Live Resin

Live resin is a kind of cannabis concentrate made from fresh flowers rather than dried and cured buds. This method preserves the terpenes that are lost during the drying and curing process. Because the aromatic terpenes are preserved, live resin is considered a premium, connoisseur-level product because of its high quality.

The freshness of cannabis plant material used to make this cannabis concentrate is what gives it its name.

What is Live Resin?

Live resin is a cannabis concentrate made from fresh cannabis plant material. Unlike other cannabis products, live resin is produced from undried or uncured plant material. Live resin is prepared using fresh flower buds and sugar leaves; fan leaves and stems are not used. It’s because of the more pungent and fragrant dabbing experience that concentrate fans like it.

The goal of extracting the whole essence and aroma of cannabis is to get it right. The live resin production process, which involves freezing the plant material, then isolating chemicals from it, results in high-quality and delicious concentrates. Bypassing the usual drying and curing procedure allows for a greater percentage of essential oils. These essential oils, known as terpenes scientifically speaking, are responsible for the unique tastes and scents in marijuana; they also play an important part in determining how strong or potent a final extraction product is.

What does live resin look and feel like?

Live resin comes in a variety of colors and shapes. The concentrate’s cultivar has an influence on many chemical and physical characteristics. Live resin is high in terpenes, when compared to other concentrates. The consistency is usually looser than other live resin concentrates because to the inclusion of additional essential oils. Live resin has a variety of consistencies, including sap, sugar, badder/budder, and sauce.

Shatter is another popular and widespread form of cannabis concentrate. Live resin in shatter form, on the other hand, is extremely rare if it can be found at all. Shatter has a brittle texture due to the presence of terpenes, which prevents the live resin process from creating hard and rigid concentrates.

What’s the difference between live resin and sauce?

Whether it’s sauce or not depends on the plant materials used to start it. Fresh weed plants are flash-frozen to create live resin. In contrast, fresh plant matter or cured bud may begin a sauce. Terpenes are missing from the cured plant material, unlike with live resin. Examine the packaging and labels of the sauce to see whether it’s nug sauce or living resin sauce.

Is live resin considered a ‘full spectrum extract?’

The long answer is, yes, on rare occasions. Full-spectrum extracts are concentrates that attempt to capture as much of the original cannabis plant’s entire cannabinoid and terpene profile as possible. Live resin can be considered a full-spectrum extract depending on how the plant is prepared. However, not all full-spectrum extracts are derived from fresh or frozen live plant material, such as kief , which is a full-spectrum concentrate despite using cured rather than fresh, frozen cannabis as its source material.

How to store live resin

Keep it cool, dark, dry, and devoid of air to keep the cannabinoids’ strength and quality. To preserve the texture and consistency, as well as protect the cannabinoids from deterioration and the terpenes from evaporation, use an airtight and lightproof container. Look for silicone or glass concentrate storage jars if you’re searching for containers. It’s more straightforward to remove gooey concentrates out of silicone than it is plastic.

To maintain its strength and quality, keep it away from light, heat, dampness, and plain air.

Light and heat can hasten the breakdown of your resin. It should be kept in a cool place, ideally the refrigerator, or even a cold room. After each usage, make sure to properly seal the live resin container. Leaving it out open exposes it to deterioration and may cause it to change color, texture, and flavor.

Ways to consume live resin

Dabbing is the method of consuming live resin, which is done with a dab rig and a flat bowl called a nail. Nails are made of materials that can take higher temperatures than glass bowls used for smoking flower.

You may consume live resin by dabbing or putting it in a bowl of cannabis flower.

A single gram of live resin can also be sprinkled on a pre-moistened flower in a glass pipe, wrapped around a joint or blunt, or used as an adhesive. The combination of cured flower and live resin extract provides you with a more powerful experience as well as additional taste.

Can you vape live resin?

Yes, you may vaporize live resin by dabbing, as previously described, or hitting a live resin vape pen, as described below. You are simply vaporizing and breathing in the cannabinoid and terpene-rich vapors in each of these cases.

Dabbing is the most complex of the three vape techniques since it necessitates the use of more equipment and work. If you’d want an easier way to get pleasure from live resin, try using a nectar collector, which is a simplified, portable version of a dab rig.

The simplest way to use a vape pen is with a live resin cartridge. Simply purchase and attach a live resin cart to your battery, and you’re ready to go.

What are live resin carts?

Live resin carts are pre-filled vape cartridges that work with a battery. Live resin carts, as the name implies, are ingestible oil cartridges that have been filled with live resin rather than cannabis concentrate. Simply slip the cartridge on a battery, turn on the heating mechanism, and breathe through the mouthpiece as you would with any other cart.

How much does live resin cost?

