Recently there is a lot of talk in the cannabis community about rosin and the technique how to make it. You may understand (and possibly want to join in on) the hype about the rosin technique once you learn how simple this method is and how you can use it to extract first-grade quality product with very little effort. Let's start with some basic information about rosin before we describe the method in detail further below.

WHAT IS ROSIN AND ROSIN TECH?

Rosin is a solid resin that is obtained with solvent-free extractions from plants or dried herbs. Maybe you know the rosin made from pine that is commonly used to treat violins or bows. The difference with rosin tech as compared to other extraction methods such as BHO extraction is that only pressure and heat are used and that the method is surprisingly simple and has about the same yield as more involved methods.

The rosin tech heat extraction method currently talked about on the web utilizes an ordinary household hair straightener or similar device that you can get for little money. What you do is use the hair straightener to press out the cannabinoid-rich resin and terpenes either from some cured buds, kief or hash. The nice thing about the method is that you don’t need any special skills or expertise to do this.

All you require is an ordinary hair straightener, some parchment paper, and then of course some bud or hash. When you extract rosin from hash, it will produce a full melt with a yield that will be about the same.

To go a little more into detail, what you do with the rosin tech is that you are melting the glandular domes of the trichomes and collect the resin sap on the parchment paper. When you scrape the parchment paper afterwards, you will have a clean, waxy residue ready to dab.

With this simple method - extracting rosin using an ordinary hair straightener - you can expect about the same yields as with other extraction methods, up to 15% when you use buds and more when you extract rosin from kief.

HOW TO EXTRACT ROSIN WITH THE ROSIN TECH

You will need these things to extract the rosin:

Ordinary hair straightener (flat iron), preferably with temperature control
Parchment paper
Razor blade, dabber etc. to collect the rosin
Some bud, hash or dry sift
25 micron screen

ROSIN TECH INSTRUCTIONS

1. Break down your bud, hash or sift material into small pieces of about 0.2 to 0.5 grams. Take the parchment paper and cut 10-20 strips about 10x20cm in size each. Preheat the hair straightener to 93-150°C. Know that the lower the temperature is, the more flavour will be retained at the cost of less yield. A higher temperature like 150°C and above will yield you more rosin, but the product will have less flavour and will also be less stable. Using the iron at 150°C seems to be the golden middle ground that is used and recommended by several extraction experts. Some say that using the iron to press for 4-6 seconds with very little product (0.25g) will give the best results.

2. Wrap one of the pieces of bud or kief that you prepared earlier right in the centre of the 25 micron screen. Put the screen with the product on one of the pieces of parchment paper and fold the paper over. Put the parchment paper on the flat iron and apply direct pressure for 3-5 seconds.

3 After you used the flat iron to press for a few seconds, take off the parchment paper and unfold it. What you see is that your product will be surrounded by rosin. Remove the leftover bit of bud or hash so there’s only the rosin left on the paper. Now take the dabber or the razor blade and collect the rosin off of the paper.

Believe it or not, that’s all there is to it! Your extracted rosin is ready to dab.

It is clear that such a simple method to extract high quality rosin without the need for solvents or any special equipment has high potential. Medical cannabis users and virtually every cannabis lover has now a quick method on hand where they can make pure and clean medicine in no time. The rosin tech is also great if you want to turn lower grade sift or hash into first quality full melt.

Do you have experience with the rosin technique? If you have tips for extracting rosin using this method feel free to share them in the comments!