Washing Machine Hash
Marijuana Horticulture
by Jorge Cervantes
On a recent trip to the tropical region of Colombia, I was able to record how expert grower friends made hash in volume. They learned this technology from Mila. This information is very useful to process the leaf that is left over after the harvest. Using an everyday washing machine will save hours of labor. Following all the steps and paying attention to the water temperature in this simple process will extract all remaining cannabinoids from the leaves.
The best bet is to purchase the proper bags that have been tested. Mila and other manufacturers make different bags for outdoor and indoor crops. Plants grown outdoors have smaller resin heads than plants grown indoors and require a smaller mesh bag to collect the resin.
A washing machine filed with cold water is used to agitate the leaf and glands that are located inside of a zipped silkscreen Ice-O-Lator bag. This process separates the resin glands from the green leafy material. Once separated, resin glands fall through the sieve into the washing machine water. The leafy material stays inside the bag. The hash-laden water is evacuated out of the washing machine’s drain hose and separated from the water in a simple filtering process.
The machine is filled with ice and ice-cold water. Cold water is used to keep the resin glands intact and facilitate separation from the leaf. The principle is simple. Resin is oil based and leaf is water-based.
First, the Colombians pace paper bags of 500 grams of leaf in the freezer for one and a half hours. Cold temperatures make the leaves brittle, which allows them to easily separate from the resin glands.
Next, the two one-pound bags of cold leaves are loaded int a zipped Ice-O-Lator bag. The drum of the washing machine is filled with very cold water. Chunks of ice the size of your fist are added to the water until the desired temperature of 41F is achieved.
Two zipped Ice-O-Lator bags are laded into the drum and machine turned on to agitate for 10-12 minutes. Two bags are used to keep the machine in balance. As the machine agitates the bags, resin glands slip out through the mesh of the bags into the water.
The next step is t evacuate the resin laden water out the drain. The drain water is sifted through an Ice-O-Lator bag to remove any remaining leaf. The water is collected in a larger bag placed in a large container. Once all the water is evacuated, they lift the large bag from the container. The “clean” water flowed out the sieve in the bottom of the big bag, and the wet resin stayed in the big bag. They squeeze the last of the water by hand out of the big Ice-O-Lator bag and the resulting unpressed hash is set out to dry. Every one kilo bag of leaves leaves 30-40 grams of dried resin. In a singe 14-hour day they can process 100 kilos of leaf and transform it into three kilos of quality resin that is later pressed into hash.