In general, consumers should anticipate to pay more for live resin than they would for other concentrates. Because of geographical and market fluctuations, establishing a specific price is difficult. Live resin can cost anything from $100 per gram to $140 per gram in the upper end, with an average of $35 to $80 per gram across the country.

How is live resin made?

To begin, I’d like to issue a word of advice: experts should only participate in the development of live resin and other cannabis concentrates because these operations may be quite hazardous.

Resin, unlike butane hash oil (BHO), is produced via a solvent-based process that includes liquefied petroleum gas such as butane or propane. Extracts are also created using ethanol and CO2, however not as often.

The leaves, buds, and blooms of the cannabis plant are all harvested and frozen right away. The plant material is quickly frozen by gently dipping it into an insulated cylinder filled with liquid nitrogen or placing it in a cooler containing dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide). The cannabis is put into a tank within a closed-loop system that is exclusively used to store it throughout the process. Before using butane or another solvent to purify the gas, make sure there was no oxygen in the tank, as this might cause an explosion and excessive pressure.

The solvent is cooled, then the starting material is treated with it to free the trichomes from the plant substance. To remove the solvent, the combined mixture of cannabis and solvent is heated, causing the solvent to transform into a vapor and rise up into the column. It’s cooled and condensed back into a liquid there. Extractors must be cautious about the temperature at all times. A too-high heat level may cause extraction to fail. Heat causes volatile terpenes to evaporate, resulting in decarboxylation and the loss of the extract’s translucency.

Extract production should be entrusted to specialists due to the complexity of safety measures and equipment needed precision and accuracy.

Professional extractors are the only ones who should handle production since the safety measures and equipment necessitate accuracy and precision.

History of live resin

The live resin manufacturing process was developed in 2013 by cannabis grower William “Kind Bill” Fenger and EmoTek Labs founder and cannabis entrepreneur Jason “Giddy Up” Emo.

In 2010, Fenger began the first legal concentrate operation in his home state of Colorado. He thought about the consequences of extracting concentrates from the cannabis plants he was actively trimming during a harvest. He guessed that the fragrant vapors wafting from freshly harvested plants were more complex and appealing than cured nugs. He believed that if he could isolate the terpenes while they were at their peak flavor profile (before drying and curing), he might be able to create a concentrate with the same pungent odour of the live plant.

In recent years, he’s been fine-tuning his technique. He initially tried live resin with the Original Diesel cultivar, also known as Daywrecker Diesel or Underdawg. He flash-froze the plant material and used it to make BHO afterward. The resulting extract, while tasty and aromatic, was hazardous to make and had a low yield. During these days, shatter reigned supreme. The conventional belief was, “If it doesn’t shatter, it’s fine.” While he preferred the live-plant BHO to other cannabis extracts he’d tried, the technology for increasing yields and making production safer didn’t yet exist.

In September of 2013, Emo installed a removal system at A Cut Above’s production facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The OBE-Dos model from EmoTek Laboratories is a closed-loop extraction device meant for commercial manufacturers producing high-quality wax and shatter. Employees at the medical dispensary were having problems with the new equipment, so they hired Fenger as a technical expert.

When Emo presented the OBE-Dos unit to Fenger, he was confident that the technology would allow him to create a successful extraction method. They worked on the extraction process for more than a month, experimenting with various strains and techniques.

Using whole cannabis plants that had been flash-frozen, the researchers were able to produce a successful batch from a 24-hour extraction session. The aromatic and taste characteristics Fenger was looking for years were found in the batch yield. He referred to both the extraction technique and the resulting live resin as live resin.

William “Kind Bill” Fenger and EmoTek Labs founder Jason “Giddy Up” Emo were among the first to use modern live resin production technology.

Why does live resin skip the drying and curing process?

Drying or curing the fresh plant material is the typical technique for producing marijuana extracts. You won’t get high from eating fresh cannabis. The moisture removed during harvesting without affecting or evaporating the terpenes

The danger is that some terpenes will be lost as a consequence of drying and curing. The most volatile terpenes depart during the curing process, which affects the flower’s flavor profile. The terpene profile of fresh cannabis plants was compared to those that had been dried at various lengths of time in a 1995 study from the University of Mississippi. Researchers discovered that drying a plant for a week at room temperature resulted in a 31% drop in terpenes.

Fresh cannabis plant material that has been cured using a high-quality, stain-free resin provides users with a dabbing experience with greater floral, fruity, and spicy notes than nug run or trim run extracts.

Bottom line

As far as Fenger was concerned, in the early 2010s, it would be worthwhile to somehow capture and utilize the fragrance and flavor of fresh flower. The evidence is in the resin. The concentration’s potency, terpene profile, and flavorful richness have made it a sought-after and highly desired concentrate.