Jeff also discusses how Rosin has spread internationally while recalling his recent trip to Spain for Spannabis, where he encountered people who had heard of it but not yet perfected the technique due to the language barrier (the most popular Instagram videos demonstrating the Rosin Tech method are in English).
Jeff is the owner of ThincPure, and he also consults for legal cannabis processors and pharmaceutical companies. He worked to develop and implement the Medical Marijuana Hashish rating system for consumers and patients, he was formerly Dean of the Cannabis College, and he has worked extensively on cannabis reform with the Coalition for Cannabis Standards and Ethics, The Cannabis Defense Coalition, and the Patient Arrest Protection Group.
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Below are some photos of RosinTech pressed hash that Jeff has posted to Instagram:
Full Transcript
Shango Los: Welcome to the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast. My name is Shango Los and I will be your host today. Jeff Church, also known as Reverend Cannabis has been extracting medicine from cannabis for over 15 years. He has worked with every modern solvent and solvent-less extraction process, including dry extraction, ethanol, and ISO alcohol, water extraction, butane, and CO2. His business Conscious Extracts produces exceptional extracts sold in dispensaries throughout Washington. He also consults for legal cannabis processors and pharmaceutical companies. He worked to develop and implement the Medical Marijuana Hashish rating system for consumers and patients.
Reverend Cannabis was formerly Dean of the Cannabis College and has worked extensively on cannabis reform with the Coalition for Cannabis Standards and Ethics, The Cannabis Defense Coalition, and the Patient Arrest Protection Group. Welcome, Reverend Cannabis.
Jeff Church: Hello.
Shango Los: I know you to be fascinated by historical hash production, as well as being on the cutting edge of the newest techniques. In what ways do you see modern hash production as similar and dissimilar to historical techniques?
Jeff Church: Modern hash has really risen out of all of the historical techniques that we have. The basic types of hashish production, sieving and hand-rubbing kind of translate over into the new things that we’re doing. The hand-rubbing is similar to the live resin that we have nowadays. The sieving we’ve taken that to the purest form where now we’ve got 99% pure trichome heads in our dry sift, so there’s quite a few things.
The one thing that historically hasn’t been done as much is the use of solvents. That’s a fairly new thing, especially CO2 but there’s been ethanol extraction in history and that just stayed around. The old world techniques have really proved to be worthwhile over time. I would see them very similar. The only main difference is today we have all of the technology that we can apply to this. Where you were only able to get so pure of a product with old world techniques we’re able to step it up with a little bit of science and get a lot of pure extract.
Shango Los: A lot of people say, “Oh, old schools can be the best way to do things,” but in this case you’re saying that, “Yeah, the old ideas, it maybe the goal of the end product is the same but we can apply science that we have now to create a better end product.”
Jeff Church: We can be a little bit more selective in what we’re actually getting out of an extract. We can remove any chlorophylls through different solvent extractions. With the refinement in screening techniques we’ve been able to get really, really nice dry sift. The quality of products has just risen quite a bit. Now that’s not to say that the efficacy has changed all that much, we’re just getting to a more pure, more potent, more pleasurable extract nowadays.
Shango Los: In what ways do you think it’s more pleasurable?
Jeff Church: I believe that the terpenes really make it a lot more pleasurable. If you look to extraction with solvents, traditionally it was done with ethanol. To purge out the ethanol you really lose all of those volatile terpenes, the search for terpenes that they just, they fly away really quick with the ethanol when you’re removing it.
I think that there’s been great strides made in doing cryo-extraction, cold extraction of cannabis with butane, where they’re able to retain a lot of the terpenes. There’s also been lots of terpene extraction from cannabis that’s been started recently. It’s a whole new frontier from just your plain old RSO.
Shango Los: A lot of the historical hashish production techniques, they were done in geographic specific regions of the world and they are being done with land resins. Whereas nowadays most of us, some of us have land resins but mostly they’re hybrids that we have created for modern cannabis production.
Do you think that the increase in the potency of the modern hybrids versus historical land resins has created a significantly different product? Or do you think that they’re mostly just similar but maybe with just a different flavor profile?
Jeff Church: Traditionally when you’ve been making hashish it’s been in a region like, say Afghanistan, they have a really indicate dominant pool of genetics there and it’s very suited towards sieving of hashish. You get a really, really nice dry resin. All of these different types of cannabis that we have now a day with the hybrids they don’t all lead to hashish extraction in that dry sift method.
You can definitely do any plant dry sift but some plants are going to be better. That being said there are some that are better for water extraction. Some of them are better for butane extraction. Today we can kind of have to, with the large plethora of strains out there, we have to look at the material, analyze it by doing the different processes to that certain strain, and deciding on what the very best processing method is.
