Ok, ok, just give me a minute to focus. Hoo boy.
Ok! Today, we’re gonna talk about hash!
Tootsie Rolls of the Gods
Hash, short for “hashish”, is a much more compact form of marijuana. Remember before when we talked about trichomes? Trichomes are little dried resin crystals that contain the lion’s share of a plant’s THC and other cannabinoids. Hash is what you get when you fuse a bunch of those trichomes into a single mass. The color and consistency of the hash will vary with its purity and production method but the best stuff is typically a dark, golden brown.
The key to making hash is getting all the trichomes away from the rest of the weed. You can do this by accumulating the shake from your Hazemaker, but for most hash this is done by drying the plant material, grinding it up, and then blending it with either a solvent or ice water. Solvents (like rubbing alcohol or butane) dissolve the resin so that the plant matter can be filtered out. Then, the solvent is boiled off (or just allowed to evaporate) until you wind up with pure hash. The ice water process is the chemical opposite of the solvent process. Instead of dissolving the trichomes, the ice water causes the resinous little darlings to harden up and stop sticking to the plant material. Once the plant material is filtered out with a coarse screen, the water is run through much finer screens to capture the trichomes. The nice part about either of these two processes is that you can start with any part of the plant – many growers collect the otherwise-useless leaves for their hash – and still wind up with a high-quality product.
The form your hash is in at this point will depend on your method. If you used a solvent, you’ll have a tarry sludge that you’ll need to scrape up and re-spread a few times just to make sure all the solvent has evaporated. If you used the ice-water methods, you’ll have a clumpy powder that somewhere on the sticky (yay!) to gritty (boo!) spectrum. You can take that clumpy powder and compact it with a Hash Press or you can heat it to melt it into a single mass. Then, you’re ready to smoke!
You got your Big G's....
If you’re on-the-go, you can mix little bits of hash into tobacco or weed and smoke it in a joint. I have nothing against either of these methods, but I think hash is best when smoked on its own. You’ll need a standard glass pipe (available anywhere fine stoner products are sold). Take a small amount of hash and roll it between your fingers into a narrow cylinder. Then, press the cylinder into the bowl of your pipe, making a crescent around the inside of the bowl. This lets you control the burning from one end of the crescent to the other so you don’t get overwhelmed by the smoke.
Now, let’s talk about how to burn this stuff. You could use a lighter like some kind of goddamn caveman, but hash won’t hold a flame like weed will so you’re going to end up pulling a long drag of lighter air directly into your lungs. Ugh. You can use a middle-man like a Bee Line, a hemp(of course!)-based wick that holds a flame more cleanly than a lighter. Or, you can egregiously overgear and head straight for your new best friend, the Phedor.
It glows red-hot with love for you.
The Phedor is a handheld ceramic heating element, which is pretty much exactly as hazardous as it sounds. If you can grit your teeth through visions of accidentally setting it down on your lap or causing some other kind of stoner catastrophe, though, you’re in for a treat. The Phedor provides an extremely accurate source of high, even heat for your hash consumption needs. Once the element heats up, you can place it on the glass right next to the tiny tube of hash in your pipe and watch the delicious smoke come pouring out. While I’m not wild about every aspect of the product design (couldn’t they enclose the ceramic element in a spring-loaded sheath so it would be protected when you let go of the gizmo?), the end result it totally worth the effort. Since good hash has a THC content of anywhere from 50 to 70%, a tiny little lump of the stuff can treat you very well.
