How Would the Shaman Bottle Hemp?
Vermont, 2019
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a horse master. He told me to go slow to go fast.… We live as though there aren’t enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.
—VIGGO MORTENSEN
“What’s new on the last-minute complications front?” I asked Colin Nohl by way of hello, tapping snow off my boots and hat. I did not do this gracefully, but I did do it gratefully: I had finally made it to the Giguere family sugarhouse, in the midst of a March 2019 blizzard.
When would I learn to rent the right kind of vehicle in rural America? I had been ice-skating for hours in another subpar crossover since my flight got rerouted from Manchester, New Hampshire, to Albany, New York, in the middle of the night. No big deal, just 7 hours late and 150 miles south of my Northfield, Vermont, destination in whiteout conditions. We had a commercial kitchen reserved for the morning, our arrival now pushed back half a day. Ever the optimist, I still stopped by Cary’s barn, four miles from the sugarhouse, to grab a big vat of hemp flower before catching up with my pards.
A Spoonful of Maple Syrup Helps the Processing Hassles Go Down
Now that I was safe at last in the Giguere sugarhouse, the maple smell and stove heat transformed me from frozen fingers to shedding layers in 10 seconds. My eyes focused. The entire clan was inside, Erin shoveling wood into the boiler, Cary and 77-year-old patriarch Conrad precariously nudging the chimney into better position from a sideways perch eight feet above a hundred-gallon vat of sap. Cary’s wife, Kristin, and some cousins were scattered around the boiler, looking nervously up at them and offering periodic suggestions.
I inhaled contentedly. This was all very promising. If you’ve ever been around maple syrup at its moment of birth, you’ll understand why I say that the white-knuckled drive was totally worth it. When an enormous batch of syrup is ready, someone opens the sap pan tap and fills a thermosful. It’s served hot in Dixie cups, or, in the case of direct Mayflower descendants, shot glasses.
Maybe it was knowledge of syrup to come, maybe the strict hemp-heart-and-cacao diet I had been following during the interstate drive was helping maintain equilibrium, but I was relaxed about the 2 hemp-processing days to come. I knew that few elements of our long preparation for these next 48 hours would prove to be as dialed in as we had planned. Heck, this time plan B had begun before I even landed. I mean, how often does your airline announce a new destination state during a layover?
But if enough did go as we hoped, these days had a dual purpose: (1) preparing 1,000 bottles of Hemp in Hemp and (2) jarring up a cauldron of Colin and Erin’s Vermont Farmacy Herbal Salve. Both products would contain seed oil from our joint organic harvest.1
Sure, we were already supposed to have the harvest half bottled. But I never doubted our run would get done. I was ready for whatever the fun-loving universe threw at us along the way. The steeplechase resumed before I got out of my wet socks.
“I wish I had better news,” Colin said as I sat and started to disrobe. “But the folks over at Victory say our seed-oil pressing has an unusual taste.”
I heaved an immense sigh of relief. I had experienced this before. Victory Hemp Foods were the folks pressing our seed oil for us—they had a facility in Middlebury, Vermont.2
“That’s not bad news,” I said. “‘First, better, or different,’ baby. That’s Samurai. It’s not unusual to my taste buds. It’s just more full-bodied than the seed cultivars most North Americans have been pressing so far.”3
I stood up to step out of a layer of long johns and pointed to the sap pan. “Like amber versus very dark syrup. Stout versus pale ale. A hemp flavor for every palate.”
“Okay. Cool,” Colin said, nodding. Then his smile faded a notch as he noticed the pronounced limp I was sporting. “Did you remember what I told you about the barn floor?”
Needless to say, there had already been additional complications during those first hours in Vermont. It was only as I skidded into what I hoped was the side of the Giguere barn 2 hours earlier that I recognized the magnitude of the shoveling that would be required just to reach our harvest. I was pretty sure that I could tell where the barn door was. While I dug around in my luggage to find my mittens, I was relieved to see the Yeti-like form of Cary approaching, carrying two shovels.
“Watch out, that floor is a hockey rink—really, really slippery,” the 31-year-old Colin had warned me on the phone when I’d pulled over for a stretch outside of Killington on the drive north. “You won’t see the ice, because it’s so clear and flat.”
Then, just a few hours later, the moment we’d chunked out the barn door enough to pry it slightly open, Cary repeated the warning. Right down to the two reallys before slippery.
