Inside Look at Leading AZ Extraction Company

I got into making cannabis extracts to help cancer patients, which started because of my best friend. Back in 6th grade he got cancer, and it was pretty sad, but since we were little kids, the concept of death didn’t really resonate at the time. The Make-A-Wish people got him a guitar and a puppy. Ironically, the dog died of cancer. My friend managed to survive and went into remission. Then last year, my friend relapsed. He had to get a testicle removed and a hernia out of the same region. This year he’s experiencing the same symptoms and doesn’t want to go through radiation again. He doesn’t want the medication anymore. One of Tasia's tinctures. His plan is to take a year off in order to travel, have fun, live his life, and choose his own path. I started giving him CBD and high potency THC capsules. He’s taking them every day now, and they're really helping him with the pain and some other symptoms.

I make live resin, oil, shatter, and crumble extracts.

Live Resin

Live resin is better than wax, hash, crumble, or shatter. Live resin starts by freezing flower. When you take a cannabis plant down, instead of trimming it immediately, you put it in a cryogenic freezer. After it’s frozen, you blast it with butane. You can open-blast it, you can close-loop it, or anything like that. Live resin should be a little bit gooey. It should be stable, but moldable, like pottery before it's fired. The clay is semi-solid. Live resin has that consistency, kind of like bread dough. Whenever you see someone making shapes or objects or art pieces out of their wax or hash, it’s usually a live resin. You can shape it with your hands and make a little heart out of it. Generally speaking, however, you want to stay away from goo unless it’s a live resin. An example of a live resin sculpture. Editor’s Note: The rapid freezing of fresh flower prevents volatile organic compounds from escaping the flower before extraction, resulting in a higher concentration of terpenes, the compounds responsible for many flavors found in foods, drinks, and cannabis products.

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Juice and Oil

There are several kinds of juices. When people used to talk about juice, they were referring to the oil for vape pens, but “juice” nowadays is actual juice, almost like a cough syrup. It can actually be called a syrup or a juice. I would call vape pen juice an oil or an oil-based product. An oil made by Santiago and Dunbar Extracts Editor’s Note: Oil refers to BHO, or Butane Hash Oil, and there are a variety of different types. To learn more about the different kinds, take a look at this informative article from WoahStork.

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Shatter

Shatter has the consistency of glass. It’ll break and crack off easily. That’s why they call it shatter, because if you dropped it, it would shatter. A lot of people prefer it to be a transparent blonde/gold color because that shows how clean it is. A shatter made by Santiago and Dunbar Extracts Some of the darker kinds can have more THC, but don’t look quite as good. For example, my Bubba Skywalker always turns into a really blonde shatter, without fail. Then I’ll run my God’s Gift, a straight indica, and it produces a dark, amber color shatter. The dark amber color is seen as less desirable, despite the fact that my dark God’s Gift extract has 77.92% THC, while my blonde Bubba Skywalker extract only has 72.63% THC. Obviously the Skywalker looks better, but it tests lower. It’s like when you buy a car: the car may not run, but you buy it anyway because it looks good.

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Crumble

Crumble is like a cookie crumble. It breaks apart really easily into a dust. It’s stable, but crumbly and not gooey at all. A crumble made by Santiago and Dunbar Extracts

Whenever you put something new in, you don’t know what you’re going to get out. You need to have extracted and purified that particular strain and breed beforehand to know what you’re going to get. My Bubba Skywalker, a hybrid dominant indica, for example, turns into a shatter every time, without fail unless I do something wrong, like waiting too long to run it. If I wait too long to run it, it’ll turn into a crumble. Then I’ll run my God’s Gift, a straight indica, and it produces a dark, amber color shatter. You have to be familiar with everything you put in. If I run trim from some place I don’t know, I wouldn’t know what kind of product I would get, nor the amount of product. I wouldn’t know whether it would be a crumble or a black gooey mess. The troubling part about it is I usually don’t find out until the next day, because I run a 12 hour purge in the vacuum oven. It could take me a whole day before I know what I’ll be getting out. Vacuum ovens used in purification. Luckily, I know how to take that product a step further. I can take something I don’t like, throw it in a rotary evaporator, distill it, make tinctures with it, or something else. It may not look pretty, but it still has a high THC percentage. It’s like a vegetable that never makes it to the store because it looks flawed.

I try to avoid blowing myself up. The butane used in the extraction process will create a plume of gas, and it’s dangerous. When you’re blasting (extracting via butane), you’re taking butane and injecting it into a tube with flower. In the process of blasting, you are unleashing a ton of highly-flammable butane into the air. It’s dangerous, and it can blow up if you do it in a non-ventilated area. A walk-in fume hood is perfect for these kinds of extractions. It sucks the gas right up the hood and out of the building. A custom-made, walk-in fume hood. Generally speaking, closed-loop systems are safer than open-air blasting, because they cycle the butane via tubes into another tank, preventing significant oxygen exposure. I only open-blast outside. I would never open-blast inside.