The Kief: If you know cannabis you know what I mean

Maybe you will know how it is extracted, what the intensity of the effect is and you will also know its taste but most likely you had missed the cannabis name of this extract. We talk about it below follow us: 

Kief is a very valuable substance, easy to obtain at home from cannabis inflorescences and famous for having a particularly powerful psychotropic effect . Basically it's the sticky powder that sticks to your hands when handling quality bud and is also the basis for hash making.  

Let's see what are the characteristics that make kief interesting and how to best produce and use it.

What is kief made of? 

For the most part it is composed of our beloved trichomes , which are the very small crystals that cover the buds of marijuana and which contain the resinous part of the plant inside them. Trichomes are delicate bumps that resemble tiny mushrooms, grow on the outer surface of the flower and, in addition to containing THC along with other cannabinoids, are also very rich in terpenes.
This resin (which is precisely the sticky substance that sticks to our hands when we handle the flowers) is a real concentrate of cannabinoids and terpenes which, if isolated, collected and used properly, can guarantee very intense and pleasant effects.
It could be said that kief is a very pure cannabis extract with strong psychoactive effects, which has a greater strength than products with a large plant composition, precisely because it has less waste and very little plant matter.

Kief and hashish

Basically, resinous hash bricks / sticks / blocks are made from kief . This substance is collected, heated and pressed to obtain a more compact shape that is easy to transport and handle.
For this reason, the flavor and effect of these two products is often very similar even if kief is usually subjected to fewer processes , it often contains more waste (because it is mainly produced in a homemade way) and its potency depends a lot on the type of cannabis used.
The production of hashish is instead done by professionals and on a large scale so it can have more stable effects .

How is kief made?

The easiest way to harvest this trichome concentrate at home is without a doubt to use a grinder . This gimmick is very popular with many regular cannabis users and is cheap and convenient to use. The grinder, which is also called a mincer, is a  container with surfaces specifically created to perform a perfect grinding of the cannabis inflorescences, a very important maneuver to favor a homogeneous combustion of your joint . When this maneuver is done with the hands it ends up wasting all the terpenes that stick to the skin.

Instead, many mincers have special kief compartments, which allow you to properly extract and store this precious cannabinoid essence. Using a grinder with a resin compartment you will obtain, barrel by barrel and grinding after grinding, an increasing quantity of resin . Once the compartment is full of material, you can take it and work it with your fingers or a small spatula to press it well and store it more easily before use. 

Another method is to use the sieve, a structure similar to a box (usually made of wood) much larger than the grinder  and made up of two compartments separated by a very fine mesh. The buds are placed on this surface and, once the box is closed, the container is shaken (not too vigorously) to allow the small trichomes to detach and settle on the bottom of the box, beyond the wire mesh. The finer the mesh, the higher the quality of the dust collected in your sieve.

centered . For those who want everything immediately, sieving allows you to treat much more material all at once even if it must be used with greater care to avoid dispersion and contamination of the resin with plant parts.

How to use kief

Usually you add kief to your cannabis joint to increase its potency and give stronger psychotropic effects until you get hallucinogenic effects and therefore have a much more effective high . But know that you can use kief in many other ways but you will always have to remember to heat it to allow the activation of THC and other cannabinoids or your harvest will be wasted.
For example, if you want to use it for food, you will first have to carry out the decarboxylation process.
Obviously, since this is a concentrate of cannabinoids and THC in particular, you should know that its hallucinogenic effects can be rather unpredictable., for this reason it is important to use kief carefully and not to overdo it, especially if you have in your hands a product that you do not know and that you are using for the first few times. The advice is to start with very very small dosages, especially if we are talking about edibles, a type of intake that makes the cannabis high even more intense and lasting.

-- Bongae