somebody asked for tips and tricks on making ice hash and i wrote a bunch of stuff down so id thought id also share it here too. The main factors by far of how good ur hash comes out is starting material and the sequence and size of the meshes u use so these tips and tricks aren’t about getting
the best hash necessarily just about optimizing the process for quality without negatively affecting yield or vise versa. In fact, like most extraction techniques, you can obtain a better quality hash at the cost of a lower yield by purposely (or accidentally) doing an inefficient separation.
First part is the blender method people using normal 5 gallon bubble bags. second part is more where the factors of scale come into play and how to maximize yield while minimizing unnecessary work and effort.
for ~5 gallon scale put plant matter in freezer overnight and add ~ 1-3 gallons of water into freezer hours before u start. u want material cold as possible and water basically at its freezing point but not frozen. for small batches lik ur doing the most efficient way is a blender even if u hav to do a couple blender fulls its way better then manually mixing with a drill for 20+ mins and doing multiple pulls. just add material to blender with enough ice cold water so that it blends well and blend it in ~2 sec pulses for lik 30-60 secs then dump in bubble bags already set up in bucket. repeat till out of material then add the rest of the cold water and some ice to bags and mix for a couple mins.
With larger scale pretreatment of material is much more important and using a blender isnt advisable unless u hav a commercial one. so to pretreat the material freeze it for two days then break everything down while frozen and brittle, especially nugs, u dont wanna leave any nugs unbroken down cause most of their valuable compounds are trapped within and wont come out in a water filtration based separation. they also act lik sponges making the whole process harder You dont want break the material down to far into sand or dust region just so its all homogenous with no large curled up leaves, sticks or buds. while is defrosting separate any woody trim like stems or the bases of water leafs, which can puncture ur screen. then put back into freezer for another cycle, this is usually necessary just for breaking all of it up satisfactorily. if too many cycles were required and material gets too much water then before use it must be dried out in an oven at low low heat so as to not decarb or melt the trichomes or in a dehydrator or desiccator then once its moisture free its sealed in freezer safe bags and frozen again now ready to go.
For mixing i used a combination of manual stirring, immersion blenders and drills with cement mixing attachment. the purpose of this step is to break off the trichomes, that are made brittle by the cold, from the plant matrix, so shear force is more important then actually mixing the components. then after mixing i would attach a vibration source to the vessel and let it sit for 30 mins to an hour for the broken trichomes to settle. Ultrasonic transducers would almost certainly work for mixing and settling step but i never did this.
now ur ready to do the a pull. first bag drains easily but needs to be wrung out and cause its still frozen this is going to freeze ur hands unless u use something like a strap ar assistant to squeeze as much water out as possible, next bag, which is usually a contaminates bag around 170 mesh, is easily filtered thru. Tips for collection from screens, after most water has gone thru and ur holding the bag, grab the middle of the outside of the screen with ur fingers and pull it down so all liquid runs to there. it will hold that shape so grap around the bag as far down as possible without any liquid get above it and squeeze gently. too much pressure will affect quality and cause foaming too little and it can take a long while. if ur hash is all over ur filter not clumped together then quickly dip it back in hash water which will cause a small amount of water to back flow into the bag and move the hash around. this technique can be used to get all the hash into a nugget that can be squeezed thru the bag to remove most of the water. Another method is having another bucket thats the right circumference so that u can pull ur bag inside out over it making the screen taut and the hash easy to collect. another trick it is to hav a large bowl of warm water around while making hash to clean anything that has goodies especially the screens in after u collect the hash. at the end of the day u can run this thru ur smallest mesh filter and obtain a bunch of bonus hash (dont put contamination bag in this). The rest r all gonna take increasingly long to filter and there are only really two things that can speed it up pressure/vacuum or clearing the screen. pressure/vacuum doesnt work very well cause of the cloth the bubble bags r made of but can still be useful. so clearing the screen aka shaking is the simplest way. by putting brief negative g’s on the filter it will make them flow much faster. when ur doing it ull understand what im talking about.
This is the most exhausting part of hash making cause the bags can take a while to finish draining and u cant take the bag out of the bucket fully without getting water everywhere and if u let it touch the water it will flow back into the bag meaning u hav to hold the weight and shake continuously for 20+ mins. Not a big deal till ur using the 50 gallon bags lik i was lol.
i rigged a system to minimize effort required; made of a rope and some elastic so i could hang the bag while draining and the elastic would still allow me to shake it allowing me to effectively speed up the filtrations several hundred %. i dont hav exact numbers on this but ive tried not shaking the 27 mesh screen at all and it took 40 mins and still had more than a liter of water in it where i could do a whole pull (all 5 bags) in less than 40 mins if i was “shaking” it.
I also had multiple purpose bought trash cans and many clean home depot bucket for various uses during the process including having a sanitary place to put ur wet bags between pulls. One of these plastic trash cans i added a drain valve at the bottom to empty the water without taking the bags off. I also experiment with vacuum by cutting a hole in the trash can near the top but not covered by the bags and attach a shop-vac or venturi vacuum aspirator, basically creating a crude vacuum filtration apparatus which did work and was very useful for getting the last of the water out of the bags but didnt do much for the bulk of the filtration.
One of the cool things i could do with this system was, after the first pull, i could hang the material bag above the rest of the bags and flow water thru it that would drain into the other bags then filter thru them constantly and out of the drain i made making it pseudo continuous process. for large scale doing this after the first pull keeps too much good stuff from remaining trapped in the giant mass of plant material. When used correctly this technique could increase ur yields with negligible effects on quality. However due to the fact that adding ice and water back to the plant matter and remixing It will give u more, but lower quality hash this pseudo continuous separation be cycled multiple times to make alot of lower quality hash without much effort. this is could be a good way for rosin guys to make something they could press out of trim.
I grew up in a legal medical residential grow house and in highschool basically all my spending money came from selling hash, but not to people from my highschool, to dispensaries lol so i got good at turning trim into playdough soft blond hash. cause trim was free to me in large quantities and would otherwise be wasted i could experiment with all sorts of extractions and products from kief/dry-sift, dry-ice hash, glycerin and ethanol tinctures, dual-solvent (water-oil) extraction to quick and slow solvent wash extractions, anything that could be done at home i did. plus although it was trim it was from indoor hydroponic systems so it was better then most of the weed at my school lol i dont know how all this all relevant besides to give people the context of my experience doing this hundreds of times
