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Vacuum curing

THC123

Active member
Veteran
Hi,

I wanted to explain an apparently not well known method of curing, the vacuum cure.

Technically it is not a real vacuum as this would crush the buds.

SO what you do is: you dry the cannabis untill all stems snap. Maybe the bigger colas can still be a bit bendy but as long as the buds are greasy the stems can snap. SO this means drying for about 10-14 days with 60% rh and 18 degrees (this depends on a lot of factors, use common sense).

You should experiment yourself at which point you put them in the bags, all stems snapping, or the majority , use your nose to decide!! If the outside of the bud is dry but the stem bends, it means it will snap once it comes out of the cure due to moisture redistribution. Some people want their cannabi a bit drier some greasier. I prefer greasier cannabis cuz I vape. The first time you do this you should make different batches that were put in the mylar bags at different moisture levels to help you decide what you prefer.

Oh yeah forgot to mention you need to dry them untrimmed!!!

Then once dry enough you remove the buds from the stem and you put the UNTRIMMED buds in vacuum seal mylar bags (no plastic food grade shit).

The you pull as much air out as you can using a vacuum sealing machine like the princess for example. Don't crush the buds.

Then you seal the mylar bags with the princess and afterwards some more with an iron to be sure it is 100% closed of.

Then you let it rest for 2-4 weeks.

Then you open it and trim the buds. Normally smells should be really strong but in the event that the cannabis was a bit too moist, just let it air out a bit untill you notice the smells are coming back. SO we are not talking about drying the buds some more, but letting the buds breathe a bit like a good wine or cheese, untill smells come out, shouldn't take too long.

Usually putting the buds in a glass jar for a few hours should do the trick. You air them in the jar. (with or without lid, depends on conditions outside of jar. If your climate is not too dry you can air them outside of a jar. (I don't cuz my central heating will fuck up terps).

Then once trimmed you vac seal the buds again in smaller portions (so that each pack lasts about a week).

After minimum 2 weeks of additional resting, the cannabis is ready to be consumed and stored in or out of the freezer.

Out of the freezer the cannabis will continue to cure, Inside of the freezer it will stay the same. If you like fresh loud smelling cannabis, don't let it cure for too long before freezing (max 2 weeks). If you like aged weed you can let it rest. It depends on personal preferences and also the strain. Many strains don't age well while other get better.
I recommend storing it in the fridge or a cool place, don't worry about moisture, the mylar bag is sealed 100%.

IMO this method gives faster better results and more stable than jar curing. The cannabis will also be a bit drier compared to jar cured cannabis while still being smooth, tasty and strong smelling. This method also preserves the original terpene profile much better than glass jar cured cannabis.

What is also nice is that because you have week portions, your quality is consistent and always fresh.

You can also combine this method with boveda packs if you want to standardize the moisture level of each batch. I personally prefer without boveda cuz it steals a bit of smell and taste.

Try it!
 

DemonTrich

Active member
Veteran
Dont you need oxygen to break down the chylorphyl for a proper cure?

If this works, I'll stuff my 1.9cu' oven and try it this way
 

THC123

Active member
Veteran
No for this method the bud is already dry enough and just needs to rest in a closed environment with as much air as possible pulled out.

I don't think it would work in your over. The reason I recommend mylar vac seal bags is because you have to pull most air out of the package. This is anaerobic curing.
 

SuperBadGrower

Active member
Heya THC123, thanks for your help in the perfect cure thread and pointing me to this method. :)
Intuitively, this has always seemed like a good method to me.

Last week I had a small twig chopped & hanged for 5 days in the tent with 12/12 (indirect light) until its little stem snapped and it was my best homegrown smoke yet. Super potent, lots of flavor and smell, and it was dry the way I like. It's hard to describe just how enthusiastic I was about it. I preferred it over anything I had laying around, including some amazing cheese.

This left me very confused. I never thought a 5-day light-dried bud would have been my best achievement ever :noway:. Other people agreed about it being my best...

If I want to capture that, why don't I just vacuum it at that point? That's when the bud smells absolutely delicious and smokes so well.

I'm slowly turning away from all the unscientific anecdotal armchair science, myths and urban legends which have spread over the internet like aids.

If it's possible to get the vacuuming gear in time for my harvest I'll be trying this in 3-4 weeks, with varying levels of dryness :)
 

igrowone

Well-known member
Veteran
subbing on this thread
some jar cured bud can go stale tasting, no argument there
i'd be curious what can be done with jars and some vacuum applied
this looks like a whole new curing adventure
 

THC123

Active member
Veteran
If I want to capture that, why don't I just vacuum it at that point? That's when the bud smells absolutely delicious and smokes so well.

