How to Make Hash at Home Without Solvents: 4 Dry Methods, From Grinder to Dry Ice

The easiest way to make hash at home is dry sifting: freeze your buds or trim, shake or tumble them so the trichomes break off, and catch that resin through a fine screen, no solvents involved. There are plenty of ways to make hash, but this is the oldest and simplest. Quick refresher on what hash actually is: weed is the dried, unprocessed flower of the female cannabis plant, while hash is the female plant's resin, separated from the plant by mechanical or chemical means. With dry sift, we start from already dried buds and use no solvent of any kind.

So how do you make dry hash from weed, and what do you need? We'll walk you through all of it.

What do you need to make hash?

Traditionally, hash is made with a simple process: agitate the plant material so the trichomes come loose, then separate them with a screen or mesh.

To make your own hash, you can start from buds or from trim (resin-coated sugar leaves and small popcorn buds). Buds give you a higher return than trim, but don't assume the quality will be much worse: you can get really good hash out of your trim.

Before you make hash: what you should know

• Not every strain will behave the same way or give you the same results: some will yield more, some less, and hash quality can vary depending on how the plants were grown. For example, cannabis grown with organic fertilizers tends to have a better aroma than cannabis grown on mineral (synthetic) nutrients.

• Environmental factors like temperature and humidity also affect the color, smell and look of the hash, in other words, its quality.

• Ideally, freeze the dried buds or trim you're going to use for extraction. It helps preserve cannabinoids, terpenes and plant material, and it boosts your yield.

When it comes to dry-sifting resin, there are several methods and tools that make homemade dry hash super easy.

How do you make dry-sift hash?

Method 1: a kief-catching grinder

This is the easiest method if you've never made hash before. All you do is grind your weed in a grinder with a kief catcher (a screen and a bottom chamber). Every time you grind, the resin glands collect in that separate compartment, and you can scoop them out whenever you want.

Kief-catching grinders come with one big upside and one downside:

• The upside: you don't have to do anything at all to get the kief. Just by grinding your buds you'll be collecting the purest kief.
• The downside: it's really slow. You'll have to grind a lot of buds to build up a decent stash of kief in your grinder.

Method 2: a pollen shaker

A pollen shaker is a cylindrical container with a lid on each end and a mesh screen on one of them. It's a great method for anyone because it's such a simple way to get hash.

Here's how:

• Break up your weed, either by hand or with a grinder.
  Then put the weed in the shaker and stick it in the freezer for at least 1 hour. The colder the better, since frozen resin glands snap off more easily.
• Take the shaker out and shake it gently for about 5 minutes. Remember, just shake. Carefully open the lid on the end where the resin collects and scoop it out.
• Repeat as many times as you like. Just keep in mind that each pass gives you less hash, and lower quality hash than the first runs.

Method 3: a dry hash tumbler

If you've got a lot of weed or leftover trim from harvest and drying, and you want to turn it into hash, you could use a dry-sift tumbler, a machine that lets you pull a lot of hash in a single automatic run.

With one of these washing-machine-style tumblers, the process is a lot like using a shaker. Here's what you do:

• Grab your grinder and break up the weed. It needs to be at least broken up to collect as much as possible. If you don't, you'll only get the resin on the outer layer of the buds.
• Then put the weed in a bag, jar or other container and stick it in the freezer for at least 1 hour. The colder, the better. Load the frozen weed into the machine's mesh drum and close it.
• Plug in the machine and run the motor for a few minutes. It depends on the speed and the model; each manufacturer gives its own run times. Finally, pull out the drum and collect the hash from the tray at the bottom. You can repeat as many times as you want before swapping in fresh material.

Method 4: dry ice hash (CO2)

This method uses extraction bags and dry ice.

Keep in mind that dry ice isn't regular ice made from frozen water. Dry ice is frozen CO2, aka carbon dioxide. It isn't watery; it turns straight into gas, so it won't get the resin glands wet. Instead, it flash-freezes them so you can knock loose a ton of resin.

Besides the dry ice, you'll use extraction bags like the ones for bubble hash (ice water hash) to separate the kief from the buds and plant material. You'll also need a large, clean tray or work surface to catch the kief as it falls through.

Here's the process for making homemade hash with dry ice:

• Grab your grinder and break up the buds.
• Put the weed in the freezer for at least 1 hour. The colder it is, the better your results.
• Set out a big tray to catch the kief that's about to come out.
• Take the weed out of the freezer and load it into the extraction bag.
• Add the dry ice, wearing insulated cold-proof gloves.
• If you've got a lot of weed, layer the weed and dry ice as many times as you need so it's spread out as evenly as possible.
• Close the top of the bag so nothing escapes and start shaking it gently. For the best quality, keep the shakes soft and short.
• Finally, gather up your homemade hash with a card and repeat if you want.

How to cure and store hash

The best hash usually comes from weed that's been stored and cured for about 4-6 months. You can either cure the material before extracting, or extract the resin once the weed has dried for about a month and then cure the resin itself.

Properly cured resin is easier to press, more potent, and better in flavor and aroma. The ideal curing temperature is around 37 °C (99 °F), and you should open the jars for a bit every 3 or 4 days so the air gets refreshed and the resin can breathe.

Another thing to think about is whether you store your resin as a pressed piece. Pressed hash degrades more slowly: the outer layer oxidizes faster, while the inside ages much more slowly. One more thing to remember: never press resin that isn't properly dry, or you risk mold.

When working the resin, keep in mind that the more pressure you apply, the more gland heads burst, releasing the most volatile terpenes and speeding up cannabinoid oxidation.

Now that you know how to extract resin from weed, here's the last tip: the best way to store cured hash is in an airtight jar in the fridge, in low humidity.

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