Fire in Fire Out: The Art of Hash Making

West Coast Cure is here to bring you fire weed and fire weed only, in all its viable forms. And we do this through the ancient, holistic art of hash-making. 

When we add a new product to our hash-heavy lineup, you can rest assured it’s a fine-tuned manifestation of the cannabis plant’s dankest properties. The whole plant — carefully condensed and beautifully expressed in every dab, toke, or bite.

Fire in Fire Out. That’s our north star, the golden rule for our extraction process.

At West Coast Cure, we value the hard work of our farming partners. And we love that our solventless concentrates connect the consumer’s experience directly to the farmer’s labor of love. Our solventless concentrates contain juicy trichomes, full of terpenes, cannabinoids, and flavonoids—bringing the plant to life in its most vibrant and accessible form while maintaining its purity. 

So what makes hash so special, and how does West Coast Cure transform the dankest hash into a rare assortment of fire solventless weed products?

How is Hash Made?

Hash, or hashish, is a cannabis concentrate made by pressing or rubbing together the resin glands from the cannabis plant to form brick, slab, or rolled pieces. It’s been around for ages, with texts dating hash making as far back as the 12th and 13th centuries. Today, the goal of hash is the same: remove the resin glands, or trichomes, from the cannabis plant and compress them to form a solid piece. Trichomes are small mushroom-like structures found on top of the cannabis plant. They contain all the cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids that give weed its dank flavors and groovy sensations.

At West Coast Cure, we use award-winning plants from Emerald Triangle Farms to make fire rosin. Our farm partners harness the natural environment to maximize trichome size and terpene production. Indoor growth with LED or halogen lights can deviate from the natural light spectrum, affecting trichome expression. A natural terroir produces more trichomes and a richer terpene profile.

Preserve the Terps

We value the Harvest Moon as growers and cultivators have for centuries. That’s why we work with our farming partners to harvest our buds at night, around 3-4am. The warmth during the day can cause trichomes to become volatile, so we want to preserve them as much as possible by harvesting them when it’s colder. We also aim to trim and freeze the plants within 20-30 minutes of cutting them in the field. Touching the plant with warm fingers can damage the trichomes and terpenes, so we avoid it as much as possible. Freezing the flowers right after harvest is a crucial part of ensuring their full preservation.

Once we’ve got those buds harvested and frozen to lock in all the volatile terpenes and flavonoids, we make an ice water hash – soaking the plant material in ice water and agitating the mixture to separate all those cannabinoid and terpene-rich trichome glands. Once we’ve thoroughly sifted the mixture through mesh bags of varying micron screen sizes, we let it dry and collect the hash.

What Makes Hash So Special?

Imagine you are standing near an apple tree during harvest season. If you shake the tree, the most ripe apples will fall off, along with some rotten ones and those eaten by bugs. The ones that are just ripe for picking will be left behind. If you shake the tree a little more, the less ripe apples will also fall off. However, the apple remains intact with its protective skin, allowing it to be stored for a long time.

Similarly, with hash, the trichomes on the top of the flower contain 99.9% of the plant’s value, including cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids. By agitating the flower in ice water, the plant material absorbs the water, while the oil and the trichomes freeze and become brittle. When the flower is agitated, the heavy trichome heads sink to the bottom and can be separated from the plant material through filters.

What is Full Melt?

Ice hash is measured on a scale of one to six — from food grade to full melt — based on how well it melts under a flame. A 1-2 Star food grade or cooking grade hash is most commonly used to make edibles. We use our food grade hash to formulate dominance-specific Solventless Gummies, with hash batches selected based on effect dominance (Indica, Sativa, Hybrid), then carefully paired with all-natural flavors for a better vibe in every bite.

A 5-6 Star full melt is the highest possible grade and the purest end of the ice hash spectrum. You can dab a full melt hash as easily as fine-pressed rosin, making it fit for the most discerning of dabbing connoisseurs. For  full melt, focusing on the oil-rich trichomes typically found in the 90 and 120 micron range is crucial because they contain the least amount of plant material. Granted, every cultivar is unique, so there are no hard and fast rules. You might achieve a full melt with 5 or 6-star hash from a 70 micron, but the 90 and 120 micron range is generally considered the sweet spot.

