Tangwena's Malawi-Style Cob Cure: Fermented Cannabis

Gazoo · Jan 19, 2019

Oh chit that reminds me its the 7 day Cure mark today at 5:30pm, cant wait to open.

Now back to fixing the heater

and the leak on the water heater line I found while fixing
the Heater

SweetSue · Jan 19, 2019

Gazoo said:
Oh chit that reminds me its the 7 day Cure mark today at 5:30pm, cant wait to open.

Now back to fixing the heater and the leak on the water heater line I found while fixing
the Heater

Gazoo · Jan 20, 2019

Opened the Cob to Dry and Re-Vacuum Seal to start week 2 Cure

Removed and weight was 18 grams, Needed to watch closer so used my Grain scale to see the loss of weight
more clearly.

Room temp was 73F @ 53RH. Air Drying I could see - 0.6 grains every 5 minutes OR 0.25 grams every 30 minutes
I let it Dry for 1hr at room temp and had a loss of - 0.5 Gram. If it continues at end of week 4 there should be 16 grams
(started with 28 grams)

Ok on with the pictures After opened and Dried for 1hr

The smell at this stage is like Spicy TERIYAKI BEEF JERKY

I have been saving the used vacumn plastic bags used in the different stages.
And can now go back and re-check the different smells as the process continues.
Maybe be able to find the best smell time frame over some time trials

I have been saving the old Vacuum baggies in separate zip lock baggies and can now go back and re-smell the process changes

JustMeds · Jan 20, 2019

You will have to let us know if you notice a difference in the smells of them bags down the road.

tangwena · Jan 20, 2019

Gazoo said:
Opened the Cob to Dry and Re-Vacuum Seal to start week 2 Cure

Removed and weight was 18 grams, Needed to watch closer so used my Grain scale to see the loss of weight
more clearly.

Room temp was 73F @ 53RH. Air Drying I could see - 0.6 grains every 5 minutes OR 0.25 grams every 30 minutes
I let it Dry for 1hr at room temp and had a loss of - 0.5 Gram. If it continues at end of week 4 there should be 16 grams
(started with 28 grams)

Ok on with the pictures After opened and Dried for 1hr

The smell at this stage is like Spicy TERIYAKI BEEF JERKY

I have been saving the used vacumn plastic bags used in the different stages.
And can now go back and re-check the different smells as the process continues.
Maybe be able to find the best smell time frame over some time trials

I have been saving the old Vacuum baggies in separate zip lock baggies and can now go back and re-smell the process changes

Good call on keeping the bags I love smelling old bags my last one could have been kept for perfume it was that good.
The cob looks spot on love the coloration your doing a mighty job so far my friend good on you.

tangwena · Jan 21, 2019

People are waking up ha ha i found this on the web.

Cannabis used to be so colorful: Acapulco Gold, brown Colombian, bright green Oaxaca big bud and, our personal favorite, redder-than-red Thai stick. The colors were the result of a variety of drying techniques that often involved drying the product under the sun, whose energy enacted chemical changes in the plant material, changing its color. This change is not something we see much of today because everyone cures in the dark to purposely avoid color change. Maybe it’s time to turn back the hands of time and see if we can learn anything.
Ask anyone what is happening in the drying room, and they will all answer “moisture removal.” Ask them what is happening in the cure room, and the answer, more often than not, is going to be “burping.” Despite a lack of specific knowledge about what is actually happening to the plant during the process, some growers say they are able to change and enhance the potency and effects during cure. If they can, there must be some chemical reactions going on. This would be really exciting because if we can identify and understand those reactions, we can leverage them. Let’s see if we can find any signs of those reactions.
A Cure-ious Comparison
The current wisdom on cannabis curing seems to be borrowed from tobacco curing practices. Cannabis producers use the same terminology used in tobacco processing. But under the hood of tobacco curing, terminology is where the similarities with cannabis curing end.
Being the most researched horticulture commodity in the world, there is plenty of tobacco curing research to dig through. The Wikipedia entry on tobacco curing has a good summary: “Curing and subsequent aging allow for the slow oxidation and degradation of carotenoids in the tobacco leaf.”
What Is a Carotenoid? A carotenoid is “any of a class of mainly yellow, orange or red fat-soluble pigments, including carotene, which give color to plant parts such as ripe tomatoes and autumn leaves. They are terpenoids based on a structure having the formula C40H56.”
Source: Oxford Dictionaries
The oxidation of carotenoids produces color changes, which explains why tobacco curing is often called color curing. If we are looking for signs of chemical reactions, the color change is a clear sign of them. In contrast, cannabis that comes out of cure the same color it went in suggests that compared to tobacco, cannabis is not undergoing significant chemical changes in the typical dry and cure process. Compared to four to eight weeks of tobacco drying and curing, sometimes followed by a fermenting process, we can guess that the chemistry of cannabis material dried in one week does not change much before moisture levels drop below where biological processes and many chemical reactions can continue.
Tobacco curing does not just change the color of the leaves, it changes the flavor and aroma as well. As carotenoids degrade, they produce aromatic compounds that contribute to the tobacco’s distinctive aromas and flavors. Curing also changes the amount of sugars in the leaves, which also affects flavor. Add practices such as flue curing (heat treatment) and fermentation to the picture, and we can see that tobacco manufacturers employ a wide range of processes to produce leaf-chemistry changes. In comparison, the quick drying processes we use with cannabis have little chance of inducing chemical reactions.
In tobacco, the color-change period happens first and at humidity levels of 80 percent to 90 percent, and temperatures up to 105°F. The drying phase happens next at temperatures up to 140°F, and the final drying phase happens at temperatures above 140°F.

