I’m looking into freeze dryers as a means of handling flowers post harvest. It seems this is the way to go since instead of 1-2 weeks for drying plus cure time, you can theoretically go from harvest to high quality smokable flower in 24-48 hours.
My research has brought me to basically 2 options, the harvest right or the Cryocure. The Cryo cure seems to be over priced considering it just us different parameters programmed into it, but the harvest right ends up making your end product too dry and crumbly.
Has anyone played with the different methods of freeze drying product and found success, If so what worked and what didn’t?
Freeze drying works great for bubble hash drying. I’ve seen it used rather well in prep for squishing said bubble. Made a damn fine, supery terpy product. The cost of production on that product was too high, however, so the trick was only performed once.
when you freeze-dry something it goes horribly crumbly, I don’t think it would make good smoke unless you pulled up with some moisture content still in the flower. Basically has the same texture as something cryo. But if you really wanna have a try you just need a vac pump and a -50c cold trap, and a vac chamber.
you can heat it once you are down to a few tens of mtor that low in the phase diagram and it’s still frozen despite the heat / the water is sublimating. As long as your low pressure the water cant return to liquid state.
Yeah I had a friend pull some out he got from a dispo the other day and was pretty amazed.
As had been stated above the trick is to keep some moisture in the flower, ideally around 8-12%. That is What Cryo cure claims they do, and from looking at their patent it seems they just changed a couple of parameters to keep some moisture in the product. Cryo cure comes with a price tag of around $90k, so hoping to see if something cheaper is available that will still net good results.
While I’ve never lyophilized flower, I have spent quite a bit of time lyophilizing proteins and other products, so if you have any questions on some of the theory or parameter settings, I would be happy to help give you some suggestions as to where to start. Feel free to DM me.
So for freeze drying bud, u want to pull 50-60% of the moisture out during the freeze drying process. Then place on screens to finish the last half. Should take another 3 days on the screens to finish off. Then close them up into air tight containers for another 3 or 4 days to equalize the moisture. Take the buds off the drying rack when the buds are hitting 12% moisture.
The goal is to get any moisture on the oustide of the bud evaporated but while keeping small amount of moisture in the center to equalize out during the rack drying process.
Start the racks at 50% rh, 45F. Then after 2 days increase to 60rh, 60f.
Ive had freeze dried weed both ways. 100% done in the freeze dryer and then 50% done and finished off traditionally. I can say i didnt notice much a difference between the 100% traditionally dried compared to the 50/50 method. Except for the 50/50 was done in 4 or 5 days and 100% traditional took 9 or 10 days
Hello! We build a chiller here wich could do dry freezing in almost anything. we do dry freezing in every batch of material going for i-BHO(i for isobutane) proccess. we discovered we get about 5% more weight in our extracts here after doing dry freezing on materials. the problem is almost ALL the terpenes evaporate in the process and is that waht bring me to this forum. now, we will modify the machine aa little bit more, to acomodate a -40c cold trap to get all this material wich is coming out, and help not diluting the vacuum pump in the purge time of BHO.
Are you equalizing (burping) in a sealed container and then checking with a hygrometer? Are you using a wood moisture meter? How are you checking the residual moisture?
Stab a moisture meter into the stem of the bud. Gets a decent reading, dont try puncturing it into the bud, gotta be the stem part.
Yeah my drying rack is in a grow tent, with an exhaust timed to run every other hour to pull excess moisture out. When they hit 12% on the rack i put them in containers and if they rise above 14% in the containers ill either leave the container open, or put back on the rack till they hit 12% again
Can you elaborate on why it wouldn’t be considered live still? Isn’t cryo curing supposed to keep the live essence of the plant? That’s the whole gimmick right? I mean all you are really doing is removing moisture. The owner of the dispo I work for approached me with this while I was researching LN2 for fresh frozen. My first thought was that it wouldn’t be live as well and that was my argument.
