5 REASONS TO TRY CANNABIS CONCENTRATES
When speaking about cannabis concentrates or extracts, you’re talking about dabs or vaporizer pens. Most people who love extracts are about that dab life, but there are vape lovers too. In fact, in California, vape pens are the second best-selling category. Concentrates (dabs) are fifth.
With that data, it’s obvious to see that dabbing and vaping cannabis extracts is a great way to develop your relationship with the plant. Between dabs and weed pens, you have a world of benefits in doing so.
What are cannabis concentrates?
Cannabis concentrates are oil-based extracts that are made from the plant’s trichomes. There are a bunch of different concentrates coming from those milky white crystals, including live rosins, live resins, kief, and that’s just to name a few. They are all categorized between solvent-based and solventless concentrates.
Which cannabis concentrates are the best?
That’s up to you. It is believed that solventless concentrates are the best. That’s because they are just pure trichomes processed in whatever way, without the introduction and purging of chemical solvents. Past that, the best cannabis concentrates decision is based on how you want to use them.
Kief
If you want an added punch to your joints and blunts, kief is an excellent option. Plus, it’s free, if you've got a great cannabis flower grinder with a kief catcher. Otherwise, you can buy a gram of the powder trichomes for a pretty low price from a nearby dispensary.
Dabs
If you’re dabbing, you’ll be choosing between solvent-based and solventless extracts. Ultimately, this will have you choosing between live resin, hash rosin, and live rosin.
Live resin is a concentrated oil that was pressed up from trichomes extracted out of frozen cannabis plants using a chemical solvent like butane. Hash rosin is a solventless concentrate that uses ice and water to separate the trichomes from the plants, then heat and pressure to press them into dabs. Hash rosin made from frozen plants is called live rosin.
There is also straight-up plant rosin that is made simply by using a rosin press to heat and smash flower into weed chips and oily residue. It is dabbed.
Live resin, hash rosin, and live rosin are all great ways to dab and experience a cannabis strain’s cannabinoid and terpene profiles. Most cannabis enthusiasts prefer solventless concentrates with the belief that they best reproduce a strain of weed’s unique chemical profile, and also offer the best-tasting vapor.
Weed vape pens/pods
Live resin and rosin are used for weed pens and vape pods too. However, the market has not really yet gotten to the point where rosin pens are widely available. So most vapes are either made with distillate and artificial terpenes or live resin. If you want a convenient and portable way to consume cannabis oil, then you will probably opt for weed vapes.
The benefits of consuming cannabis concentrates
Whether you’re dabbing or vaping, concentrates go hard for plenty of reasons.
The flavor journey
First off, if we’re talking concentrates, let’s talk dabs first. Dabs are those little pucks of oil that you see on dispensary shelves or (hopefully) in dispensary coolers.
When you dab, you turn that oil into vapor through high temperatures. The vapor (hopefully) tastes just like the way the plant smells. That flavor translation from aroma to your mouth is the biggest reason people love to dab. Well, and the high that comes after inhaling those 7-10 pulls from a single little smidgen of an extract.
Besides convenience, flavor is the second biggest reason that people love vape pens too. Unless you’re vaporizing straight distillate, which has no flavor and only cannabinoids, your vape pens.
Efficiency
Dabs get you super baked in a quick second. It’s a different high than consuming cannabis flower, which has a heavy-eyed sort of feeling to it. With dabs, if you’ve built up your tolerance for THC, you may find that the high is much cleaner, and clear-headed, allowing you to proceed throughout the day without getting too bogged down after your sesh.
Potency
In addition to getting you higher faster, dabs are also more intense than cannabis flower, due to having a much higher THC content. Because of that, with dabs, less is more, and those little gram containers can stretch for quite some time.
Between flavor and potency, that’s why people love dabs: they’re extremely tasty, hit hard with barely a dot of oil, and you reach cloud nine within minutes.
Vape pens tend to have a higher potency but result in a much shorter-lived high than hitting dabs. Still, with several puff puffs from a vape pen, you’ll definitely feel the intensity of your live resin.
Vapor over smoke
You can’t talk about cannabis concentrates without talking about smoking versus vaping flower, or combustion versus vaporization.
Combustion comes from fire-producing smoke that you then inhale to get high. Vaporization differs in that it heats plants (or oil), but does not combust them or produce smoke. Vapor is seen as a healthier avenue of cannabis consumption than smoking weed because of the carcinogens associated with smoke.
No lingering burnt plant smell
Last, but certainly not least, the fact that using cannabis concentrates is always more discreet than consuming flower is a huge benefit. You can dab in hotel rooms and be just fine by the time housekeeping rolls around the next morning. The same goes for using vape pens, and with them being portable, you can use them to consume weed literally anywhere you go.
With cannabis flower, you can only smoke in privacy or outside, but there will always be a lingering smell in the room, and on your fingers and clothes.
In the end, it’s easy to see why so many people prefer cannabis concentrates to flower sometimes. Just make sure when buying dabs, or any cannabis concentrates for that matter, that you are buying high-quality products from the best cannabis brands.
At STIIIZY, we only use premium flower for all of our cannabis extracts including our live resin, live rosin, and proprietary pods.