Instructions for Pressing Rosin with Tips and Tricks

More valuable than gold, less dangerous than BHO and every day the number of fans of the valuable cannabis resin increases.

Not least because of incidents like in Dresden or Cologne, where people had to pay with their own health after accidents with BHO, the alternative BHO extraction method using butane gas or other solvents comes more and more into disrepute.

But since cannabis trends are not written in Germany, but in the USA or at best in the Netherlands, it is of course worthwhile to take a look across the pond. Even among our friends of punitive tariffs and blond-maned presidents, numerous incidents have led to bad press about BHO. According to USA TODAY, 32 explosions occurred as a result of BHO production in 2014, 30 of which resulted in injuries. Accordingly, in purely mathematical terms, there would only be a 6.25% chance of being uninjured after a butane gas explosion.

But today it should not be about the dark side of BHO, because BHO also has some advantages to offer and in professional hands the BHO method in completely closed systems with the necessary safety precautions is on the one hand very safe and on the other hand the extracts can really be seen. Keyword Shatter. But it is important to understand why BHO is not the best way to extract cannabis resin in every case.

It's not just the explosive nature of BHO that has Reddit users and American cannabis media alike raving about Rosin: Especially hobby extraction artists without vacuum chambers or know-how in so-called purgen have the problem that after extracting there might still be (unknowingly) solvent in the concentrate. At the point there is danger to life mainly because of the rising brain pressure due to the partial unintentional inhalation of n-butane gas.

Rosin - clarification of misleading terms and discovery of distant relatives.

When properly manufactured and using relevant refining processes, the end products of raisin and BHO are very similar. In both cases, if a Hightimes investigation is to be believed, they are cannabis products averaging around 75% THC. Contrary to the established terms BHO (butane hash oil) and SHO (solventless hash oil), these are not cannabis or hash oil, but actually resin. The resin is formed by the cannabis plant to protect itself from insects. This is because the cannabis plant does not need insects to reproduce, but relies entirely on the wind for the purpose of reproduction. This resin ultimately contains the most THC of the entire cannabis plant.

Since the cannabis concentrate referred to is a resin, the Rosin manufacturing process is also similar to other resin extraction processes. As an example, rosin is used by stringed instrument players to maintain the horsehair of the bow. A more prominent example of application should be soft soldering. Here, the plant resin is used as an activator.

Colophony is made from conifers such as conifers, which like cannabis are also resinous. So Rosin isn't such an old shoe, you just have to dig deep enough to make parallels to the legal world.

Manufacturing: pressure, time & temperature.

Making raisin requires pressure, time, and temperature. Preferably just the right amount of everything. But what is right in that case?

If the answer to the question were so simple, Rosin would probably be called BHO. Fun. The Rosin trend started with YouTube videos in which resourceful cannabis lovers squeezed their buds between the heat plates of mom's straightener wrapped in baking paper with all their body weight. After a short time, the pioneers then unfolded a baking paper stained with golden blobs and flattened buds. The golden droplets represent the coveted raisin.

The oldest of these videos that I can still find today are from 2015. It's likely that the Rosin hype began much earlier, but who am I to give an absolute start date for that. The subreddit r/rosin is used so often that the last 1000 viewable posts (that's as far as it goes) don't come close to 2015.

All the beginning is in the straightener.

If you have a straightening iron and baking paper at home, you can easily do your own first steps in raisin making. I also started with a straightening iron, even bought one specially for this purpose. But I quickly realized: 70kg body weight is simply not enough to achieve good yields or quality. Even the 90kg of my handball-playing roommate couldn't make too much of a difference. Why?

To press raisin optimally you need a pressure of about 1000 PSI or a little less than 100 bar. If you're below that, you won't catch all the resin, especially when pressing comparatively quite briefly with a straightener and body weight. In addition, because you can only hold the pressure for a maximum of 5-10 seconds with body weight on the straightener, you have to increase the temperature to compensate for this sobering fact. However, high temperatures lead to loss of terpenes. Terpenes, in turn, are elementary for the mode of action and taste of the cannabis plant parts and, accordingly, for the mode of action and taste of the concentrate.

Next Level: What comes after the straightener?

The straightening iron was enough for me for the first attempts, but especially the yields did not really fit me into the picture. After all, why sacrifice relatively large quantities of delicious flowers for two or three droplets of concentrate?

