Hello everyone and thank you for joining. Today we will be looking at the difference between water curing cannabis and dry curing. The type of flower we will be looking at is “California Snow auto flower”. The plant went through a 12 day flush with 4 day increments. Auto flowers are known to have less THC potency than photoperiod plants so I harvested this plant right when the trichomes were mostly cloudy so the plant would be at it’s most potent point. Unfortunately, the buds went under some heat stress and fox-tailed a little which also affected the THC potency. Water curing is also said to boost THC potency by concentrating it more, so I’m hoping that will work. Also I will be using distilled water. Now, let’s get into things!
Right here I grabbed two branches of bud which turned out to weigh about 10 grams. You can see the foxtail. Now I am going to give them a quick wet trim and get them ready for jars.
I have now removed all of the stems, the fan leaves and the majority of the sugar leaves. I will be keeping those for cooking later since they are pretty sticky and do contain THC. I could have done a much better job trimming the sugar leaves, I just didn’t bother.
Now in the jar, the buds will float so it’s important to fill the jar right to the top and allow some spill over when you put the lid on.
Now that I have labeled it with my chicken scratch, we have the date it’s starting and the hopeful date it will be finished. I will be changing the water every 24 hours using distilled water.
This is day 3, they have been drained and filled and now I will be filling them again. Notice how murky and cloudy the water is. The water from the first day wasn’t even this bad.
This is day 5, we can see the water is a lot clearer than previously. Although it looks pretty good I’m going to add one more day just to be sure.
This is day 6. Notice how clear the water is now. I’m going to drain it and start to dry it out now.
Here the buds are fresh out of water and just starting to dry. I’m going to get a fan near them to dry properly and flip them regularly so there wont be any chance of them growing mould. Again, not the best trim job, you can see the sugar leaves poking out. You can also notice the fox-tailing as well. The buds are very very sticky and kind of have a wet grass smell, definitely not as strong as drying or fresh cut buds. So I’m gonna let these dry out for a few days now.
This is the final product, ready to go in jars now. That’s what the bud looks like. Visually its not terrible, minus the trim, but it doesn’t look like garbage. I smoked a little already and the ash looked like a little piece of cotton. It was really smooth and gave a nice little buzz. I’m sure I could wait a little longer to smoke it, but its dry and cured now.
On the left here we have a bud from the same plant that has been dry curing. On the right is the water cured bud. The dry cured has been trimmed a little better, however you can still notice a colour difference. Lots of bright green and crystal on the dry, and the wet almost looks blue (keep in mind the lighting isn’t perfect as well). The one on the right is ready to smoke, the one on the left needs at least another 3 weeks.
A few days later now, I have two nugs right here. I’m gonna toss them in my electric grinder and give them a buzz. It looks ok and doesn’t have a strong smell. A lot of times people will say water cured bud looks visually unappealing. So far I see sticky, crystaly bud.
This is ground up. Looks basic and normal other than the foxtail. It broke up well and is nice and fluffy but still sticky.
And here we go. It was fluffy vs crumbly and since it had some nice stick I didn’t have to pack it too much. Gonna fire this bad girl up.
So far this is the burn. Lit once and hasn’t gone out. No canoeing with a nice white ash. Tastes smooth as well.
So about 15 minutes and halfway down, I feel a pretty good high. I’m a consistent smoker that smokes a few times a day so to say I got a nice high off of this tells me I’ve been doing some things right.
It took me about 45 minutes to smoke this whole thing and I have a nice high considering everything I mentioned previously. Well for a lower THC potency flower and the foxtailing it was a good thing I harvested when the trichomes were at their cloudiest. Also I believe the water cure did help concentrate the THC making it a little stronger. I look forward to trying this with a photoperiod non stressed plant. My final thought: I would do this again, especially if I want to smoke the plant a lot sooner and not wait as long to do a dry cure. I used about 10 grams here, try taking a few from your own plant and doing it. You have nothing to lose! Thanks for watching everyone, I hope this was informative. Happy growing!
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