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Meds Freeze dried weed

I dehydrate and vacuum pack my bud as well as garden produce. The superior storage life and quality in the taste of freeze dried goods has had me interested in the freeze drying process. This is until I started looking at the cost of a home unit. These little machines run at a minimum of several thousands of dollars to get started.

I love love love freeze dried strawberries, blueberries and the cherries will bring you to your knees with their crunchy styrofoam texture and flavour explosion. But sadly a home unit is not feasible for me. But I'll still gladly buy freeze dried cherries wherever I find them available.

Frankly, I'm surprised that freeze dried goods are not available in supermarkets and seem to only be marketed to the prepper and hiking crowd.
 
Squiby said:
I love love love freeze dried strawberries, blueberries and the cherries will bring you to your knees with their crunchy styrofoam texture and flavour explosion. But sadly a home unit is not feasible for me. But I'll still gladly buy freeze dried cherries wherever I find them available.
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Honestly - you don't need a freeze-dryer. Just follow this instructable. Works like a charm for well under $50.
1570818444000.png
 
psychonaut said:
I talked with a grower yesterday who has been freeze drying his fresh frozen ice water hash and then pressing it into rosin. I took at look at the freeze dryers and wow they are not cheap.
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Frenchy Canolli, who puts out a ton of videos to show people how to make bubble hash, uses a HarvestRight pharmaceutical freeze dryer to purge the water from the trichomes. Thats actually how I got interested in freeze drying, and will be running some bubble through the unit shortly. Once bubble has been purged he then presses it into hash, and it looks lovely. I'm hoping to replicate those results with a little luck.

I found an article that references freeze dry
www.leafly.com

CO2 Trimming and Freeze Drying: Crop to Cure in 24 Hours | Leafly

The same technology that gives us astronaut ice cream is helping producers and processors cure their cannabis flower in a matter of hours, not weeks.
www.leafly.com www.leafly.com
Here's a quote: “Freeze drying could revolutionize the way marijuana is packed and presented. Imagine a bud looking the same inside a package as it did coming off of the plant,” says Arnovick. “You remove the water, but keep the structure. There’s no mineral loss, no vitamin loss, no terpene loss—just a beautiful flower, ready to smoke.”


Disrupt said:
Curing isn't about keeping everything exactly as it is at harvest, which freeze-drying will do. It's about slow, careful degradation of what you don't want - chlorophyll, undesirable plant flavors, etc. You probably do lose some cannabinoids and terpenes, but it's a trade-off that most are happy to make. It's a common observation that if you dry too quickly early in the cure, you'll lock in those undesirables. Expect the same to happen with freeze-drying - only worse.

Originally thought that freeze-drying fresh-harvested flower would be fine for extraction. It might be, if you dry-sift afterward. Haven't tried, but should be easy to do - trichomes come off very easily after freeze-drying. Non-polar solvents, like butane, hexane, or heptane might also work better than ethanol with freeze-dried whole flower.
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We're experimenting with curing options. There's a bunch hanging now, and will run another batch this weekend to see what difference it makes. The flash cured herb is very smooth tho, so I'm not sure what other changes to look for.

Dry sift is the very next thing. I have 30 grams to drop into the pollen extractor in just a few minutes - wish me luck :)

Edit - @Disrupt That instructable is interesting, but nt suitable to production or large batches. We purchased the freeze dryer to convert the contents of an entire upright freezer, including an entire beef, into freeze dried for long term storage. We now have a 4 month supply of food stored in 7mm mylar bags. With proper freeze dry and packaging everything will stay as packaged for 25 to 30 years. There are 10 lbs of pickled beets running at present, and in a few more hours there will be 10 lbs of soup going in.
 
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Killick said:
That instructable is interesting, but nt suitable to production or large batches.
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It certainly isn't. Each vacuum container holds about an ounce of flower. Never have more than twelve ounces to work with. (Only grow one plant each year in a closet - and it's plantin' time!)

But if others just want to try freeze-drying for themselves, they shouldn't feel they need to spend thousands of dollars.

Did you spring for the oil-free vacuum pump? Developed an aversion to vacuum pumps changing the oil in lab. On a small scale, you can just use a faucet aspirator.

Good luck!
 
The cost of the oil-free pump was about the same as 4 oil pumps, so I'm changing oil. Oil changes are a fairly painless process as a hobbyist, but doing it a few times each week isn't such a chore.