You could but keep in mind that it will always cure and change a bit. If you really want to capture that moment during the drying process I would freeze the buds UNTRIMMED in mylar ziplock bags(not the same as vac seal mylar bags). It is really controversial as everyone is afraid of freezing their weed. But as long as you keep it in a place where it is not agitated there is nothing to worry about, it will come out sticky and smelly as ever. When freezing it is important that the cannabis tastes really good and has a good effect before freezing. It should be at this point:
Last week I had a small twig chopped & hanged for 5 days in the tent with 12/12 (indirect light) until its little stem snapped and it was my best homegrown smoke yet. Super potent, lots of flavor and smell, and it was dry the way I like.

the amount of days drying depends, but if it tastes good and is dry enough you can freeze it! It is the only way to capture that moment.

You could also vac seal them but there is a bit of a learning curve and it will always change bit it won't stay the same like when you freeze it. Vac sealing can make them better but if you really like that moment when the cannabis tastes good and is strong and has it's strong fresh smell, freezing is the way to go.

I would say try both methods ;) Freezing is easiest, the difficult part there is choosing the right moment to freeze.

 

hush

Señor Member
Veteran
Honestly, I think that the same procedure could happen with vacuum-sealed canning jars. I don't understand the need for the mylar bags. In my experience, when I jar-cure, I always find that when the buds are in their perfect condition, I can "freeze time" by vacuum sealing the jars at that point and putting them in the freezer. Years can go by, and when I go back to that vacuumed jar, the buds are exactly the way I left them, in that suspended animation state.

FWIW.
 

THC123

Active member
Veteran
Because the point is having a fresh stash, if you freeze a whole jar, when you take it out, the weed will change by you opening the jar. By the time you get to the end of the jar the weed won't be the same. By packing the weed in small packages it is always in a perfect state. Try thinking outside the jar :)
 

hush

Señor Member
Veteran
Fair enough. Good reasoning. I just like jars because you get to *actually* vacuum seal them, as opposed to what you are doing with the mylar bags which is just sealing. I always re-vacuum the jars after I reach into them to pull out a week's worth or whatever. They are only ever opened and exposed to the atmosphere for 2 minutes at a time, if that.

I like vacuum sealing, and I don't like compressing buds, so jars FTW. :tiphat:
 

THC123

Active member
Veteran
I just tested some guerilla gold 3 that has vacuum cured for 2 weeks. It is just as smooth as the cannabis with the boveda pack but the taste is much much much better. The one with boveda while being just as smooth has a greener taste. This one tastes like the smell :) and it is stickier.

Edit: Smoked a seond sample after I finished manicuring. I put every handful of buds in an open mylar bag so it could breathe a bit while I as cutting the rest of the buds. I am finished now and the second sample was even smoother and tastier. If this would have been unseeded decent weed, this would have been cup quality. The other batches are mediocre but this one is fucking nice!!

Next smoke test will be in 2 weeks approx after one half was stored vacuum packed in the freezer and the other half outside of the freezer.



This is my favorite batch this year.

I had 3 batches of the same harvest:

Jar curing with boveda
Vacuum cure
Freezer

Vacuum cure is nr 1
Freezer is nr 2
Jar cure is number 3

I will now manicure it and vac seal it again. Half goes into the freezer now because it is really good. The other half will age for 3 more months.

I will also test adding oxygen absorbers into the mylar bags. Side by Side and after 3 months we will see :)

The weed was really bad to start with cuz it was seeded(seedgrow) and had light pollution causing it to flower for 12 weeks instead of 7-8( greenhouse).

For this reason I never got it to a good point during hang drying and thus freezing it directly with no cure was not as good as usual. But most of the times just freezing them at a certain point during hangdrying (untrimmed) gives me the best results, without any cure, just hangdrying, how crazy it may seem. I know it goes against all theories and it is a controversial thing to say, but my best weed has been direct frozen untrimmed weed. I even have won cannabis cups with such weed (after trimming of course).

The problem is that it is not an exact science and basically to get a consistent good result you would need a climate controlled room (18 degrees celius and 55-60% RH) for perfect drying conditions. If one thing goes wrong during the drying process, curing allows you to fix it, while with direct freezing the drying process needs to be flawless or else it won't be so good. Try it :), especially if you are a vaper;) For smoking the vacuum cure method is better.

So basically the vacuum method is drying untill most stems snap and bud is not too moist on outside(but also not super dry still sticky), then you sweat it in almost vacuum circumstances for 2 weeks(no 100% vacuum or you will squish buds in a brick). The bigger stems that didn't snap before will snap now and the cannabis will be a lot stickier an at perfect moisture level. Then the weed dries and breathes during manicuring(be sure to turn off you central heating during the manicure, ^put every handful of buds in a mylar bag that is not sealed so it breahtes but doesnt dry out, losing precious terpenes). Then you vac seal again and it continues to cure. If you dont want it to change, you freeze it at that point. Options are adding oxygen absorbers. Won't work in a jar, I tried. Not in a vac seal jar, I admit, but I tried side by side in a normal jar and the ones in jars tasted green after 2 weeks.

