying marijuana means reducing the water content of the buds to 10-15%, depending on the desired crispiness of the final product.
Most commercial growers do not cure their crop; they just dry it and sell it. Curing is a long but necessary step toward the highest possible quality of the smoke. For the real connoisseur, curing is the essence of it all, the culminating moment towards the perfect result.
There are many ways to cure and dry, but the method I like best is to use a climate-controlled room.
The Conventional Method to Cure Cannabis
All you need to have for this step is a few vacuum-sealed Kilner jars. They are easily available in the market so you won’t have any problem in finding them. You can also use jam jars or mason jars if they are air-tight and are properly sterilized.
Once your buds pass the snap test and are dry to the touch, gather all the buds you can by snapping them off the branches. Now, open the jars and start filling the 2/3rd of the jars with these buds. Do not close the lid or clamp it down in case of Kilner jars. Instead, keep it loose and store in a dark cool place.
Dry rack
Depending on how you intend to dry your buds, you may need a Dryer Rack, which we’ll go into more detail about below. This is definitely not the preferred method because it’s easy to misshape your buds, but it may be necessary if working in higher humidity environments.
ALTERNATIVE: GO LIVE
Using fresh frozen flowers rather than carefully dried and cured buds is the breakthrough US extract artists have made to produce gourmet concentrates with far more terpenes.
The cannabis must be kept at subcritical temperatures for the entire extraction process and you really need lab conditions and equipment such as rosin press to accomplish this.
Long term storage
For long-term storage (months), buds should be kept in air-tight weed containers (the wide-mouthed mason jars they’ve been curing in are perfect) and placed in a cool, dark environment.
For serious long-term storage (6 months or more), you may want to consider vacuum sealing your buds, or even better, storing them in your freezer in tightly packed mason glass jars!
As you’ll be well aware, cannabis plants produce varying levels of tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) and a number of other cannabinoids such as CBD and CBN. These compounds gradually transform over time, with THCA eventually becoming converted into THC through a process of biosynthesis as your plant grows.
Interestingly, this process of biosynthesis continues after you decide to cut down your plant and, fortunately for THC lovers, the non-psychoactive cannabinoids in your buds will begin to convert into THCA when kept in the right conditions. Namely, this means keeping them at temperatures that fall between 60°F and 70°F and humidity levels of 45% to no more than 55%.
Dry Your Cannabis In A Climate Controlled Room For Success
Drying is as important as growing, and a bad drying process can ruin even the best buds. Drying marijuana means reducing the water content of the buds to 10-15%, depending on the desired crispiness of the final product.
Most commercial growers do not cure their crop; they just dry it and sell it. Curing is a long but necessary step toward the highest possible quality of the smoke. For the real connoisseur, curing is the essence of it all, the culminating moment towards the perfect result.
There are many ways to cure and dry, but the method I like best is to use a climate-controlled room.
The Conventional Method to Cure Cannabis
All you need to have for this step is a few vacuum-sealed Kilner jars. They are easily available in the market so you won’t have any problem in finding them. You can also use jam jars or mason jars if they are air-tight and are properly sterilized.
Once your buds pass the snap test and are dry to the touch, gather all the buds you can by snapping them off the branches. Now, open the jars and start filling the 2/3rd of the jars with these buds. Do not close the lid or clamp it down in case of Kilner jars. Instead, keep it loose and store in a dark cool place.
Dry rack
Depending on how you intend to dry your buds, you may need a Dryer Rack, which we’ll go into more detail about below. This is definitely not the preferred method because it’s easy to misshape your buds, but it may be necessary if working in higher humidity environments.
ALTERNATIVE: GO LIVE
Using fresh frozen flowers rather than carefully dried and cured buds is the breakthrough US extract artists have made to produce gourmet concentrates with far more terpenes.
The cannabis must be kept at subcritical temperatures for the entire extraction process and you really need lab conditions and equipment such as rosin press to accomplish this.
Long term storage
For long-term storage (months), buds should be kept in air-tight weed containers (the wide-mouthed mason jars they’ve been curing in are perfect) and placed in a cool, dark environment.
For serious long-term storage (6 months or more), you may want to consider vacuum sealing your buds, or even better, storing them in your freezer in tightly packed mason glass jars!
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