I saw your post on faucet aspirators a few weeks ago and have one in an online shopping cart. A handy device to be sure. Until now I've been using a $30 handheld vac pump from a Buchner funnel to do small tasks, like vacuuming air from mason jars and mylar bags of freeze dried stuff.

~~~
In the highest altitudes of the Andes, freezing temperatures are pretty much guaranteed at night. The Incas used this to their advantage by bringing potatoes to these chilly environments and letting them freeze beneath a cloth. The residents of the wintry villages would then walk on the cloths in the morning to squeeze out the moisture from the potatoes. The repeated process would result in freeze-dried potatoes known as chuño.

This product had several distinct advantages in the Incan empire, as it does today. First, it was lightweight. This allowed soldiers to carry large quantities of it with them on their campaigns with relatively little effort. Second, chuño, like all freeze-dried food, is extremely durable and can keep for years without being refrigerated. This made an excellent backup food source in case of drought, natural disaster or any other type of crop failure. Even today, in the case of crop failure, Andean highland natives will rely upon chuño to get through the difficult times. Lastly, the freeze-drying process would eliminate the bitter taste from some species of potatoes, making them much more palatable. https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/inventions/5-ancient-incan-inventions5.htm
~~~
 
Killick said:
I saw your post on faucet aspirators a few weeks ago and have one in an online shopping cart. A handy device to be sure. Until now I've been using a $30 handheld vac pump from a Buchner funnel to do small tasks, like vacuuming air from mason jars and mylar bags of freeze dried stuff.
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It's one of those things you'll wonder how you ever got along without.

Changing oil sucks when you're using ancient pumps with hazardous, even radioactive, samples. Yuck!
 
Ran about 15 grams through a pollen sifter overnight and this is the result. Bud was removed from stalk with minimal crushing. The sifter should do the work, I'm just helping out be full of buds, not stalks. Will weigh it later. Sifter is still running so should have more. Also will be pressing this a little later...

It looks a little green, but will check it closer when back later today...
20191012_095257.jpg
 
Disrupt said:
This chart is all there is to it:

View attachment 13698

To freeze-dry (sublimate), you need to be in the lower left corner. How you get there is up to you. It looks like you need to be <0.5 atm, so just popping flower (ice cream, whatever) into a chest freezer, shouldn't work. (Have seen this method described in tutorials, however.) Freezing under vacuum, on the other hand, should work fine - and does, IME. Don't really know what "anneal" means in this context. It may speed the process, which takes a few weeks otherwise.

Curing isn't about keeping everything exactly as it is at harvest, which freeze-drying will do. It's about slow, careful degradation of what you don't want - chlorophyll, undesirable plant flavors, etc. You probably do lose some cannabinoids and terpenes, but it's a trade-off that most are happy to make. It's a common observation that if you dry too quickly early in the cure, you'll lock in those undesirables. Expect the same to happen with freeze-drying - only worse.

Originally thought that freeze-drying fresh-harvested flower would be fine for extraction. It might be, if you dry-sift afterward. Haven't tried, but should be easy to do - trichomes come off very easily after freeze-drying. Non-polar solvents, like butane, hexane, or heptane might also work better than ethanol with freeze-dried whole flower.
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Thank you, @Disrupt. The chart is handy, and your observations important.
 
Disrupt said:
Maybe more plant material, being so dry and brittle?
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An interesting thing is that it's not so much dry and brittle as it is light and fluffy. I avoided any grinding or rough handling, and have the pollen extractor set to a gentle nudging action, so it's not heavily agitated in there, either. Tomorrow the be getting checked out a little closer, and getting some pressure to see what shakes out. Will press some and also try manually pressing some into hash, for science :)
 
Killick said:
An interesting thing is that it's not so much dry and brittle as it is light and fluffy. I avoided any grinding or rough handling, and have the pollen extractor set to a gentle nudging action, so it's not heavily agitated in there, either. Tomorrow the be getting checked out a little closer, and getting some pressure to see what shakes out. Will press some and also try manually pressing some into hash, for science :)
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Very curious, thanks. Have some freeze-dried fresh flower in the freezer.
 
@Disrupt a few experiments showed that it's best to age the herb for a few days prior to FD, and there will be another batch going in tomorrow for testing.

Another experiment will be tree mushrooms - I was gifted a large bag of chaga, reishi and shelf mushrooms that I dunno what to do with. I'm reading that a water extraction, followed by an alcohol extraction, is the traditional way to do this. So I'm going to try the water extract in the pressure cooker, then freeze dry the pulp for an alcohol extraction, and then FD everything and see whats left. It's an oddly fun hobby...
 
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