And still—unsurprisingly, to anyone who has spent an hour working around my Clouseau-like life—on my second step I slipped magnificently and found myself resting on what I know from my kids’ Spanish lessons are called las nalgas. Actually, only on the left nalga. The right one was wedged against one of our Samurai flower-bin shelves, millimeters from knocking 150 pounds of it onto the icy floor. A good portion of 10 months of work by four people and tens of thousands of plants came inches from spilling.
When I related the anecdote to Colin in the sugarhouse, Cary summed up hemp entrepreneurialism and possibly life by shouting from his ceiling roost: “I learn every lesson the hard way. Including the slippery-barn-floor one.”
Just as golf is really three games (driving, short game, and putting), so you are essentially starting spring training afresh on the first day of any new stage in the hemp process. Getting the cobwebs out. That’s how I looked at that resulting bruise over the coming days: as a reminder that we’re all beginners, every time.
Fresh maple syrup helps you forget a bruised body. In Vermont, sugaring is the key family and community bonding time. I think the idea is, Cabin fever is setting in, might as well all gather together so we can have witnesses. Plus, let’s see if we can’t tone it down a notch by flooding our systems with glucose. I think, overall, it’s a good system. Any vestige of ritual keeps a culture alive.
“It’s the sugaring and the autumn wreath making that keep this family together,” Kristin, who is an early preschool educator when not sugaring or making wreaths, told me.
This is the same “when it’s time, it’s time” role I hope my ranch’s goat rituals and hemp cultivation inspire in my progeny. And rural Vermonters are learning fast that sugaring can overlap with hemp processing. For my part, the processing window was narrow. I had a series of live events coming up in the ensuing weeks, plus a waiting order for Hemp in Hemp from my New Mexico food co-op. And I was out. Even at home we were down to our last bottle. Erin and Colin were getting low on their salve, too, which (on-brand alert) infuses its cannabinoids for a full moon cycle.
For the 2019 Hemp in Hemp run, I was scaling up slightly, but once again processing what felt like a manageable amount. This batch of three-ounce bottles would, when it sold through over the course of probably a year (given my limited time for marketing), gross my family $50,000. I’d estimate the eventual net as $20,000. We give a lot of bottles away. Then there’s the cost of bottles, caps, graphic design, labels themselves, web work, testing, permits, organic certification, accounting, legal, storage, and shipping (but not genetics, because we own them, as free farmers always have). And now I’d be sharing revenue with my new retail partners out West. Part of the five-year plan.
The question I wrestled with in the sugarhouse was, was I really about to extract two family members from their clan’s principal annual activity, for 2 entire days? There was a septuagenarian swinging from the ceiling, for heaven’s sake. But everyone at Château Giguere seemed to understand a key point: that it’s wise to feed both the sweet tooth and the endocannabinoid system. These are two essential dietary services for humankind.
Extraction Methods Old and New
The best part of processing hemp for 2 days in the mountainside commercial kitchen that Colin had booked was seeing and smelling two hemp product lines, derived from the same crop, bubbling forth in side-by-side cauldrons (okay, monster pasta pots). I’d even call it a top 20 moment in my working life.
I love the crazy shift in scale that occurs when you go from being a customer to a producer of anything—broccoli, hemp massage oil, compostable hemp-plastic paper clips, whatever. Instantly it’s about tons of product, rather than “Honey, did you bring the produce bags?” A hemp customer for two decades, suddenly I was in an apron and gloves with 1,000 empty bottles smiling up at me from a shiny metal counter. Even with my family’s considerable omega-3 and cannabinoid diet, I thought as we unboxed that sea of glass, this was an amount I would be hard-pressed to argue was for personal consumption.
No longer would we be buying 16-ounce bottles of Nutiva hempseed oil, grateful as I’ve been for this superfood for decades. Now we’re thinking in terms of rodent-proof storage bins for multiple tons of hempseed and flower. When I first trudged up the un-shoveled kitchen path on the far side of Northfield, I was just excited to make some more of the product that I most wanted to use. When I carried full bottles down the same path 48 hours later, with the roof eave icicles a few inches closer to the ground, I was a craft commercial provider.
Another reason this hemp-processing run ranks so high is because the product that wound up in those bottles represented the regenerative economy manifesting in the real-world marketplace. I had the opportunity to practice, in the processing stage of the season, everything I’d learned about plant pace over the course of the year. It was my hope that the resulting mind-set, method, and love would show up in the product.
