This was typed up as an explanation to someone so if it sounds odd I got lazy and didn’t want to retype it up for this post. I have quite a bit of experience with ethanol concentrates and I wanted to share it with the community and spark up some good ethanol discussion and tek sharing! If you have questions I’ll try and share more when I can.
This thread will serve as the communication for all things Budder that I have currently done and will be doing over the next few weeks to get a more stable understanding of this new concentrate and how it behaves.
So first, what is Budder? It is a different consistency of concentrate that can be found in two forms, one that is dry/crumbly/putty when manipulated and another that is wet/puty when manipulated. The difference between the two of these is basically post processing of the whipped material. After it has been whipped the Budder will cure and become dry and rigid. With a little manipulation, rolling and homogenizing in ones hands, you can cause the concentrate to be come wet and very sticky. After a few hours the wet consistency will become more stable again but still hold the wet look from before. The advantage of this concentrate is that the user can easily manipulate this with a tool and ball it up in their fingers to be easily placed into a vaporizing device.
How is it made/differ from Crumble? Once we have poured up shatter and purged off the ethanol below our required 5000 ppm limit the slab will be removed from parchment paper and transferred to a silicone whipping tray. Once in the tray we melt down the shatter till it is liquid throughout. When whipping Crumble we have our hot plate set for 80 C but with Budder the hot plate is set to 60 C. The difference here is to keep all those precious terps from boiling off during the whipping process. When whipping Crumble we target a very specific look for the concentrate before putting it in the oven at 100 F and purging under vac. This allows the concentrate to rise and become the crumble consistency we are used to seeing. When whipping Budder we will whip the concentrate a little further than the point we usually look for in Crumble as to make sure the concentrate is extremely homogeneous. Once the concentrate resembles a thick peanut butter consistency we take it off the hot plate and allow it to set up and harden. If we want to give it more of a wet texture/appearance then the concentrate can be further manipulated/homogenized by rolling it around in the extractors gloves to allow those terps to come back to the surface. This wet ball would then be allowed to set up for a few hours so that it stabilizes and is more easily placed into gram jars.
What is the difference in potency/terps for Shatter, Budder and Crumble? When ranking these concentrates in order of highest terp content to lowest it would make the most sense that Shatter would have the highest terp content followed by Budder and finally Crumble. This is due to the amount of post processing done to each concentrate. Since Shatter is very stable it locks in all the terps and in doesn’t often smell very much when its packaged. When vaporized shatter releases all these terps and can sometimes be a bit more harsh inhalation since terps are basically solvents. The next highest concentration of terps would be found in Budder. This is because it has been through a heating and whipping cycle that would cause some of the terps to evaporate. Since it doesn’t go into the vac oven for a final purge like Crumble it is thought that it will have a higher amount of terps trapped in the final concentrate than Crumble. This will also make Budder smell much more aromatic when packaged as opposed to Shatter and Crumble because unlike Shatter the terps are able to escape the concentrate and unlike Crumble they have not been purged off in post processing vac oven. As for the ranking of potency I would speculate that Crumble would be the most potent, followed by Budder, and finally Shatter. This is simply because as the amount of terps decrease the relative amount of THC content would increase. This trend has been confirmed between Shatter and Crumble potency analysis but will require further testing for Budder.