So I asked around to see what the market had to offer in terms of professional options. In 2017, the market was nowhere near as busy as it is today. But at least the market was already born. The desired devices are so-called heat presses, as they are also known from textile printing. The World Cup was not so long ago, in this summer probably very many such heat presses were used.

The explicit heat presses for Rosin, however, differ slightly from the textile presses: they have smaller heat plates and can exert much more pressure - often this is achieved by means of hydraulic or pneumatic pump. The smaller heat plates also mean that the effective pressure applied is greater than when the same pump is used to press large-area plates. For more information, see the physics/mechanics chapter in the table.

I decided to use a heat press from China at the time, which I definitely wouldn't do today. We'll get to the "equipment that makes the difference" later. Promise.

How does such a press handle?

Certainly better than a straightening iron, I can anticipate that much. The press consists of a mighty metal frame, two heat presses, and in my particular case, a hydraulic pump. There are also two displays and controls to control each heat plate, countdown and pressure. For safety, an emergency off switch and two buttons to be pressed in parallel to start the process.

So what to do when you suddenly have such a fierce machine in front of you? I would set the time to 100 seconds, put 5 grams of material between the plates on a baking or "oil click paper" and press at 1000 PSI. More on this again in the "equipment that makes the difference" section.

Rosin is the most honest THC test of your flowers.

What comes out as a result then? Raisin, sure. But how much? That depends entirely on the source material used. For example, let's take a potent Gorilla Glue with 24% THC. 5 grams of that and you'll also get around 24% yield in the best conditions. If more, unnecessary plant material has come into the concentrate - for example, by too high pressure. If significantly less, the settings used are not yet the last word in wisdom. However, you can work on this, because once pressed flowers can be pressed a few more times to tickle even the very last remnant from the starting material.

Rosin is the most honest THC test because also only as much THC-containing resin can be extracted as is present in the flowers. Therefore, from Albanian Hedge you will be able to obtain smaller yields on average than if you process a lovingly cultivated Super Lemon Haze.

Unit salad enlightened.

Unfortunately, the Rosin technology did not emerge from the cellars of an elite American university as a secret project. Therefore it is not surprising that in the course of the Rosin victory march also numerous inaccuracies crept in, which are part of the marketing and knowledge exchange until today.

Especially annoying: pressure and mass are often confused or equated.

Whoever is interested in the manufacture of Rosin, stumbles sooner or later in Facebook groups, subreddits or PR texts of well-known heat press manufacturers about this problem. One thing in particular stands out: Even in 2018, some concentrate aficionados still don't know that mass is not synonymous with pressure. Example fancy?

At this point, I would therefore also like to provide clarity regarding the units in the context of this article:

While the mass represents a basic size of an element, which is always the same, we have to do it with the pressure (p) with a size, which depends on other sizes, namely the force (F) and area (A). The formula for this:

 P = F / A

We see: The mass describes an elementary property of a body, popularly also called weight. Example: without taking into account manufacturing differences, every iPhone weighs the same at a certain altitude above sea level. Or every VW Golf VII in the team configuration or every half liter of water or every gram of grass. No matter whether the measurement is made in Germany, Southern California or between two heat plates.

Pressure, on the other hand, is a composite quantity, which changes significantly with different combinations of force and area.

So, if we take our press from the example, advertised as 10t, this information is therefore not very meaningful, since you can press any amount with the press. 1 gram, three grams, fifteen grams... Different quantities also consume different amounts of surface area on the heat plates. Accordingly, the force of the piston of the hydraulic or pneumatic pump acts on different areas depending on the amount of material to be pressed, resulting in different pressures. Here is a diagram for illustration:

It is very easy to see here the insanely large pressure created when pressing on small areas with an object weighing "10 tons". Where webshop operators might still be inaccurate because they only want to show a limit value, it gets wrong at the latest when users report in forums about results they pressed with so and so many tons. I know how long it takes to get from pressure to a statement with the unit tons. There is of course no direct conversion figures, because the area must always be added to the calculation in addition to the pressure applied.

Furthermore, the area grows quadratically and shrinks in a root, while the mass increases and decreases linearly as a one-dimensional quantity. Therefore: Let's just talk about PSI or Bar, there we don't have to worry about areas, masses and square roots at all and can even read the value directly from the barometer.

Equipment, what makes the difference.

When pressing rosin, unfortunately, the best results don't come just because you press 5 grams of potent Gorilla Glue at 1200 PSI, 80 °C, and two minutes of time. For best results, the Rosin connoisseur of the world uses a few useful tools.