It’s no accident that we speak of returning to our roots. The moment I accepted that I was about to dedicate 2 days of my life to preparing product, I relaxed. I was shifting out of fifth gear even as we fired up the mammoth stovetops. Confront a human living at multitasking, finger-swiping speed with the methodical pace of a plant’s life cycle, and he often finds it pleasant. I think this is why so many military veterans from George Washington himself to today’s resource war vets rediscover their sanity in farming.
It’s also a quality-of-workmanship issue, taking pride in your craft. The way I like to make hemp products is deliberate, time-consuming, and small batch. This is not to discount the many positives of digital-age conveniences. The key now is, like good primates, to learn and build from the obvious missteps of the industrial centuries, including the main one: not embedding regenerative processes in our society’s economic and agricultural pipelines.
Accordingly, my first question when embarking on any stage of the hemp process is, “What has always worked?” Another way of asking this is, “What would the shaman do?” And what humans have always been able to do in order to extract the healthy, tasty, or otherwise useful parts of a plant is to heat it up in a lipid.
Thus, when attempting to capture these values in a bottle, as I’ve already revealed, I’m an unapologetic fan of decarboxylation. I’ll relate our step-by-step process on that mountain in Vermont, which basically involved combining the hempseed oil and the flower from the same plant, heating the concoction, and subsequently becoming Druids. But to provide options, I’ll also run down the other four of my personal top five regenerative cannabinoid/terpene-flower extraction methods.
The three biggest factors that will affect your enterprise’s choices are the quantity of product you’d like to produce, how quickly you’d like to produce it, and equipment costs.
DECARBOXYLATION
When you heat hemp flower just right, you remove a carbon atom from your cannabinoid molecules—such as CBD, or the one I so love seeing come back in testing samples, CBC—hence the term decarboxylation. You’ll recall that this atom removal transforms a cannabinoid from its acid form to its active state.4
The procedure is so tried and true, so ancient (even being alluded to in biblical priestly anointing-oil passages), that I wonder if the term processing, given its association with slices of prepared cheeselike product, is apt. It just doesn’t feel true to the “double, double toil and trouble” life that we lived for those shivery 48 hours in that 2019 storm.
The other component of decarboxylation that I love is that you transfer all your cannabinoids and terpenes in pretty much the exact levels and ratios in which they are found in your flower. Given that in five years (tops) some piece of well-publicized research is going to launch that cannabinoid #42 we’d never heard of to Next Big Thing status, I’m a devoted fan of this mode. I believe it’s likely that many of us benefit most from the interaction of these hundreds of compounds in a “whole-plant extract.”
By contrast, as we touched on earlier, some early CBD customers are being trained to ask, “How many milligrams am I receiving of this one cannabinoid per serving?” That might be relevant on the explicitly medical side of the plant’s applications. Soon, though, as we begin to connect the dots on the nutritive and health maintenance sides, I think more of us will ask, “What are the cannabinoid and terpene ratios in the source flower, and how were they extracted?”
The bottom-line performance I experience in my own body and mind is the main reason why, in a volatile cannabinoid market, I utilize the whole plant. And it’s the reason I don’t discuss cannabinoid isolate much, other than to disclose that current gold rush prices for CBD isolate are hovering around $20,000 per kilo. Under ideal conditions and with extremely efficient processing, you could produce 20 or more kilos on an acre of flower-only hemp if your cultivar produces 10 percent CBD.
Remember that if you don’t own the processing equipment, you’ll either pay for toll processing or have to sacrifice a percentage of the harvest, just as during feudalism. Still, we’re talking about a six-figure gross per acre, if current prices hold. Some folks, as we’ve seen, are already in the market for emphasizing or isolating cannabinoids other than CBD, such as CBN. For his part, Edgar is keen on CBG, because chemically, it’s the building block for all other cannabinoids. The source code.
“All the other cannabinoids regurgitate from that one,” he told me way back in 2016. “So if we breed for that, we stay in the game no matter what other cannabinoids become desirable in the marketplace.”
As CBG is already worth $25,000 per kilo in today’s market, Edgar was not swimming blindly. Because fewer farmers are growing for it, we might see its wholesale prices hold longer than CBD’s inevitable correction as markets mature and supplies increase.
