Making cannabis concentrates at home is generally regarded as a taboo subject, and rightfully so – there have been enough explosions to give the whole niche a bad name, even when it follows the industry’s best practices.
Nevertheless, there is one method of making cannabis concentrates at home which can actually be surprisingly safe and easy, as long as the only heat-related tool you use is a hair straightener.
The Rosin Method
Making rosin at home is almost too easy to believe. All you need is:
- A hair straightener
- Parchment paper
- Heat-resistant gloves
- Scraping tool (razor blade, dab, etc.)
- Jar (for the resin)
First, fold the parchment paper in half and put the cannabis inside, as if you were rolling a joint, but without breaking the cannabis down. Then, set the hair straightener to medium-low heat, no higher than 300 °F. Otherwise, the THC might be vaporized instead of extracted.
Fold the parchment paper over the cannabis, covering it completely. Then, start squeezing the bud as hard as you can with the hair straightener for about 5 seconds, going from one section of the paper to the next, until you’ve pressed down the entire bud. You can use heat-resistant gloves to squeeze the hair straightener, or you could even step on it.
When you open the paper, there should be a beautiful oily substance collected at the bottom of the parchment. Allow it to cool either at room temperature or in the refrigerator, then scrape off and try dabbing!
And that’s all there is to it. While the yield may be low, making rosin is easy, safe, pure, solvent-less, cheap, and requires no investment other than cannabis and the hair-straightener, which has other obvious applications as well. Not to mention, you can even use the leftover decarboxylated buds for something else like cannabutter in cooking, for example.
