How to Make Hash? | A Complete Guide

Do you have a stash of cannabis that you want to make the most of? Then making hash is the best thing you can do with your cannabis plants. 

While most of us think that high-quality hash can only be produced industrially, here’s a secret. You don’t need to own heavy machinery or go through tedious processes to learn how to make hash. 

You see, the main substance that gives cannabis its values are the cannabinoids and terpenes present inside its trichomes. Making hash is simply the extraction process of these trichomes from your cannabis plant. Following the extraction, you can press, heat, and use different methods to turn these trichomes into edible hash. The resulting hash is highly aromatic and has a distinctive flavor. 

Coming to the point, there are a lot of methods you can use at home to extract the trichomes and make your hash. With the long list of techniques and recipes available, you’re bound to find one that’s accessible for you. Here’s a detailed guide on how to make hash to help you get all the reliable information you need to get started. 

How to Make Bubble Hash?

Bubble hash is the most reliable and effective technique to make your hash. It requires easily available equipment and ingredients to create the ideal hash at home. 

To make bubble hash, you will need water, ice, silkscreen filters. Simply enough, you have to melt freshly frozen cannabis buds and press them at low temperatures. The result is high quality concentrated live rosin, which costs a fortune in the market. To get the perfect results, you’ll need to follow these instructions. 

Get Your Materials

You’ll need frozen cannabis buds, preferably frozen, to make bubble hash. Besides that, you’ll need a large bucket and a bubble bag that fits inside it. Also, find yourself a spoon big enough to stir everything properly. 

Prepare Your Bucket

First of all, line your bucket with micron filter bags or bubble bags. Start with the smallest bag you have and continue lining your bucket one after the other while gradually increasing the size of the bags. In the end, you should have the largest bag on the top. 

Next, fill another bucket with as much ice as possible. Cover the bottom of your bucket with ice and after that place weed and ice in alternate layers. Keep in mind that when you reach the top of the bucket, the last layer should be ice and not cannabis. Leave some space to facilitate stirring as well. 

Stir Your Weed

Wait until the water temperature decreases. You can consider putting the bucket inside the refrigerator if you want to work fast. When you’re sure your mixture is fully chilled, stir the mixture gently with a spoon. Keep stirring for fifteen to twenty minutes while increasing your speed as the ice starts to melt. 

Strain

Now for the most important part, you have to pour all your material into the bubble bag lining to strain it out. Once you’ve passed the material through, you need to start removing the micron filter bags or bubble bags one by one. When you remove one bag and filter out its contents, small resin glands will move on to the next bag to be filtered out even further. 

How to Make Dry Sift Hash / Flat Screening?

After the bubble bag technique, another popular and easy formula for making hash is the dry sifting method. This method is simply sifting your plant matter through a sieve to create concentrated kief. Later, this kief can be compressed into any shape and size to form hash. Here’s the step by step guide for making hash with the flat screening method. 

Get All the Essentials

You will need cannabis plant matter, baking paper, and silkscreen to get started. You should get silkscreens of various sizes so that you can gradually move towards smaller sized screens. 

Besides that, get yourself a container or a large sheet of paper to catch all the materials you sieve out.  

Start Sieving Your Trimmings

The next step is to keep your cannabis trimmings on the silkscreen and rub it with a stiff paper or card material to help it pass through. Continue doing that until you can see that no more resin glands are passing through the filter. 

Sieve it Once Again

Now, keep a second screen right under the first one. As soon as you finish sieving your cannabis through one screen, remove it and replace it with the second one. Keep doing that until you pass the material to all the various screen sizes you have. 

Label and Store

You see, every time you sift the material further, it becomes finer with a higher THC concentration. You can combine all the sifted material when you store it. On the contrary, if you’ve used different sizes of filters, you can store each resulting material separately and label it accordingly. The quantity will decrease with every sift while the quality will increase by volumes. 

How to Make Hash Oil?

Hash oil is a more concentrated version of the high THC resin hash. The thing about marijuana is that the more concentrated it is, the more expensive it gets. Even though hash is highly potent on its own, hash oil was created in 1970 to meet the increasing demands from marijuana enthusiasts for higher THC concentration. 

Hash oil is outrageously expensive if you buy it from local stores and dispensaries. However, you don’t need to worry. By rounding up the right equipment and ingredients along with maintaining proper precaution, you can make your hash oil at home. 

Prepare Your Safety Measures

The hash oil preparing procedure can be fatal if you don’t take the required precaution. You have to heat the marijuana trimmings in alcohol, which releases harmful fumes. Use a plastic cover to trap the fumes under it carefully while you heat the material. Also, keep some fans close to your working area to help disperse the fumes. 

Furthermore, these alcohol solvent fumes are highly inflammable. That’s why it’s ideal to use a hot plate or an electric stove to complete the process. Using gas stoves and Bunsen burners can put your home at fire hazard. 

Also, you should keep in mind that you’re working with highly toxic solvents. Make sure you completely remove these solvents from the oil you make before trying it out. 

Cook Your Cannabis

Start with trimmed cannabis flowers and crumble them a little with your fingers. Next, preheat your oven at 250 degrees F and place the plant matter onto a baking sheet. 

