[titoon29]

Hello IC friends and foes !

I have been hanging around Xaouen for a few weeks, likely a couple more. Been digging a little bit more into the culture, the growing, the production of Kif, and playing around with some resin I hope this thread will shade even more light on the Moroccan hash production... I will reference some interesting publications found here and there. It will be a follow up of the excellent threads on Morocco here on IC.





This thread is a tribute to the moroccan farmers, who have carried along generations this amazing plant, and made it possible for a whole generation in Europe to access the marvelous realm of the getting high. They have an incredible dedication to this plant, which you need when you see the harsh conditions that they must work with.


Little history, source in french
J. Bellakhdar - Contribution à l'étude de la pharmacopée traditionnelle au maroc - la situation actuelle, les produits, les sources du savoir, 1997.

According to the writer Al maqrizi, the cannabis cultivation was introduced in the 13th century in Egypt. At this time, the plant was acclimated to North Africa, but the use as a psychotrope had been long known by the Arabs when the conquered the maghreb.
The cultivation was grown everywhere, not only in the North like now. It was mostly grown for personal use. At the end of the 18th century, the Rif became the larger producing region.
However, the cultivation had never reached the scale it did the last 50 years, due to international trafficking.

The use of cannabis got widespread in the 1800s, and Moulay Hassan "had to" dictate repressive laws to contain it. But it was already too late, and Kif was spreading.
During the protectorate (Spanish & french), and until 1953, Kif selling become official and it was sold by the Régie des Tabacs, which sold mixes of kif/tobacco with 1/3rd and then 1/5th of kif. There was mainly three cultivars : Ktami, zerwali, and gnawi, which needed quite a bit of water to grow.

In the end of the 1960s - some people that had travelled to traditional hash producing countries (mostly afghanistan, pakistan, lebanon), introduced the sifting techniques, as well as some new cultivars that required much less water to grow than the original Moroccan ones. Many stories you hear about here, some says the first guy was american, some english, who knows !
From the 60s to the 90s, the old morocco strains slowly got cross pollinated with the lebanese and afghan/paki genetics. It slowly got selected for using very little water, and producing resin. Then, in the 90s a new loads of genetics arrive, some places here call it mexicana. I ld tend to think it would be the cheap Sensi seeds genetics.
Later on came the Amnesia, the Critical, the Kush, the Skunk. Around here, it seems that Amnesia got there around 2005, Critical since a couple of years. They are now switching to feminized seeds, which is quite different then their old planting method.


What I will be calling the Bildya further in this thread, the local cultivar, is in this case the old moroccan genetics mixed with the Leb & Paki. The old cultivars, the true landraces, are probably nowhere to be found anymore, but their genetics are carried on in the Bildya. While the old people do agree that the genetics of their Kif has changed over the years, the cannabinoid/terpens profile still seems to be tuned with their social and recreational use of the plant - CBD is present in ratio around 1:2, and the terroir seems to still express itself through natural selection despite multiple foreign pollen floating around.

Keep in mind that the knowledge that I am getting locally is tied to the place I am. Xaouen is quite different in term of production than the Ketama Region. Here it is more craft work, so you will find a bit different ways of working than most of the products that can be accessed in Europe, which comes from sophisticated & vast operations…


Now that the context is given, let’ s get straight to the point - the RESIN !

Moroccan have been dry sifting since the 70s. The most widespread traditional extraction is made using a bucket and a fabric screen (in the 200 microns range).
The buds, removed from the stems, are put on top of the fabric screen. Some farmers, for the special quality, do not beat the first resin but only gently break the buds by hands. Then come the plastic bag on top, and beating with two wooden sticks, to get the first to the third quality. These beatings you can hear while walking around the mountains…

The bildya seems like of piece of work on its own. While I have seen some 80+ percent resin heads in the first quality from dutch genetics, the bildya hardly gets to 50% with the same technique.
My take on why is that is quite speculative, but I see few factors
- Bildya does not get much water, so the soil is dry, particles fly and gets on the flowers.
- Bildya resins head are tiny, 20-30 microns
- The resin head seem harder to detach without breaking the stem as well.
- due to mostly natural selection and seeded buds, the overall resin content on the plant is not so good in the first place.

Bildya Hash from Amsterdam - aka the Shoe



I have vaporized a couple of times the Bildya. Interestingly, it does smell almost nothing like the final hash. The one I had access to had this sweet - bubblegumish - smell, that is very different than the final hashish, which is more earthy.
The bildya hash itself has some kind of reddish color, darker then other hybrids hash. Of course, depends on the grower and the batch, but overall that s the rule...



