Just got a pollenmaster kief tumbler with 150 micron mesh and the results were not what I expected and I’m hoping yall can help me figure this out.
I tumbled half the recommended volume of trim in two batches and collected kief at a few time intervals to track the quality and yield. The first batch tumbled at room temp, the second batch had 1 minute of LN2 chilling at the start and 2 more times during the run. They advertise 15 minutes run time, but I extended that to 5 hours total. I did this excessive run time on purpose to be sure I was capturing all the goods. I did see a slight greening of the kief in the last collection so I figured my plan had worked.
I took a sample of trim from the room temp run at the 3 hour mark and had that tested for potency and terpenes. Between the 3-5 hour mark I collected only 1.5% yield added to the rest to make 22% yield total. Here’s the weird part… Tumbled trim lab results show 15% total cannabinoids and .8% terpenes still present in the trim. This is really confusing to me. I ran the tumbler 20x the suggested time, I saw a huge drop-off on yield, I saw a change in color suggesting trichomes were removed and now shredding leaf… but lab results suggest this trim is nowhere near fully kief’d.
I was testing mainly to confirm that the trim was not usable after tumbling, and to fine tune my run times. I am tumbling to reduce the ratio of leaf matter and total volume of my batches for hydrocarbon extraction, to increase extraction efficiency per batch. This is throwing a wrench in my plans if the tumbled trim is still potent. Im going to reach out to the lab and have them retest to be sure.
Any ideas on what the issue could be?
Is it possible to remove ALL cannabinoids and terps from trim with a kief tumbler?
Is chilling absolutely necessary for pulling all of the yield? And do I need constant LN2 in the tumbler?
Is 150 micron mesh large enough to allow all goodies to pass through?
Hopefully someone here can help me narrow down the issue and get this dialed in. I appreciate your time, thanks for reading…
What temperature was the room you were working in? It should be a bit chilly so it negates any of the friction heat coming off of the motors. Also the longer you run those bad boys the more likely you are to pull plant material when what you put inside has time to tumble around and bust apart more if it’s bone dry. Like if you chill the material and then it goes into a warm room it can get pretty goopy and sort of just stick to heaps of plant material instead of getting through the tumbler mesh like you want because of the tumbler cylinder rods sort of whacking things as they’re on their way down and breaking it up more.
Also alternatively the tension rods on those tumbler tubes are pretty annoying and require a bit of love to get to the point where it’s properly stretched out with only an ITTY BIT of tension on it because that mesh really really sucks hard when it comes to durability.
Do me a favor and hold your tumbler tube up to a light while it’s totally empty and see what the mesh looks like, if you can see little globs on the inside of the tube you likely are dealing with stuck on trichs that are slowing your output/making some of it glob up inside of plant material as things heat up since it can’t escape.
Just my two cents as I was really keen on trying to make good rosin out of sift - which is doable…but with the amount of effort I had to put into it and the work it was to find well cared for trim/shake to tumble I decided for my efforts it was easier to hand wash fresh frozen. Not saying that’s where you SHOULD go as it’s more about the journey there rather than the destination but for my time and effort it was much more fruitful and giving me the results I truly wanted. Good luck my friend!
These are some good points. I thought a smaller batch (half of max) would get better results but I will be trying the max trim amount to see if that changes the tumbling and pushes more out. I’m concerned about trichs not falling through the mesh and getting broken and smeared on the leaf. Not sure if chilling will make a difference there? And I don’t mind extra plant material making it through with the kief since this will be added to trim and extracted anyway… but I do want to avoid anything that will damage the trichs or affect yield/terps.
The room is 60-65f and mid/low humidity. Trim is high quality cured material, mostly sugar leaf and smalls, stored in walk-in at 50f then straight into tumbler. Maybe I should let the trim sit at room temp overnight before tumbling so there is no moisture issues?
During the room temp run the material seemed dry and I didn’t notice any goop or smearing on the mesh, but I will take a closer look at the mesh with light behind to be sure. The second run we blasted with LN2 a few times which made things brittle and I’m guessing even more dry. Still didn’t notice any clumps or smearing etc.
I did replace the mesh on this and the new one was loose around the cylinder, so I am adding zip ties to keep the mesh tight on the rods and keep it from scraping the bottom of the box (the trim weight made it sag and almost touch bottom). I hope the zip ties will keep the mesh from rubbing on the rods since it will be held in place.
Chilling the product/biomass throughout the whole process makes a noticeable difference when sifting especially with terps
Also surface area is key with sifting trim i find smaller batches ran you get higher yields but im also working on a much smaller scale
hope this helps good luck
If you refine a small sample of your kief to be mostly heads, what is the consistency? Is it greasey, or sandy in texture? Cause some varieties just dont sift as well as others, and if its really greasy its going to be a lot more prone to sticking to the plant material when agitated too aggressively.
Also, I know you said your material seemed dry, but was it bone dry, like crumble with the slightest pinch dry?
My thoughts: Can you tumble trichs that have ruptured? Wouldn’t that oil just stick to the trim, accounting for at least some of the 15% trim potency post tumble? I’m a solvent guy myself, so IDK how it works and how easy it is to rupture the heads instead of gently breaking them off intact.
What temperature range you would say is acceptable for tumbler? Reason I’m asking I live in a hot climate where I’m limited with what I
can do with bubble even at max ac capacity. But tumbler seems like an idea to try if it can run in a higher environment.
Thanks for the spoon, love reading your solventless posts helped me tons. Seems like a viable option for now until I can upgrade the room for proper washing. Right now I loose quite a bit to the bags due to temp differences.
If I’m not overstepping my welcome. If I understand correctly you were mainly doing sift to rosin? What about old school way of tumbling very dry material and converting sift to hash?
I know that US market rosin/ hash is completely different and you’re looking for both color and yields vs work needed to get there. Myself I’m just looking to start practicing techniques to get a better understanding how the actual process looks and to convert my trim. With limited resources just trying to find which way to start experimenting.
I was but that was mainly out of hopeful optimism that I didn’t have to spend more time and effort running it into bubble hash - what I was getting had too much plant material contamination and not enough terpene content for my liking so I just took the plunge and started running all the stuff I was going to make like that. Honestly just for the terps alone it was worth it nevermind the lighter colors (although that has a lot of variables attached to it). I personally try not to aim for the white-white hash simply because terps aren’t clear or white unless there’s significant work done to clean them up. You’ll notice a lot more terps hanging around jars with more color to them than anything else.
If you’re trying to get nicer quality but you’re going to stay with using trim, I would try freezing it and washing that fresh frozen trim! You don’t even need to use a freeze dryer but that helps later on with preserving more terpenes and keeping color in check, otherwise if you’re ok with having something that’s only slightly darker I bet you could still get a pretty passable product with that. I would just go with the method traditional hashmakers use for drying. I forget which video frenchy made specifically for it but you want to find the one where he shows how he goes about drying his bubble that he’s freshly processed. You could always dry like that, in a scenario like that it gives you a bit of flexibility to either make a big fucking chunk of hash at that juncture, or just stuff the dried resin into a rosin bag (I like using the smaller micron bags (I usually use the lowtemp plates 25 micron bags), usually double bagged and then press that bad boy! If you get comfortable with that process you can easily teach yourself how to make some super fine temple balls or canollis because that is essentially the ‘fork’ in the road where you can choose to either head on down the line to rosin or you can learn how to hot roll your resin so you can make more traditional styled hash which is always great to have around for a rainy day