I think this works better because you can cure it at a drier level because you pull most air out so the RH rises more and faster, It brings the buds to a perfect RH while in jars it would get drier at this point. In jars you slow down the drying proces. Here you dry first and sweat it to an almost ideal point, if there were too much air in the container it would get drier instead of sweating(because there is a little bit more air in the jars). Then while manicuring it dries a bit more and then by packing under vacuum again, but this time manicured, it sweats again to a perfect point! And just to be clear, the jar I tested side by side was filled 99% to emulate the conditions in the mylar bag.

This method preserves the fresh terpene profile much better. In jars you can get dank smells after some time but the smell will change compared to the smell on the plant.

But it is also a LOT easier than jar curing. You still need some practice to find the sweet spot for putting them in a vacuum but it is a breeze compared to jar curing.
 

Drewsif

Member
The term vaccum throws people off. Negative pressure is essentially raising temp, so that's a whole different thing going on than vacc bags.

I don't understand the freezer cures. Things I don't understand scare me. Freezing is for bho tubes only! How can it cure outside of temps/rh required for the finishing plant processes? Conversion of starches, sugars, lipids,proteins, offgasing of nitrogen, etc)

I don't want the product coming out the same it went in, I want it louder and more delicious than seemingly possible, which a good 4 month cure between 65 and 80° always results in. I dont see a way to cut corners. I see commercial operations version of cutting corners, it ain't pretty. (They "cure" in 5 days now. Meaning as long as it doesn't smell like hay or look brown, the lcd customer base they pander to doesn't know any better.)

I've always used vaccum bags, reusable ones with valves for the last few years. My theory on why jars suck is that whatever off gases during cure doesn't have anywhere to go, so it absorbs back into the bud. Jars are for end storage only! With valved bags they expand and you suck the air back out. The need to burp is cut in half and you can test the flavor without even opening them up.)

Honesty i was open to trying the freezer method until I saw you say you prefer wet weed (greasy is not antithetical to dry) because you vape. I have never in my life seen a situation where moisture helps vaping. I've been vaping exclusively for over a decade and the dryer the better, always. Nothing sucks more than chewing up larf in the grinder, sitting it on paper, then rechewing endlessly until it's crispy enough to taste like sugar and actually give a hit instead of tasting like steam and being a complete waste.

So now I'm back to convinced everyone on the grow forums is growing a completely different plant that me. The purpose of curing has always been to turn the generic sugar flavor/smell into the complex strain specific candy flavor. Cedar flavored candy, lemon flavored candy, pussy flavored candy, armpit flavored candy, fuel flavored candy, etc. And it always takes months, at room temp..
 

THC123

Active member
Veteran
It doenst cure in the freezer but the fresh smell builds up. I am talking about the smell it had on the plant, not a green wet smell. And the weed is not wet it is sticky and greasy but the stems snap. This gives me the best flavor and the thickest vapor. But it needs to be at a certian point.

But I also freeze my vacuum cured weed after 3-4 months. I always have big outdoor harvests and I dont like how weed changes over time.

It also depends on the strain. An aged sssdh or frisian dew is nice but an aged amnesia or spg sucks.

I always divide my big harvests in multiple batches and do different methods, this way after 3-6 month I end up with 3 different weeds from the same plant, eacht with a different taste, look and high.
 

TheIsland

New member
so based on a mixture of drewsifs information and thc123s information...
am i right in thinking im ok doing my cure in the reusable vacuum bags that you use with a hoover..
and letting them gradually burp themselves (because over a couple of weeks air very gradually seeps in and the bags un-vaccum)
and then re-hoovering with the vacuum.. waiting a few weeks and repeating the process..would this work?
 

Easy7

Active member
Veteran
No a vaccum in a proper chamber will not crush buds. A cure needs gas exchange. Preservation is another matter.
 

de145

Member
Because the point is having a fresh stash, if you freeze a whole jar, when you take it out, the weed will change by you opening the jar. By the time you get to the end of the jar the weed won't be the same. By packing the weed in small packages it is always in a perfect state. Try thinking outside the jar :)


Dude, you can get tiny 4 oz mason jars if you want, they come in all sizes. No need to crush your buds in a bag unless you want to for some reason.
 

THC123

Active member
Veteran
They are too expensive for the quantities I would need plus I just get better quality in mylar as opposed to glass jars.
 

pasha.h

New member
Ola! Why you mentioned two times that we need to dry them untrimmed and put em in vac bags untrimmed? Whats the trick?
 

pasha.h

New member
So i tried this method. Buds was curing for 2 weeks. Now it smells like a hay or fresh grass :(. I ll wait 2 weeks more to be shure it works or not.
 
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