I also came upon a very interesting piece of information. As most of you know, local people did not remove the males traditionally. That makes little sense to us, because we know that seed production does decrease the resin and terpens content. I thought before that it was mostly because they needed seeds for the next year, but I was surprised by the quantity of seeds that came out of this pollination, way too much then needed.
Well turns out that the traditional preparation of kif, the flowers mixed with some local tobacco, requires pollinated bractas/calyxes to work with. Non pollinated ones are tiny, and have a different "texture". Because of this technique, when you smoke the kif you find some kind of a woody aftertaste, that also translate in the smoke texture. While I am not specially fond of this particularity of the kif, I have to say that overall it is an excellent product for daily use, and it is been well established to cause very little problems to health, lungs, in this form.

[titoon29]

testing moroccon hash aka the shoe / Amsterdam early 2017

[titoon29]

Some pictures from a local friend

Hybrids (Mexicana ?)


Donkeys carrying hybrids buds



Feminized seeds grow >1000m high



Vape & Bildya - Morning ritual

[STRANDvasker]

Fuck yeah travelling titoon threads. Hope ur good.

STRAND

[KiefRichards]

Hello Titoon! Beautiful hash, my mouth is watering, no hash in north europe anymore We just dreaming hash kind of that, i love u threads..

[titoon29]

Thx StrandV, all is good here. Good hash, good food, venturing in the mountains, and nice weather

Thx KiefRichards, the days will soon come where you can legally get your fairtrade 99% organic bildya dry sieve in your local dispensary

Local Bildya Hash


Another Bildya




Titoon jelly amnesia



Cleaned amnesia sift @48 microns. Went through 120, 73 microns, about 1h of work for a couple of grams



A side of Chefchaouen under fog


Smoke reports to come

[74G]

hey so good Titoon that you make another excellent book trip... .. .
Que du bon mon poto... .. .

[hazyfontazy]

hows the vaping ? what temp you vaping at ? gotta order me some hash now

[titoon29]

Hey 74G, good to see you around poto

Hazyfontany- I use the default settings on my crafty, which are 180 and 195 if i m not mistaking. I am keeping it at 195.
I have to say that in the past, I have been mostly disgusted by vaping imported hash. I am not sure why, but I found that most pressed hash taste was very unpleasant, fungal, too earthy. I did vape bunch of prime hash from morocco, nepal, mexico, all pressed, and was never able to finish a bowl.
However this has changed with using unpressed sift, which provides a much better overall flavor. The moroccon hash is much smoother than when smoked, and you can perceive this bubblegumish taste in there. The vapor is quite smooth, extremely dense, this little crafty thingy is perfect when using the oil metal pad - though intense to keep clean.
I have to say that I am only vaping in the morning and smoking mixed joints afternoon to evening (don t have any dabbing equipment, yet)... Bad habit, but damn this is hard to escape when in such an environment. I ll come back on that topic in a later post...

Announcement
I will be getting some help improving my resin skills in a few days, from a fellow English member of Icmag known to most. You can expect your mind to be blown by millions of tiny trichomes heads that will be invading this thread

A little story that I was told...

Once upon a time in Issaguen (commonly named Ketama), there was a policeman that didn't like to see people smoking hashish. In order make that happen, the cop had an "excellent" idea. He would go after the papers. With no rolling papers, how would the people smoke hashish ?

So he put in place his Machiavellic plan, and starting chasing every single person that would smoke a rolled "cigarette", and stop any shop from selling them. In such a small town, everybody quickly run out of paper supply... Anybody rolling with paper would attract people from "far away", and the paper demands exploded while the offer was near to zero. The prices of paper went up by 10, reaching one dirham (a few hours of work) per paper.

Once upon this time, there was a german traveller that stopped by Issaguen. Being the only person around smoking with paper, he was quickly spotted by the policeman, which did take all his rolling papers, and some money. The traveller learnt later from the Issaguenis the story behind his misadventure, and later shared it with me.

A little while after, the policeman was kicked out of the city, having created a whole crisis into the town's culture of freely using cannabis, and things came back to "normal"...

Digged from archives, HPLC moroccon.

[Farmer John]

Mmmmm.... Hash... You don't get to see good moroccan here in the north that often. Damn I miss good hash.