Making high potency weed edibles at home fast and consistently has always been tough. With new gadgets like the Levo and Butter bags making cannabis infused food can at first seem challenging. The basics are easy though and in the interest of spreading free, medicinal information to the masses our publish has decided to make his recipe for weed infused coconut oil.
Step 1 is to take your weed and grind it up finely. You can do this with a grinder or a coffee blender. Either way, you want to expose the most surface area of the cannabis flower to the heat of your oven. The next step is to dump the ground flower into a mason jar or other oven-safe container. Pre-heat the oven to 220F and once it’s ready, put the container holding your cannabis inside.
Make sure you don’t seal the lid on the jar or your container all the way tight. Carbon dioxide is produced during this decarboxylation phase, so you want to leave a way for it to escape the container. Decarboxylation takes THC from its acid form and rushes it along the space-time continuum until it becomes the THC which our bodies can metabolize. Normally, when you smoke a joint or a bowl you’re doing this with the heat of combustion. It’s a time-tested way of enjoying and consuming cannabis but it also burns off a lot of other great metabolites humans have found beneficial. Heating weed to just 220F will convert the THC-a to THC but won’t ruin too much else. If you leave the weed in the oven for longer than 60 minutes you’ll start to burn off even the THC in its activated form.
Once you’ve decarbed your cannabis herb, take it out of the oven and with the lid slightly on let it sit for 15 minutes until it cools. Leaving the lid slightly open lets the CO2 leave but keeps some of the evaporated terpenes and other cannibinoids from escaping. The next thing you’ll need is a scale.
I know the rough weight of my jars and what I usually do is just subtract that from the combined weight of the jar and the decarbed herb. But let’s say you started with about 28 grams, like we did here with the Sour Kush (Ben Oui) from P’Tite Pof (Aphria). After decarbing, you’ll notice the weight of your cannabis will have decreased slightly. This loss of weight is due to the CO2 which evaporated during decarboxylation and usually amounts to about 5% of the total weight.
I have a high tolerance so I like to make very high potency cannabis infused oil. After much experimentation, I’ve found that adding about four times as much oil as there is decarbed cannabis is the right amount to keep your oil moving while it infuses and get the most out of every dose. So if you’ve decarbed 28 grams that will probably look like 25 grams after decarboxylation. Multiply 25 by four to determine the amount of oil we are going to infuse and we get 100 ml. Combine the oil (coconut or MCT oil works best) and let sit for an hour or more.
When you’re ready to use the oil you’ll have to strain it first. I like to use rosin pressing bags. They’re made of mylar so they don’t soak up the oil and they’re ubiquitous. I make a small cut along the seam, flip it inside out and then, spoonful by spoonful, I squeeze the oil out of the wet herb using the mylar bag. I do a first pass with my hands by simply ringing the rosin bag. Then I put it in a garlic press and squeeze the remaining infused oil out of the herb.
The resulting oil should be dark and dank. You can dose it in pills or, like I do every day, put some in a smoothie using a small pipette. To determine the potency take the THC % on the front of the bag you bought, let’s say it’s 20%, and multiply it by 10. This gives us 200. That’s 200 milligrams of THC for every gram of cannabis. We’re ultimately going to measure our oil’s potency in milligrams per milliliter and since milliliters are equivalent to milligrams it’s a helpful number to have on hand.
So with 200 mg of THC for every gram of weed, if we had 25 grams of decarboxylated cannabis that would give us 200 multiplied by 25 which is 5,000 mg of THC total. Then we added 100 ml of oil. So our total weight became 125 ml. The potency is just the total amount of THC in the herb divided by the total weight of the infused oil and herb together. In this case, we’d have a rough potency of about 40 mg / ml. Most legally available concentrations are 30 mg / ml or lower and are much more expensive than doing this on your own at home.
Do you have a cannabis recipe you want to share with us? Let us know in the comments!