© Nikkytok | Dreamstime.com
Tobacco leaf is commonly 25-percent sugar by weight, according to “Guidelines for Temperature, Humidity and Airflow Control in Tobacco Curing” by researchers at the University of Georgia. Flue-cured tobacco produces higher sugar content, while air and sun curing produce lower sugar content in the leaves.
If sugar levels can affect smoking smoothness in tobacco, maybe controlling it in cannabis could provide similar effects. To find out, we would need to look at using slower dry-down rates and heat applications, and, possibly even try to ferment the product to see exactly what changes we can induce in the plant’s chemistry. We would also need to examine whether any of those treatments produces a clearly superior cannabis product.
One thing is abundantly clear, whatever we are doing in our cure spaces, it’s not the same thing happening in tobacco curing barns.
Calling All Experimenters
The drying step for cannabis removes the majority of moisture from plants, and the humidity and temperature of the drying environment controls how fast moisture migrates out of the plant material. As opposed to cannabis, tobacco curing happens under the influence of heat, so here is something for someone to experiment with: heat curing. For that matter, someone should also try cold curing.
During the drying phase, water lost from the plant material carries with it aromatic compounds including ketones, alcohols, esters, terpenes and more. These terpenes are not the ones we typically talk about in the plant’s resin. They are contained in the plant material, like tobacco. It is reasonable to expect that as the “plant tissue” aromatics diminish, the aroma of the dried material becomes dominated by the terpenes contained in the resin on the trichomes.
This causes us to wonder if the dreaded “grassy” or “hay field” smell is the signature aroma of drying plant tissues, while the lasting aromas we get even after a year in storage are due to the terpenes contained in the resin that exists outside the plant material. Evaporation is not a chemical reaction (it’s a state, or phase change), so we don’t see much that suggests chemical reactions happening in during drying. We can, however, recommend a test for growers to vary the dry/cure conditions and monitor how long it takes for unwanted odors to dissipate, and which variable is responsible for the difference.
Test #1
Chlorophyll is a great place to look for chemical reactions. Popular literature ascribes unpleasant tastes to chlorophyll in leaves, and many people talk about getting rid of chlorophyll as a key goal of dry and cure. The green product rolling out of the typical cure room tells us chlorophyll is clearly not being destroyed, and people don’t seem to be turning it down, so does chlorophyll really play a role in aromas?
To find out, take some material and dark-cure it. Also cure some of the same material in sunlight, or under lights, until you get to the desired moisture level. Odds are that the light-cured material will not be the same color as the dark-cured material. The loss of the green color is the indication that the chemistry of the material has changed as the sunlight broke down the chlorophyll molecules, removing the “green.”
Now for the taste test. If the light-cured material gets higher marks from testers than the dark-cured material, we have fairly conclusively shown that chlorophyll is an important variable in the aroma equation—and that maybe we should be adding lights into our drying spaces immediately. If the tastes and aroma are largely the same for both green and not-green product, we will know chlorophyll is not the place to look for taste and aroma enhancements.
Test #2

© Odyssei | Dreamstime.com
Where does this leave us? In need of testing that enables cultivators to relate drying and curing techniques and schedules to aroma. First, dry some flower quickly, and compare that to flower dried over a six-day period. This will quickly establish how important the dry period is and provide feedback for fine-tuning.
We are very aware that the typical quick-dry times for cannabis are driven by a financial pressure that is never going to let up. That pressure is going to require anyone trying to lengthen their dry and cure time for better quality to have some pretty strong evidence that a longer dry/cure process is going to produce more revenue. A few simple tests seem reasonable to validate the current dry time and resulting quality, or indicate that minor changes in dry and cure have a potential worth that warrants further experimentation.
The Lab Test
What about the claims of better potency and altered effects? With labs now readily available to growers, claims can be validated or bounced easily. So when looking to dial-in a cure room, lab results will tell us if product chemistry is significantly different before and after cure. No more guessing.
Drying and curing processes are not insignificant to production costs, and that makes them a lever. Since you can move anything with a big enough lever, we need to find out if dry and cure offers us a little leverage on quality—or a lot.

