Hello all ive been digging around trying to find information on freeze drying flower material.
The most abundantly available freeze dryer model for the consumer market is the Harvest Right so Achieving desirable results with one of these units would be the ultimate goal.
When people run their flower in a harvest right normally the end product from what Ive seen people note ends up with a styro-foam like texture that is undesirable and so dry that it crumbles to dust.
Companies like Cryo-cure state that their product finishes differently and still has moisture in it, thus leaving me to assume that they dont finish the process most likely. If you look into the fine print of their words they very specifically say they have a " patent pending " dialed in run times, temps, and pressure ratings that achieve consistent results that their units provide leaving your material at 8-12% and not feeling like terrible foam.
Ive seen small whisperings of some harvest right users doing shorter run times to achieve better freeze drys, or hanging to dry prior to processing.
If anyone has experience in using the harvest right to produce desirable non foamy freeze dried flower that retains its terpene profile and doesn’t crumble from dryness I would love to hear about your process and experiences. Would love to get this process hammered out with the technology that is accessible and currently used by a good portion of us
It seems to have pertinent information. It discusses specific shelf temps something the harvest right lab model can handle and I imagine labconco and more high end models easily are equipped with these options.
I wonder if you can buy the Harvest right Lab shelves and install them into the pharma unit, and upgrade the firmware.
for the material to be consumed as is, flower form. Yes that is the objective.
The " lab results" and reviews Cryo cure boasts seems like its something to be desired, Higher terpene content than air dried / cured. No time for degradation or oxidation of cannabinoids from lengthy drying process. Looks like the plant did when it was alive.
But as I hear the harvest right doing a standard run is over kill. The patent info I linked I think has the specific parameters they use to achieve their results, I think temp controlled shelves maybe necessary. But I still want to hear from anyone who already achieves this themselves.
from what ive read on the patent it would only be possible with shelf control and potentially vac control. So first problem, can be fixed by using harvest right scientific that has 12 step control for their shelves. 4 shelves in the medium, They seem to have more space inbetween the shelves.
are you familiar with the shelf size of those as well? From videos ive seen when people nug out their material on the freeze drying trays quite a bit fits let me see if I can find a video that ive seen in my research.
there is a time stamped link of footage of what it looks like loading trays and putting them into the unit.
it seems like enough space for what the shelves offer. – Warning loud music in video –
that looks okay I think but other opinions are far more valuable than my own.
The crispy foam buds is a common result from people freeze drying their buds.
I think the key is to do 80% of the moisture removal in the harvest right, then dry the rest on screens in a 60F/60rh room. After 4 days close them up into bins, rotate the buds and burp the containers once a day for a week.
Try a “full” run and see how that goes, if its too crispy coming out of the HR, dial back ur time by 20%
I think this is going to be the direction you’d want to head, but I’ve only seen two of these things in operation (food, not reefer) and they are like 500k and probably weigh two tons and you would need to be feeding them some serious volume or they would be idle pretty much all the time. I think there was a company doing a continuous feed version for hemp flower but I haven’t seen them around for a while. maybe someone else can remember the name of the company.
You also get up to 60% more volume and a nice green color. Imagine a flower-appearance and smell straight from the Field in smokeable bud
Nothing against regular drying, but im hooked: www.wave.cc … not related with this company. They freezedried cupwinners.
Our costs for freezedrying is basically nothing … 40-45 Euro per Dried kg all incl. Way less Stress than hangdrying … just freeze on the Field and dry on demand, shall mean we will have the freshest flowers during summer month when everyone is in need.
I actually used to live down the road from the couple that owns Cryocure, really cool people with a little pollen chucking operation going on, as well. Their tech is 100% parameter tweaking on a pharmaceutical freeze dryer with heated shelves, they just save you time on R&D and their units get much larger than standard consumer freeze driers. They make them domestically too, which is kind of nice.
Here’s some sour gelato that was chopped and run through their rig for 14 hours. It was a little “foamy”, but gelato crosses kind of always are, so that’s inconclusive. Terp retention was on point, smelled fresh and a lot of people harvest what terps that do cook off from the ice trap on the drier. Definitely wasn’t overly dry, I’d say 12% overall fresh from the shelve with slight pliability in the stem. Smoke and burn quality were top shelf, can’t ask for much more 14 hours from chop.
I work for a huge MSO and we’ve dumped a ton of research into getting equivalent results from similar large-scale Chinese freeze drier units, and there isn’t much money to be saved over going through Cryocure. I know this totally sounds like shilling, but I definitely recommend them if you’re looking for value-adds for flower or are having problems with fresh frozen like we are.
Because we’re trying to avoid oxidation of cannabinoids and terepene loss. The point is to have superior flower to that of standard cure. If you saw the oxidation difference of hash that is air dried vs freeze dried you’d be on the same train as me.
quite possibly when they make they 10-15k model I could try them out. But for now they dont have a model that is less than 90k USD.
From what ive seen a Harvest Right Scientific unit W/ a upgraded scroll pump should hit the vacuum their settings require.
The scientific has shelf heating steps you can program just like the processes that are detailed in patent application.
Past that its just duration of time that the shelves are at a specific heat to achieve which ever one of their many specific processes, Drying, Curing , or Terepene extraction.
Im going to most likely go ahead and put in my order for a scientific unit. Based on the fact that their process is specifically just a series of fine tuned settings on a capable machine we should be able to get similar results in the scientific harvest right… ( You can buy it w/o their dry scroll pump thats 1500 usd) I think its vac rating is less than that required in the patent ( this is the quote direct from harvest right " MTorr level will hover around 500 and dip as low as 100 or 200 " on the scroll pump ) Will have to double check.
inbetween purchases, research, and finishing a lab space right now.
Thank you for your response valuehorse it was very much needed and appreciated just the type of info im looking for.