Notice that Edgar speaks of “breeding for” a particular cannabinoid profile. Not isolating it via machinery. He enjoys, as do I, working toward desirable components as part of a cultivar’s whole-plant profile. I’d love to develop a cultivar whose flowers display CBC in a one-to-one ratio with CBD and some of the funner terpenes, like myrcene and pinene. It’s just my preference—I love grape and pine tree scents—a breeding mission onto which I stumbled by chance (or plant’s choice) in my own hemp diet. Everyone’s body is different and no one’s body chemistry is static.
Okay, there you go. I’ve disclosed that a market exists for isolated components of the cannabis flower. And that in most circumstances, I wouldn’t spend my money on these isolates. But then I am in the entourage effect business, not the CBD business.
COLD ETHANOL
One reason that cold ethanol extraction is on my approved list is that it’s still a pretty tried and true technology—indeed one of several processing modes the FDA considers “low risk” when done right—but it’s a faster, larger-scale mode of getting those cannabinoids from the cannabis flower.5
The end result of running raw flower through the ethanol process is crude, that luscious, sticky caramel goop we discussed earlier. This is isolate’s precursor. Like decarboxylated flower, crude contains all your flower’s original cannabinoids, though much concentrated. It can go into your own products, be sold to others who want to isolate the CBD with chromatography equipment, or be “white-labeled” to folks who will add your crude as an ingredient in their own products.
I believe products resulting from ethanol crude processing can be bioavailable, and I think the process is doable in accordance with regenerative practices and values, especially if your facility is solar-powered. Energy choices are a vital part of the process for the regenerative entrepreneur.
A cold ethanol processor can be a tabletop unit or, as with Dexter Rice’s ceiling-high behemoth at Nature’s Love, much fancier. Either way, modern ethanol processing is when you take off the shaman’s tunic and broach the alchemy era. You start busting out the beakers and plugging things in. You check pressure gauges and deal with flammable materials.
Margaret Flewellen uses cold ethanol extraction for her Natural Good Medicines line of tinctures in Oregon. I’ve studied and filmed her processing MO since 2015, starting when she had the simplest model from Eden Labs in Seattle. Here’s how this kind of processing works: Margaret loads her ground-up flower material (grown 100 yards away by Edgar) into a finely netted bag. The bag goes inside a glass dome containing a condenser. Very chilly ethyl alcohol (−20°F) rains over the flower. The ethanol (C2H5OH) acts as a solvent, removing the cannabinoids and terps that reside in the flower’s trichomes.
Upon filtration, the process concentrates these to about 50 times the level of the flower itself, but in the same ratios. The alcohol filters out via a vacuum process, and can be reused multiple times. There are some other nuances involved in the process, such as whether you want all your plant’s chlorophyll and waxes removed from the crude. If you do, the extracted product is often called full-spectrum rather than whole-plant.
One option a bootstrapping enterprise might consider is devoting some of its flower harvest to producing a value-added product and some to producing wholesale crude. This is a viable hedge if wholesale prices hold for a few more seasons. I know several farmers who employ this type of strategy. Plus small-scale cold ethanol processing equipment can be feasible to own for a self-funding entrepreneur.
For Margaret, the hardest part of ethanol processing is managing growth. Natural Good Medicines has upgraded processing equipment three times in five years as Margaret’s business has expanded.
“It takes about eight hours to process forty-eight pounds of flower in our latest machine,” Margaret told me. “We lose about ninety percent of the mass in the extraction process, leaving us with a crude that, depending on the source flower, is roughly seven percent THC and seventy percent CBD, if we start with flower that has .2 percent THC and eleven percent CBD.”
Embedded in these numbers is the reminder that the ethanol process concentrates all your plant’s cannabinoids, including THC. Assuming you don’t want higher THC levels in your product (meaning you aim for your product to meet current hemp definitions, something ready for customers of all ages), you have to dilute it back down.
Margaret said it’s not hugely expensive to purchase a starter ethanol unit ($11,000), and the prices can get up to $275,000 for the largest commercial-scale unit. Under the guidance of engineer Bill Althouse, the folks at the Fat Pig Society have jury-rigged their own ethanol processing technology. Dexter Rice’s $175,000 unit processes 175 pounds per day.
“Operating according to GMP [good manufacturing practice] standards for food-grade products is a cost and a challenge I would warn anyone considering a small processing operation about,” he told me. “It’s not that easy to self-learn—I wouldn’t underestimate the time and energy that go into it.”