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tangwena · Jan 21, 2019

Year old GT and Malawi x Ethiopia its like I'm swimming in a pool drowning and reaching for the side.
Gotta go being pulled back in by something ha ha.

dajerm119 · Jan 21, 2019

Awesome

That cob looks so delicious...

Mr. Magoo · Jan 21, 2019

I had some cobs get moldy in a vacuum sealed bag. Has been a long time since opened but I was so disappointed.

Kismet · Jan 21, 2019

With cobs you can probably just wipe off the mold and dry more and reseal. Had a bad seal on one of mine and was a bit of mold on it did above and resealed and was fine months later, No mold taste. Or am i wrong? When you guys prefer to eat a bit of cob ? Mornings,afternoon,or evenings?

tangwena · Jan 21, 2019

Kismet said:
With cobs you can probably just wipe off the mold and dry more and reseal. Had a bad seal on one of mine and was a bit of mold on it did above and resealed and was fine months later, No mold taste. Or am i wrong? When you guys prefer to eat a bit of cob ? Mornings,afternoon,or evenings?

quite right my friend just shave it off and dry the cob a bit more. Thats why its good to check them frequently that and its a good excuse to try them again ha ha.

Check out the sugar on this Panama x Honduras canary bud. Its only aged 1 month so far and its the bomb it was be nuclear by the time its 3 months old.
The cobs of this are doing their aging and will be something else when opened.
This stuff stinks you cant walk in room with even a small piece unsealed. Pure bliss.

Tony Urban · Jan 22, 2019

I have to add my appreciation for the trailblazers, and those that fuel them, for bringing us to the world of cobs. I know I will be making a LOT more of them next harvest.

Kudos to all you folks

SweetSue · Jan 22, 2019

tangwena said:

Oh my goodness my friend. :eek:

A warning shot next time! Lol!

Thanks for the insightful reading. That experimental lad sounds like someone that’d love playing in this sandbox. :battingeyelashes:

@tangwena, I haven’t shared with you a new chemovar I’ve discovered that’ll soon be a staple in my garden as we search for a way to replicate the effects MagicJim and I experienced two days ago. This one demands to be grown and cobbed. Here’s my smoke report from that wonderful day I spent riding an incredibly energetic pre-orgasmic wave.

My review:
"It's It Punch, by Sungrown Genetics. It's a keeper guys. How do I describe a chemovar that sends my cellular community into orgasmic waves of energy, coursing through my body with the speed and breathlessness of a roller-coaster ride?

One you'd be smart to grow. One I'll be growing myself ASAP."

It was a lower branch from a revegged plant, harvested at Day 45 of flower with mostly clear trichomes.

Can you even imagine the potential for cobbing? :yahoo:

tangwena · Jan 22, 2019

I will look into it Sue but at the moment I am drowning in cobs of great effects.
Also the Australian customs appear to have upped their game and many people are getting no shows from seeds ordered online.
A dark time for getting new genetics in Australia.

Oldbear · Jan 22, 2019

A strange question ... what do you guys think would be a good price per gram for cobbed cannabis at a retail dispensary?

Neiko · Jan 22, 2019

Oldbear said:
A strange question ... what do you guys think would be a good price per gram for cobbed cannabis at a retail dispensary?

If you could get a dispensary on board with them I imagine they would go for whatever they are getting for top shelf. In Michigan that would be about $20.00 a gram.

dajerm119 · Jan 22, 2019

Destroyer cola going into Cob-A-Tron:
This is before the sweat, 20" long cola... it was around 84% humidity when I put it in the bag. I would have waited but it would have been too dry for a nice wet sweat.

Destroyer

dajerm119
Jan 20, 2019

Destroyer 160 days old, post flip: 109 days (15.57 weeks) Post pistils: 92 days or 13 weeks...

Destroyer cob

dajerm119
Jan 22, 2019

Destroyer cob

dajerm119
Jan 22, 2019

Destroyer cob

dajerm119
Jan 22, 2019

Destroyer cob

dajerm119
Jan 22, 2019

Destroyer cob

dajerm119
Jan 22, 2019

Here it is after 24 hours @ 104f