How is hash oil made?

There are quite a few ways concentrates are made. Understand that concentrate is simply pulling the trichomes off the plant matter. There are a few ways to accomplish it.

1. Pressure/Heat Extraction – The below two videos outline Rosen Tech, which is a heat-extraction method. The general idea is to fold a cannabis flower in parchment paper (don’t use wax paper, as the wax will melt) and squeeze it with a heated curling iron. A laundry iron will achieve the same affect on larger quantities.

Since trichomes are directly squeezed off, purity levels are in the 90-percentile, which you can tell by the light eggshell color of the resulting shatter in the 2nd video.

2. Butane/CO2 Extraction – The next two videos show a homemade BHO extraction and a commercial CO2 extraction rig. Apeks makes CO2 closed-loop systems, whereas the homemade process is an open-loop system. The solvents and systems are interchangeable, and home-brew systems aren’t recommended for safety concerns.

The general idea of the process is to rinse trichomes off the plant matter using an ethanol solvent. In a closed loop system, the solvent is even filtered and reprocessed, saving a lot of money.

The homebrew system below costs about $100 (though you likely have the pieces necessary already), whereas the Apeks commercial systems costs $20,000-$200,000.

When you hear anything bad about BHO (butane hash oil), it’s because people use cheap open-loop parts like glass or PVC pipe and are often manually controlling the output. Mistakes will be made this way. Also they don’t let it fully dissolve before vaping, which is extremely dangerous and can lead to explosion when butane bubbles are trapped in the concentrate.

3. Ice/Water Hash – Of course, you can always make bubble hash the old-fashioned way, which is to rinse it with ice water. The video below shows this process.