Why Full Melt?

Using full melt hash as the basis for new products is how we ground every WCC experience in the plant’s holistic heady goodness. Full melt captures all the hard work the farmer put in throughout the plant’s lifecycle, from nutrients and water to organics and soil. Everything that went into making the plant and its fruit is now present in the trichome. It’s a result of the farmer and the plant working with nature to create a high-quality product. When you receive it as hash, frozen, it’s like walking through the field on the day of harvest and smelling the plant. You’ll get the same sensations, variety, and smell. You get exactly what the farmer intended.

Hash vs. Rosin: What’s the Difference?

Hash and rosin are both made without chemical solvents—hash by physical agitation and separation of the trichomes from the rest of the plant, and rosin by applying heat and pressure to plant material. The simple difference between them is that one begets another. First comes hash, then comes rosin.

Think of hash as the starting material for rosin. The goal is to remove the bud’s trichome glands mechanically rather than chemically. We place our hash into mesh bags and apply heat and pressure with steel plates to remove any plant material and extract all the oils from the trichomes. Then we squeeze the oils onto parchment paper through the mesh bag. The result is an oily, resinous form called rosin, considered a cleaner extract and preferred by cannabis enthusiasts for its pure, terpy taste.

Fire Out: Our Hash Rosin Products

Take our Live Rosin Fresh Press as a fire showcase of top-tier rosin production. We take our ice water hash made from fresh frozen material at peak maturation, then press it in a heavily controlled setting so the terpene content is locked in until you heat it for consumption.

We also cold cure our Live Rosin Fresh Press into a Cold Cure Badder, preserving all the good stuff that makes live rosin a uniquely rich, flavorful experience. After our award winning hash makers whip our  fresh press, we set it to cure under a controlled temperature until it reaches a cake badder like consistency. Whipping the rosin helps with the stability of the product, extending its shelf life by locking in the whole plant’s terpene and cannabinoid profile. The slightly firmer texture makes this tasty rosin easy to dab with any smoking apparatus.

Our badder also serves as the starting material for our Live Rosin Diamonds. We “diamond mine” our badder (separating THCa crystals from the rest of the extract through carefully timed heat and pressure), then bring the full flavored sauce back together with the THCa diamonds in a ratio we determined to be the most optimal for your senses. As always, the result is an exceptionally flavorful, high potency product.

A Better Vibe in Every Bite

At West Coast Cure, we want the full melt experience available in every product type out there, especially edibles. That’s why we use our full melt hash to craft small batch Cultivar Specific Gummies. First, we put our full melt hash through a slow, careful, in-house decarboxylation process. Decarboxylation is how we activate the noticeable effects of the plant, methodically applying heat so cannabinoids can interact with the body’s cannabis receptors. Then we formulate it into Cultivar Specific Gummies, allowing you to taste the terps and feel the heady effects of the source plant like you would in a super chill dab, only in convenient edible form.

Dab in a Cart

Portability can be tricky when it comes to dabbing. Even the “portable” dab rigs and e-rigs can be cumbersome and difficult to maintain for the uninitiated. Though distillate vape pens and THC vape cartridges don’t offer what you might consider the “full dab” experience, we’re starting to see a need for more cartridges in the market that deliver quality full-spectrum live rosin in a convenient vape cart form. West Coast Cure’s Rosin Cartridges offer unfettered access to an authentic dab’s full spectrum of flavors and sensations, especially when paired with our CUREpen Pro Battery, great for achieving lower vape temperatures and unlocking the entire dab-like experience in a cart.

The WCC Way of Hash

We at West Coast Cure take our responsibility as stewards of the plant seriously and carefully consider the input that goes into every one of our products. We’re all about providing the best possible experience for our customers and always put forth the time and effort to ensure we capture the best of the farmer’s work.

Cannabis products that truly capture each source plant’s unique, multidimensional effects can be frustratingly few and far between. We’re out to change that by example, and one of the ways we do that is by diving head first into the world of hash. Fire in Fire Out. The plant deserves it, and so do you.