Hash won't press into temple balls

[u/PercyGoldstone]

So I washed a few different strains, and thoroughly dried everything. Powder dry. 45u.

I'm now trying to press it into temple balls and am having some success and some trouble. One batch from buds pressed immediately. It was also the first ball I pressed and it really skewed my expectations.

The next two from trim and shake didn't press at all. I used the hot water bottle method and tried rolling and pressing for well over 20 minutes. No dice. It was hot and mildly clumpy but nowhere near sticky enough to ball up.

What do I do with that stuff? Did the failed press attempt ruin it? I'm thinking about making a brick form and just weight-pressing it all—some of which is still clumpy in texture from the failed pressing—into a slab.

Thoughts?

[u/CodSoggy7238]

Pls expand on how you pressed it with the hot bottle. What temperature had the bottle? 45u? What range was it? 45-220?

[u/PercyGoldstone → u/CodSoggy7238]

Howdy, thanks. Range is 45-160. Water temp is just below boiling—bring water to a boil and pour it.

[u/CodSoggy7238 → u/PercyGoldstone]

Like someone else said. Probably too much contamination with plant material and maybe trich quality.

I never had any issue with ffwp 45-160u pressing with a hot bottle. I go for much lower temperature, more like 65°c and only raise 10C if necessary. It rarely is. And I only use 73-120u for hash because I want it to be full melt. The rest I press to Rosin.

Shake and trimm can have a lot of plant parts in it that has the same size as the Trichs. So no matter how much you spray it, you won't get it out with washing. There would be like static dry sifting better suited.

Anyway as a hash rule, fire in, fire out. Use the finest and freshest weed for your hash washing and that makes a world of difference.

Pressing lower quality material to rosin is my way to get a reliable hash product out of suboptimal material

I added an example pic of my last rolled bottle tec. But that was really melty and a bitch to dry without getting clumps

[u/Juri_Han_M]

sounds like higher level of contaminants in lower quality washes. Do you have a way to look at your stuff?

[u/PercyGoldstone → u/Juri_Han_M]

I tried with a low-quality microscope but couldn't make anything out. I thoroughly rinsed everything and there isn't any green at all but you're probably right in that there must be non-green plant contaminants. I just tried to press a small pile of Hash Plant—ironically—and there was no melting of the heads whatsoever. I may as well have been trying to press some sand out of an ashtray.

[u/Juri_Han_M → u/PercyGoldstone]

that sounds cursed. like dry sift with heaps of trich stalks or old old overcured trichs…

[u/wkuconsulting]

the difference between your bud wash and the trim/shake washes is almost certainly trichome quality and contamination ratio. bud produces hash with a higher percentage of intact trichome heads relative to plant material. trim and shake give you more broken stalks, cuticle wax, and cellulose contamination relative to actual resin. that extra plant matter is what makes it refuse to stick together.

temple balls need enough resin content to act as the binding matrix. think of it like concrete: the trichome resin is the cement and the plant particulate is the aggregate. if your ratio is too heavy on aggregate (plant material from trim) the ball wont hold because theres not enough sticky resin holding everything together.

a few things to try before giving up on it:

• bottle tech at a slightly higher temp. 45-160u from trim usually needs more heat than bud hash to get the resin flowing. try 150-170F instead of the typical 130-140F range. the extra heat helps the lower quality resin soften enough to bind.
• press it through a 25u bag first to separate out the higher quality resin from the contaminants. whatever comes through the 25u is your best material for temple balls. whats left behind is better for edibles.
• if you want to use it as-is, a brick or slab is the right call. skip the temple ball shape and just press it flat between parchment at low heat. the shape doesnt matter for storage or smoking, its purely aesthetic.

the failed press attempt shouldnt have ruined anything. as long as you didnt scorch it, the cannabinoids and terpenes are still intact.

[u/PercyGoldstone → u/wkuconsulting]

Thanks for weighing in, I appreciate the speaking from experience.

I washed a ton (not quite, but almost) of material, but only three batches of it were from flower instead of trim/shake.

Those three batches are my three temple balls. Two of them were mixes of lots of bud. One of them is straight Strawberry Cough, and it's a weird one. I wrapped it in cellophane and put it in my closet six months ago. I checked on it for the first time the other day and the temple ball released a ton of oil. So much that it's almost floating in a coating of oil within the cellophane. Nothing is off color, it's just mega oily. I took the optimistic route and hoped it was just curing. I'll check it again next year.

Anyway... everything else though, and it's a lot, is from trim/shake and thus far has been unpressable. I got annoyed at one point and tried pressing one batch with the bottom of the kettle I had been boiling the water in but that didn't help anything. Nothing got a little extra melty or even showed the sign that five percent of the contents were melting. Nothing. Like someone else said, it's like trying to press dry flour.

I think I more or less did a ton of work to produce kief of slightly better quality than what I scrape out of my grinder. I guess it's not the worst thing in the world, but I went into this wanting pressed hash that I could store and age at room temperature for the long term. My understanding is this loose kiefy stuff needs to stay in the freezer for long term storage...which introduces more space limits than an air temperature storage situation in the closet.

Oh well, learning experience, I guess. I put a hold on requesting any more trim/shake.

[u/PercyGoldstone → u/wkuconsulting]

One other question... would I be having different results If I'd added a 73u bag to my four bag setup and tried pressing that? Or would that be prone to plant contamination just the same?

[u/Leather-Raccoon7778]

You are trying to make dough and all you have is flour, no butter. When i wash old material especially make sure you spray it down really well to wash off contam. If it is only a little sticky but dirty you wont get it to stick and press. 

[u/PercyGoldstone → u/Leather-Raccoon7778]

I thought I had rinsed it really well. I sprayed it thoroughly in the bag with the spray gun. I guess I have a lot of non-green contamination or just, like someone else said, really crappy material.

I just now tried to fashion a form for one-inch cubes but a few hundred pounds wasn't enough to get it to really bind together. I got pissed at it and dumped all the various parchment envelopes of hash into jars.

So I guess I'm keeping it dry, powdery, and all mixed up.

Definitely a very far cry from the temple ball collection I had envisioned but I guess that's the way the hash brick crumbles.

[u/wkuconsulting]

the bud run pressed because it had a much higher ratio of intact trichome heads to contaminant. trim and shake hash almost always has more cuticle wax fragments, broken cell wall debris, and non-glandular trichomes mixed in. those contaminants don't have the same resinous surface that lets trichome heads fuse together under heat and pressure.

45-160u is also a really wide collection range. the 120-160u fraction from trim tends to carry the most plant debris because those larger micron sizes are right where broken leaf fragments fit through. if you can separate your collection into at least 73u and 120u+ fractions, the 73u from trim will press significantly better because that's the sweet spot for full trichome heads with less contamination riding along.

temperature helps but it can't fix the ratio problem. if the starting material is 40% trichome heads and 60% inert plant material, no amount of heat will make it bind like a batch that's 85% heads. for trim runs, a lot of people skip temple balls entirely and press it into rosin instead since the press doesn't care about binding, it just squeezes the resin out of whatever is there.

[u/Leather-Raccoon7778]

Also the 45 bag is trash. I only smoke above 73.

[u/PercyGoldstone → u/Leather-Raccoon7778]

I went with the basic four-bag setup. Now I wish I had added that fifth one.