This sage wisdom is true for all processing modes. In the final analysis, the big advantages of cold ethanol processing are volume and speed; you can probably make 10,000 units in the amount of time it takes me to make 1,000 of my decarboxylated product.
WATER OR ICE EXTRACTION
This type of “solventless” extraction has a place. Ganja processors will know it as the bubble hash process. What it does is remove the trichomes from cannabis flower with water and elbow grease. The flower is physically stirred (by hand or machine), and the water or ice is filtered out via screens or mesh bags.6
COPPER STEAM DISTILLATION
Distillation passes the shaman test and can provide a nifty mode for extracting alternative components of the flower, such as essential oils. I feel so bad for my colleague in Hawaii, Lelle Vie, who is such a mistress at this mode that folks always want demos, so she’s forever toting her giant copper distiller to conferences. More than once I’ve crossed paths with her at an airport or farm-side event and found myself carrying shards of copper sheeting for her.
PRESSURE (ROSIN) EXTRACTION
Lastly, if you really want to be an opposite-of-isolate processor, the pressure extraction mode, used for centuries by the kief-makers in the hills of Morocco’s Rif region, can hardly be topped. You apply just the right amount of mild heat and tough love (with a press or, in some traditional modes, by beating wrapped flower with a stick) to extract the desirable oils from cannabis flowers. Remember our farmer friend we met at the United Nations, Adebibe Abdellatif? That’s his production mode.
Here in the West, the resulting product is known as rosin, and it’s increasing in popularity as a high-end, solvent-free processing mode. There are easily a half dozen commercial rosin presses on the market. Though you might want to head to the Rif region to see how it’s always been done.
A processing mode that doesn’t fit as well under the whole-plant umbrella is CO2 (sometimes called supercritical) extraction. That’s because while it’s very high volume and a clean method when it comes to solvents, the process can remove too much of the plant’s terpene profile.7 You can re-add terps and other desirable parts of the plant later, so it’s not a total disaster. But why use a process that removes ’em in the first place?
Off the list entirely are butane, propane, anything ending in -ane or -ene. Anything done with petrochemicals is a nonstarter. Not just because of potential solvent residue in the resulting product but because we’re trying to wind down the dinosaur juice era as a species.
In the end, I employ decarbing exclusively for my own product not just because it’s been field-tested for millennia, and not just because you end up with the original levels and ratios of all your cannabinoids, but also because as long as you are paying attention and have better balance than Inspector Clouseau, it’s so dang simple. It’s just heat. How much heat and for how long matters a lot, though. Also you produce far less product than most other modes, and it takes up a lot of time. So decarbing is overall best suited for small-batch, top-shelf products. Which is what I make commercially and personally. It’s what I eat in the morning goat yogurt. And it’s what I rub on muscles sore from corralling infuriating goats and much-less-maddening hemp work.
Now we’re ready to reveal how we removed that carbon atom to create the Hemp in Hemp product run in 2019.
Goop Is Good
Among the supplies Colin, Erin, and I toted into our kitchen were 27 gallons of hempseed oil, in six 4.5-gallon “jibs,” fresh from the Victory Hemp Foods presses.8 Hemp in Hemp being both a seed and a flower product, we had a multistep process in front of us prior to bottling. First prepare the seed oil, then infuse the flower in it.
Experimenting with hempseed oil as a decarb lipid was pure Dolly Parton: The result of having access to a farm-side seed-oil press and not having many other options. Organic coconut oil would have been very expensive. Otherwise I might not have discovered what an ideal (and low-carbon-mile) base hempseed oil makes for a cannabinoid/terpene product. Because we’re working toward an edible product in future seasons, what’s really exciting is that the combination of seed and flower encourages both superfood and health maintenance qualities. Plus, how fun to utilize more than one part of anything these days, let alone a plant.
When coming up with the idea for Hemp in Hemp two years earlier, I didn’t know anyone else who was immersing flower in the seed oil from the same crop. Now it seems to be catching on. Our friends at Salt Creek use hempseed oil, albeit not from plants they grow, as the base for their whole-plant 42 brand capsules and Eleven Acres products (they grow the flower). I hope many more join the parade. This is the open-source era. Feel free to re-create Hemp in Hemp in your ecosystem, in your regional economy, with your cultivars. If you grow organically, I’d love to try your offering.