Oil Slick Sheets.

First, we would have the Oilslick Sheets, which are an upgrade to conventional baking paper. Because, unfortunately, baking paper tears quite quickly and studies show that, at least in the past, quite unhealthy substances escape from the baking paper when the temperature is too high. Of course, you don't want these substances in your raisin. Besides the additional robustness and tear resistance, the Teflon-coated Oilslick sheets have another advantage: they are much smoother than baking paper, which greatly simplifies the collection or scraping of the dispersed raisin droplets that follows the actual pressing.

Nylon Bags.

Elementary in my estimation are also nylon bags/ nylon bags. These are relatively sturdy nylon mesh cutouts sewn together to form small bags. The flowers or hashish to be pressed are filled into them and lightly closed. What's the point? This ensures that the material remains as compact as possible on the heat plate and does not spread out over the entire sheet. Among other things, this ensures that resin that has already been squeezed out is not reabsorbed by the next possible crumb of weed and leads to a much cleaner collection of the raisin.

Rubber gloves for "coring".

Another important utensil is rubber gloves. With this comes another step in the process of making raisin, which in my experience is essential for best results: carefully coring the flowers to be pressed. It is advisable to carefully remove all stems from the flowers. In doing so, it is easy to notice how far sharp-edged little branches branch out deep inside the flowers. It is recommended to remove the stalks because, firstly, they contain hardly any active substances and, secondly, as a dry mass, they absorb the escaping raisin of the other flower components. This means that the raisin does not run out nicely, but first spreads in the stalks, as they turn out to be very absorbent at that moment.

Another problem of stems in the material to be processed shows up in the nylon bags: the stems are quite capable of stabbing/cutting the nylon mesh when the pressure is applied, thus favoring blow outs. Blow out is the (unintentional) breaking out of the material to be pressed from the nylon bag during the pressing process. However, this happens not only as a result of improperly trimmed blooms, but also by, for example, allowing the nylon bag to protrude slightly from the heat plates or by stowing the bloom material too airy and unevenly in the nylon bag.

Hand pump.

Be sure to buy a press with a hand pump! Electric pumps achieve similar high pressure, but in doing so you simply don't have full control over your pressing. This is because with a manual hand pump, you have the ability to determine for yourself how long it takes to reach the pressure you want to achieve. Very few electric pumps offer this luxury, and in the case of my Chinese heat press, hops and malt are lost in this respect anyway. With a hand pump you feel the pressing easy!

Even heat plates.

With heat plates, as almost always, you can buy good or bad products. Bad heat plates have what are called cold spots - places where there is no heat or lower than desired heat. The problem with this is that raisin flowing over a cold spot on its way toward freedom may cool and not continue to flow toward the outlet. Or settle into plant material above the cold spot. Stems paired with Cold Spots, accordingly, are not a desirable combination.

High quality heat plates are made of much more heat conductive metal than the heat plates of cheaper presses. Whereby I can assure you that even well-known manufacturers do not install the non-plus-ultra in heat plates in all models. Build and plan yourself is a real added value at the point.

Trick Tip:

Who has problems with the collection of his Rosin, need not worry: As long as he calls a freezer his own. Simply put the Sheets a few minutes in the freezer or an already cooled base, for which also the good old frozen pizza is suitable, under the unrefrigerated Sheets. In the following, it should be easy to pick up the scattered raisin droplets with a dabber or the tip of a knife.

Risks:

It is best to avoid reaching between the heat plates. No more words needed.

Bottom line:

Just for hobbyist concentrate artists, the Rosin technology lends itself well. The risks are close to zero, unlike BHO, and especially at low temperatures and not excessive pressure and long time, very terpene-rich material comes out of the press. Rosin is what is left when you take away all the non-psychoactive components of its flowers. An uninhibitedly honest summary of what the grower has done beforehand. Both in terms of yield, and taste.

Rosin should of course be enjoyed in moderation - comparable to a good glass of whiskey. Connoisseurs like to drink one, two, maybe even three glasses. But a whole bottle? Far too precious to drink it all in one evening. It's a similar story with raisin - enjoyed in moderation, there's no danger. Anyone who otherwise smokes a gram of marijuana in a joint need not fear 0.1 grams of Rosin. 1 gram dabs, as you may know them from numerous YouTube videos, I consider wasteful already from an economic point of view.