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FiveToMidnight
Well-Known Member
For the first 3-6 days, you want a good amount of air circulation around the buds to crust up the outsides adequately. After this it's good to put them in paper bags or any other form of spacious container for a couple hours so the innards of the buds can sweat some moisture out to the recently dried portions and stabilize the RH in the buds in the process. Once the RH is redistributed, then take them back out into some open air with less circulation, but still some circulation as you'll gradually reduce the amount of air circulation you expose them to the more the buds get dried.
The concept is first to rapidly dry them to get a good amount of moisture out of the buds to prevent molds from forming. Once you're out of those woods, then you want to focus on slowly, but steadily "sweating out" more moisture, but not too quickly as the slower the dry, the better the cure and more flavorful the smoke. Once you get to the point where it takes 12 or so hours to redistribute the inner RH, then it's time for final trim, debranching and into jars for extended curing periods. Ideal RH is 62% and you can find Boveda 62 RH packs to hold constant RH in the jars once the buds are properly cured down to that range. I've never used the Bovedas yet, but have heard too many good things to not pass along the idea.
Practice your drying and curing techniques on the samples.
Thank you for that run down, I also have the YouTube video you copied in a previous post bookmarked to watch again just before I cut it down.
Would it be a good idea to leave the buds to sit in the box with the light on to dry? I was hoping I could leave them in there for the smell factor but don't want to damage them.