Following the snowy 2018 harvest, as with previous seasons, we first had to press our seed. Actually, first we had to send off a sample to make sure it passed its microbial test, which it did. As we no longer had access to a seed-oil press, I got on the horn with Chad at Victory Hemp Foods.
As with ethanol processing of flower, you lose the majority of your mass in the seed-pressing process. So you get, say, 40 gallons hempseed oil from 400 pounds of seed. Our seed oil was darker than what you find in bottles of most North American hempseed oil options at the moment. Holding a clear bottle of it to sunlight, what I see reflecting back is luscious, olive goodness: all 20 amino acids and three essential fatty acids.
Dark though it was, our 2018 oil was not as dark as the earlier pressing of Hemp in Hemp. That’s because in 2018, the seed we used wasn’t exclusively our Samurai. Since the seed itself was both limited and in demand for its genetics, we asked the good folks at Victory to mix our Samurai seed with their US-grown organic hempseeds for the small-batch pressing.9
Still, the decarbed product had that chartreuse hue. This special darkness helps explain why Chad’s plant manager wanted to alert us about what to his peeps was the unusual resulting taste profile. Samurai is an unusual cultivar. Robusto is the word that comes to mind. Sustaining.
The final Hemp in Hemp mixture was also delightfully cloudy. That’s because I asked the folks at Victory to leave our hempseed oil unfiltered after pressing. Another way I like to sidestep the gold rush herd is to leave the plant’s lignin in. I believe it has beneficial qualities. More than one industry professional advised me against this, saying it reduces the product’s shelf life. Even if true, I’m fine with that. In fact, I hype it. On the label, I recommend storing Hemp in Hemp in a cool place and using within 90 days. I even added a line reading SHAKE WELL: THE GOOP (LIGNIN) IS GOOD.
These are just further reasons why it’s so vital that you own and develop your own genetics. Just as every fine vintner cultivates her own distinct grapes, your taste will come only from your hemp. This concept of “terroir” is essential to the top-shelf hemp craft model.
Now we had our lipid base and what’s more, all of it made its way up the slippery path to our kitchen without spilling. (The charming, remote spot was at a resort called the Woods Lodge that used to be a girls’ camp called Camp Wihakowi.) After spending an hour making sure we and all our surfaces and cookware were clean and up to code, we were ready to heat 20 pounds of flower in those jumbo pasta pots full of seed oil. Thus begins decarboxylation.
I had brought 50 pounds of flower from the barn, incidentally, once I had got off my nalgas and learned how to skate across its sheer floor (long, relaxed-as-possible strokes). That was just in case we got carried away and wanted to bottle a surplus for a future run. Or, more likely whenever I am in a kitchen, because stuff boiled over and we needed to repeat a step.
For the kids reading this who didn’t come of age under prohibition, can I just say what a pleasure it is to drive around in a rental car with out-of-state plates toting 50 pounds of fragrant cannabis flower with nary a worry about law enforcement attention? Cannabis legalization overall is a simply fantastic development for the American economy and for public safety. And Vermont’s embrace of it—at all THC levels—has provided peace of mind on numerous occasions, including during a chat earlier that first processing day with a state trooper. He wanted to let me know that my rental car’s running lights weren’t on—he couldn’t have cared less about the bin of terpenes and trichomes in the backseat, on my sweater, and on the dashboard.
I thought, as I pulled on my apron, that Vermont is the West-est state East of the Mississippi. Just remember, deciders in the South Dakotas, New Jerseys, and Mississippis of the world—your residents have endocannabinoid systems too.
Double, Double Toil and Entourage Effect
Decarboxylation aficionados all have their favorite modes. The process is a rarity in modern life: both a science and an art. Colin and Erin usually heat the flower for their products in an oven before getting shamanistic in the cauldron, in order to reduce processing time.
Myself, I’m as old-school as it gets: For the 2019 batch I filled two giant pots with hempseed oil, added pounds of flower to each, slowly raised the temperature, and decarbed at a steady 220°F for 3 hours. This reflected a lowering of temperature and increasing of processing time from the 90 minutes at 230°F I had been running. I did that because hempseed oil starts losing some of its nutritive properties at 190°F and I didn’t want to cook out the goodness. A good portion of each three-ounce bottle would contain pure hempseed oil heated to 185°F, so I wasn’t too worried; plus, as of 2019, the product wasn’t yet intended as food. But in discussing decarb efficacy with colleagues, I thought longer heating at a lower temperature was worth exploring.