Bake for about 10 minutes. You’ll know the cannabis is properly toasted when it turns into a powder form when you crush it with your hands. If you’re using a hash instead of fresh marijuana, you only have to heat it for a few minutes until it gets smoky. 

At this point, you’ll have to continue quickly to the next step, or the powder will start losing its aroma if exposed to the air for too long. 

Blending the Powder

Blend the powder in a mixer at a low speed. We recommend this step even if it’s at a fine consistency after crumbling. That’s because blending helps disintegrate the plant’s cell walls and assists in maximum oil extraction. 

Refluxing Your Hash

Next, once you have your finely ground cannabis powder, you have to boil it in a solvent to extract the oil. Alcoholic solvents are the most common solvents for making hash oil. 

This is how it works. When you boil the powder in the solvent, the trichomes combined with traces of chlorophyll dissolved into the solvent, while the plant matter and cellulose parts get separated.

Once the mixture is completely cooked, you can strain the residue out of the mixture, and continue cooking until the solvent evaporates. 

You’ll need to build your lab condenser and ventilation hood for extra fire protection while boiling your stash in the alcohol solvent. 

Soxhleting

Soxhlet is the process of removing every bit of oil left inside the strained residue. Take a strainer and cover it with filter cloth or paper. Pour your mixture through the strainer. However, this process does not remove the oil completely. 

To finish the job, you can go through the refluxing process again and place an ice-cold lid over the pot once the mixture starts boiling. As the fumes condense into liquid form, you can collect the remaining oil from the soggy mixture. 

Removing the Solvent

Remember, hash oil combined with an alcohol solvent is not safe for consumption. So you’ll have to remove that before you begin using the drug. To do that, you’ll have to place a small pan over the strainer you had placed over your steel pot. 

After that, boil the mixture, and the fumes that rise will condense and drip back into the pan. You can also fill the stew pot with cooking oil, add some water to your hash oil mixture and place the steel pot inside the stew pot. 

This way, when you bring the oil to boil, the water will start to evaporate. Once you notice that all the water is gone, you can be sure that there’s no solvent left in your hash oil, and it’s finally safe for consumption. 

Your hash oil is ready, but, if you wish to smoke a highly potent substance, you can refine it further using the petroleum ether refinement technique.     

Four Different Methods of Making Hash

We covered the dry sifting and bubble bag methods for making quality hash above. Besides that, there are other common methods used for making hash from plant extractions at home. 

Hand Rolling

Hand rolling is the easiest method of all when it comes to making hash. You’ll need fresh, non-dried cannabis buds or trims, and your own hands. 

First, wash your hands and hold the cannabis bud in your palms. Now, start rolling it in a circular pattern. Applying lots of pressure will damage the plant and contaminate your hash, so keep the pressure moderate when you press the buds. 

When you’ve been rolling the stash for quite a while, you’ll see a dark, black colored resin beginning to develop on your hands. This resin material is the hash you’ve been looking for. Rub it off your hands and roll it into a ball or just shape them into lumps to smoke later. 

Blending

While hand-rolling remains the easiest method, this one is equally easy to do in the comfort of your home. You’ll need cannabis trimmings, silkscreen, and ice water. Besides that, you’ll need simple household appliances like your blender and a coffee filter, and finally a jar to store your hash. 

Blend your cannabis trimmings in the blender along with ice-cold water. Make sure to use plenty of water, enough to cover the buds completely. As a result, you’ll have a thick, murky mixture. Run this mixture through the silkscreen right into your storage jar. 

After some time, check on your mixture, you’ll see that there are some sediments settled at the bottom of the jar. That’s your hash. Simply pour the water above the hash slowly, and fill it again with ice.

Allow this mixture to settle for another 30 minutes and drain the excess water. Repeat this process 4-5 times to separate every bit of plant material from your hash. Finally, strain the mixture through a coffee filter and dry it. Your hash is ready for smoking. 

Mechanical Drum

The mechanical drum method is a little of the professional side. It works just like the dry sifting method, only the process is fully automated. 

The cannabis materials are added to a large silkscreen drum. The drum spins around and makes the trichomes separate from the plant matter. To do this at home, you’ll need one of these drums, frozen cannabis buds. The drum can be expensive, but it makes the task less exhausting and can be used for making hash in bulk, which will pay off its cost easily. 

It’s simple as that. Just add the cannabis to the drum and switch it on. You’ll get rich, potent kief when you’re done with the process. Mold them into balls or lumps for storage. 

Dry Ice Hash

Dry ice is difficult to handle, that’s why this hash making procedure is strictly for seasoned hash makers. For this method, you will need mesh bags, dry ice, and a clean surface to place your finished product. Also, make sure to get protective gloves. 

Fill a bucket with dry ice and cannabis buds. Now, stir the contents of the bucket, as mentioned in the bubble bag technique. In this method, you’ll need to keep your bucket covered while stirring. When you’ve stirred the mixture enough, place a sieve or mesh bag over the bucket and turn it upside down to release all the contents on to the work surface. 

For rich, potent trichomes, use different sizes of filters until you get concentrated hash in the final stage. The final product can be collected, shaped, and pressed according to your preference. 

Conclusion – How to make hash?

This is it. We are sure you now have all the knowledge about how to make hash. You can choose from a wide range of options as discussed. Best of luck!