One of the ways Grace and I use cannabis is by ethanol extraction of THC from resin, then using the resulting solution in either concentrated (tincture) or dilute forms. Due to Grace’s many health problems, one of which is severe arthritis, her THC intake is so high it would be cost-prohibitive to get it all from edibles; smoking doesn’t bring long-lasting relief, and doing too much of it is inadvisable anyhow due to her chronic lung damage from decades in the industrial trades. She keeps a bottle of the tincture on her desk, and adds drops of it to her tea as needed; we use the more dilute form (which I call snakebite) in her soup, and I sometimes use it (very sparingly; “dilute” is a relative term, as you’ll see) in cocktails when I really want something strong. We were introduced to both of these by a generous gent who used to make them for us, then decided to buy us the equipment and teach us to do it ourselves. And now I’m going to teach you; it isn’t that hard, and the equipment isn’t terribly expensive.
The first step is to buy “dab wax” (resin) from your local legal dispensary; I’m afraid I have no idea how to get ahold of it in places where it isn’t legal. In Washington, this is actually the cheapest ingredient; I usually get the highest-THC resin available from among the budget-priced selections, which are usually just over $10. If we’re going to make tincture, I get two packs of an indica; for snakebite, a single pack of sativa. I wouldn’t advise going any stronger until you’ve tried it at this level;
as I wrote above, “dilute” is a relative term, and the snakebite is still very strong (just not as concentrated as the tincture, which one uses by the drop rather than the tablespoon). Put the wax into a small beaker (we use an 80 ml size) and place that into a decarboxylator machine like this one; you’ll need to read the instructions carefully, but it’s fairly foolproof and has a light that turns from red to green when it’s done. The beaker will be hot, so Grace usually lets it sit in the machine for about 30 minutes or so before attempting to remove it.
Once it’s cool enough to handle with bare hands, take it out and add about 60 ml of pure ethanol; you don’t want to add it too soon lest the beaker break. You don’t need lab-grade ethanol; Everclear is 95% ethanol, and that works just fine (it’s also available at most liquor stores). Next, you need to stir it very thoroughly, over heat; Grace insists stirring it by hand is not sufficient. Here’s our magnetic stirrer in action; you can get similar units on Amazon.
You can see the settings Grace usually uses in this video. When you can’t see any more wax globules at all, either suspended in the liquid or stuck to the sides (roughly 45-60 minutes), you’re ready for the next step. For tincture, that means simply pouring it into a small bottle with a dropper top; make sure you label it! For snakebite, there’s an extra step. If you look at the package the resin comes in, there’s a little chart with the THC content broken down; the one you want is “Total THC”.
It will be expressed as a %, and since the resin we get here comes in 1-gram containers, it’s a simple matter to work out the amount of THC in your beaker (93% = 930 mg, etc). Multiply that by 0.75 to get the total # of ml of ethanol for your batch, allowing for what’s already in the beaker; in my example, the total volume of the finished snakebite should be about 698 ml, so if there’s 70 ml of solution in the beaker, I would add 628 ml. You don’t need to be exactingly precise; you just want to know how strong the resulting solution is. At these proportions, the snakebite is 60 mg of THC/45-ml shot; that works out to 20 mg per tablespoon. You could of course make it stronger if you like, but I wouldn’t go much weaker because pure ethanol is over 3x as strong as typical vodka. I keep it in a fancy decanter I bought from a garage sale when I was a teenager, and I add 8 drops of green food coloring per bottle so no guest at your house accidentally pours themselves a big old slug without asking what’s in the bottle (which may or may not have happened with one of our early batches). You could use any color you like, but I chose green in Scotty’s honor.
Anyhow, that’s all there is to it; enjoy it in good health!