I’m a happy man when I am stirring a cauldron, breathing in the essence of cannabinoids for 180 minutes. I think I might have some Druidic lineage.
“Watch me try to stop smiling for ten seconds,” I said to the 30-year-old Erin, who was stirring one of her salve pots with a giant ladle next to me.
“That’s the terps,” she said, waving a couple of be-gloved fingers in front of my face. “Your body’s getting ready for you to introduce cannabinoids. Receptors are springing up.”
One of the coolest parts of the decarb process for me is watching the carbon molecules start bubbling off the flower-and-seed-oil mixture. These are smaller, more numerous bubbles than you see in actual boiling, more like the tiny ones that bubble off your carbonated beverage on a summer day. I’m extremely grateful to Bill Althouse for teaching me to look for this distinct bubbling pattern way back when he was still tired from my saxophone wake-up call, because it’s a great way of ensuring that your concoction doesn’t get too hot.
That’s important because when you get beyond decarb temps and into the boiling range, all your cannabinoids can get transformed into CBN. This isn’t necessarily bad, if a CBN-enhanced product is your goal (as it is in some of Erin and Colin’s products). CBN is often used for pain reduction or as a sleep aid.10
But since I was endeavoring to highlight all of Samurai’s cannabinoids and terpenes, the reality was that there in the hilltop commercial kitchen, with yet more snow socking us in, one of us had to keep stirring and watching our thermometers the whole time. Vigilantly. It can be a fine line once you’re approaching that 225–230°F degree range. Terpenes, in particular, can be fragile at these temperatures. If one of us wasn’t on stirring duty, she was dashing around, preparing bottles, working on the salve product, or cleaning up after my latest spill.
Before I knew it, we were done. When the timer went off and the mixture felt and tasted ready, we punched out. Bright and early the next morning, all of us still in a terped-out state of mind, Colin taught me a great time-saving bottling tip. Though a relative youngster, he has a decade of food service management experience under his belt. He explained that if we “hot-bottled,” meaning jarred our product above 185°F, we’d be pasteurizing as we went. This saved hours on the thousand-unit run, because in previous years I’d washed, dried, and heated all the small maple syrup bottles before filling them.
Like every part of the hemp season, like every part of life, processing has a lot of karma embedded in it. I am still bubbling over with gratitude now, several months later, as I relate that every step of this batch of Hemp in Hemp bottling went just right. The decarbing part came off without a hitch, and on bottling day, I spilled only a few gallons of product.11 (The low spill rate was largely thanks to the handy, hobbit-sized funnels we used.) Erin and Colin’s moon cycle salve also went smooth as butter. Literally. Try some.
While we were toting those 100 boxes full of bottled cannabinoid/superfood offering through the snow, all of it certified organic, I was beaming. I was excited about getting the stuff out to the world. But first and foremost, the Fines back home on the Funky Butte Ranch, the people who are irreplaceable to me, were all set in the hemp category of our superfood health maintenance regimen for a year. Another primeval box checked off for this aspiring neo-Rugged Individualist. From a crop I grew.
After loading the rental car to the sprockets and skidding down the mountain for the last time, I shipped off a couple of boxes of both my product and Colin and Erin’s to Colorado, where they would be waiting for me at my speaking event and book signing a week later. And I sent a few bottles off for cannabinoid testing. They passed.
Colin and Erin snarfed some of the ceiling-high stack of pizzas I’d brought in appreciation for their generosity of time, stirring muscles, and knowledge, and then dashed back to the sugarhouse. Cary and I reconnoitered and drove a couple of hours north to the Orwell, Vermont, library to give a talk to interested farmers near the Canadian border.
Back in Northfield much later that second sleepless evening—a gorgeous one, the icy sky having cleared to reveal a glitter box of stars—we all converged at Château Giguere. Cary opened the bottle of still-warm Hemp in Hemp I had given him and poured generous portions in brandy glasses for the whole family.
“To USDA-certified organic craft cannabis,” was my toast.
The 2018 vintage tasted scrumptious, even better than the first batch, was the uniform consensus. Cary’s observation was that the nutty finish reminded him of the polyphenols one tastes in high-end olive oils.
It’s possible the judges were biased: This is a stout family when it comes to beer. A “Grade A Very Dark” maple syrup bunch. Also we had all grown the crop we were enjoying together. I didn’t overthink it. I finished my shot of Hemp in Hemp and then got started on the maple syrup.
