Feb 8, 2021
Live Resin: What Is It?
What is Resin?
As cannabis grows it produces an oil, that oil is what contains every part of the plant that we want to consume. We have no use for the actual plant matter itself, the leaf and stem is just carbon and when you burn and inhale it, it doesn’t get absorbed so you just blow it back out creating the visual smoke you see on an exhale.
A product like a vaporizer only heats up enough to cook off the oil but not burn the plant matter which creates a much more efficient and enjoyable experience. But another option is pre extracting the oil from the plant matter in a processing facility and shipping it out as an extracted concentration of cannabinoids and terpenes.
Resin is a term used in the legal recreational market to refer to solvent based extracts like CO2, Hydrocarbon Butane/Propane/Hexane, Ethanol. Products like shatter where they take the flower ground it up and put it into a large cylinder, then they pumped butane into one end which essentially washes the trichomes off and pushes them out the other end, then the product is left to purge so all the butane evaporates and is washed with very cold ethanol to get rid off the waxes/fats/chlorophyll type plant materials that will tarnish the flavor or leave residue in your banger.
So then what does Live mean?
We learned from our nitrogen packaging blog that as soon as the plant is cut from its roots it starts to lose moisture. As the moisture evaporates the oil that holds the cannabinoids and terpenes crumbles and falls apart. Nitrogen packaging in a tin is a way to prevent this in flower but what about concentrates?
In order to prevent any cannabinoid and terpene loss in the final concentrate product, they can’t let the plant dry and cure the traditional way. They cut it down and immediately flash freeze it to instantly dry it out and preserve it for extraction. From there they can either squish it in a rosin press to create live rosin, or run it through butane extraction to make live resin. In the right conditions this is also how THCA diamonds are formed and is known as the most true to flower full spectrum concentrate available today.
Shop Live Resin at all our stores today!