I wound up returning my rental car in New Hampshire, which had only 76 miles on it when I picked it up in Albany, in a very different condition from its original one. The fellow at the airport return department seemed unsurprised and unperturbed. Maybe they had hemp farmers coming though here all the time. Regardless, I was grateful that the smell and back road grime didn’t raise eyebrows. Even the travel nightmare was going as well as could be expected.
As I checked in for my return to the West, I thought some more about scaling up. In 2019, three people’s lives were dominated by this micro-processing run for 2 full days. And in any regulated workplace, our punched-in hours would really have added up to 3 days. Or 2 with a ton of overtime. Not counting the 10 months of work that preceded processing. All for 1,000 units.
I couldn’t help wondering what the whole hemp cycle would look like now that I would be working with colleagues with a built-in retail outlet. Based in Arizona, Kim Williams and Dana Rae Zygmunt were my new Hemp in Hemp partners. These two women were proven righteous humans whom I’ve known for years. They came from medical backgrounds, and, some would say most relevantly, they had an existing shop for our product line in the thriving Tucson health center called Tumbleweeds they founded and had operated for seven years.
Around the time I was processing in Vermont in 2019, Kim dropped casually that she believed interest in Hemp in Hemp at Tumbleweeds would reside “in the two-hundred-bottles-a-month range, conservatively.”
Yowzer. That would mean monthly sales at 20 percent of current annual sales. At one location. Soon I was really going to have to turn pro. I’d already dealt with hemp permit paperwork, organic certification, and, ya know, growing fine crops. But food-grade certifications and distribution chain of custody rules hovered on the horizon. I hoped then and still hope we can avoid the homogenization that so often erodes what’s awesome about craft products when they scale up and need to meet different regulatory guidelines. Would late night shamaning-out in icy mountainside kitchens still be in my production SOP? If it were up to me, even if we had to do what we did in that Vermont kitchen monthly, I’d still prefer to process by hand in a cauldron.
Could I, though? With each expansion there is more to think about on the business side. Take batching, for instance. Here we have another process about which Colin and Erin had been teaching me between sing-alongs and product stirring. Every bottle’s label has to be tied to its ingredients’ source. For me, to date, it’s been easy: Batch 1, 2019, that’s it. One crop, one product run per harvest. It’s the blessing of a simple recipe produced in a single batch.
But Colin and Erin, who process a dozen times per year, have to keep track of every bottle, its source flower, its source seed oil, its source eucalyptus and lanolin (and whatever else Erin adds to the moon cycle salve). My colleagues do that with a UPC symbol that accompanies their labels. They even ward off scrutiny with one of those “This product has not been evaluated by the FDA and we make no health claims” disclaimers.
Since I have only one retail outlet among the three places Hemp in Hemp has so far been marketed (my New Mexico food co-op), I can for now let those good folks attach their UPC label. I could say “our” UPC label, since I’m a co-op member. I met the mother of my children next to the produce aisle. The other places one can find Hemp in Hemp in these early days are at a spa on Maui and at my speaking events. That will change by 2021. At least that’s plan A.
Batch management and claim avoidance are just the start. I’m equally concerned about maintaining control of ingredients. I once did a radio news story about a local who was taking her regionally popular salsa to the big time. Her one complaint was, “I’m forced to use facilities that only accept certain suppliers for my core ingredients.”
All of which is to say, once again, be careful what you wish for, hemp entrepreneurs: Between GMP quality control, FDA regulations, and payroll paperwork, even with your product ready to ship, you might find your dream job quickly becomes a real job.
Still worth it, I thought, watching my club soda decarboxylate from my plane seat. If designing labels and planning for inspections were not exactly what I thought I’d be doing with my life when cannabis became legal, neither was producing a fine omega 9-6-3 balanced product.
When it came to my own entrepreneurial effort, I just hoped that no matter when and how we took it to the next level, I’d still be in the field more often than not. More immediately, I was finally going to be able to call it a day. I thought about this with relish as the final flight banked toward Albuquerque (I’d detoured to Colorado for some research into hemp cooperatives after leaving Vermont). I’d share trampoline-jumping energy with the kids in exchange for their granting me some precious grown-up time with my sweetheart. Then I’d milk the goats and toss some Hemp in Hemp into the bath. I knew from experience that I’d barely hang my towel before I was ready for the dreamless. Health maintenance is so much better than any kind of recovery.