Where historically you had fairly similar things being produced in one region. You would see a lot of plants that were hand-rubbed in the Himalayas. They have a certain type of cannabis that’s there and it’s a bit different than what they have down in Afghanistan, or Morocco where they’re doing a lot of sieving.
Getting away from those land resins has made it a little bit more difficult, but because we have so many different methods to choose from nowadays you don’t need to just extract by sieving alone. We’ve gotten around that. We’ve progressed with the plan.
Shango Los: That’s really interesting that the different strains, they all have their own use. Somebody like yourself who has done this a bunch, can you give us a couple of examples? Like for example if you were looking for a plant that is going to be better for sieving versus a solvent extraction technique, what are you actually going to be looking for in the plant? I encourage you to name a couple strains, even though strains tend to be regional in a lot ways. Give some more concrete examples.
Jeff Church: I’ll start off with Afgooey, that’s my very favorite strain for production of high quality hashish from the water extraction method, and it too works well with dry sift. The one thing about that strain is the resin had seemed to cure so well that they’re just brittle and they pop right off. There is a large amount of resin on there. Now Afgooey, it’s an Afghan cross and that one was really produced and bred over time to be for dry sift production, and then it was brought out to California and bred, and now we have the Afgooey.
Now that being said, the Afgooey’s flavor is just kind of sweet. There’s really nothing to terpenely much that stands out with that. I, myself prefer other strains for their terpene contents that are a little bit more strong and a little bit more in the haze range. Now haze plants, I really have a hard time extracting those with dry material, as the resin had seemed to be a bunch more submented onto their stocks.
Anything like Dog shit or Schrom, those strains don’t give up their resin as easily as Afgooey. Afgooey, our record was 2.75 ounces from 1 lb. of material, and that was all four-star, high quality bubble or greater, some was five-start but at least four-star from that. Where if you run another strain, you’re just going to end up with some two-star and it’s not going to be as tasty.
Those sort of strains you would want to process with a solvent to get the most efficacy of the cannabinoids present in the plant. Because if you’re only getting a 5% yield with water extraction and then you bump it over to a solvent you’re getting 10% to 15% yield, you’re being a lot more efficient.
Shango Los: I follow. I follow. You mentioned a two and three star, and this is the star based hash grading system that you helped to develop for producers and consumers. You developed that a couple of years ago and now a couple of years later do you still find it, is it as inclusive as when it was originally devised? Or are you finding that hash is going in directions that you could never have expected and the star rating system needs to be adapted? Why don’t you explain a little bit about it for folks who are listening who aren’t familiar with it, and then talk about it if you’re still finding it as appropriate now as you did when it was devised.
Jeff Church: The star rating system, it was originally devised by a good buddy of mine who has been making hashish for just as long as I have. We’ve made hashish together for years and he goes by Milton Bubbly on Instagram. He was the owner of the hashish bar in Oakland called The Bazaar. When they opened up their hashish bar they were really into making hashish and they wanted to have a hash bar. [Inaudible 00:10:47] allowed for basically, to do within your private home or business, you were able to have a social club to allow for the distribution of hashish and marijuana and people to collectively smoke.
He really wanted to have a grading system that reflected the hash quality to the consumer. Everything had been pretty much $20, $25 a gram retail was hashish’s standard price, but there was a lot of stuff that was lower quality than that. It didn’t really deserve to fetch that high price, but just because it was hashish it got that price. Then there were a lot of things that were higher priced … or that were higher quality than that, that should have been fetching a higher price because they are much more rare, much more high in potency, but they weren’t able to attain the same prices that BHO at the time was able to attain.
The idea was make a one through six star system. One-star being basically no melt, doesn’t want to press. Two-star presses, melts tiny bit. Three-star, it will melt into a lump and boil into that lump. Four-star will boil into a puddle, it will basically come into a lump and then boil flat into a puddle, and continue to boil.
Five-star will do the same, boil into a puddle and then it will boil big, clear domes that take up basically the whole space of where the hashish is melting on the screen, and the contaminant itself is pushed out to the edges of the screen by the bubble. When that pops you actually can see the bare screen down below it, where previously there had been hashish boiling. That’s the five-star is that crater, once you get that crater to form that’s five-star.
Then six-star is pretty much just the same consistency as hash oil, just a little bit more contaminated than hash oil because there’s some cellulose and blacks that’s actually in the resin had itself, that when you do a solvent extraction that’s left behind. That’s the one through six-star.
It’s really served the patient community very well, as well as the, it’s starting to serve the recreational community. People are able to say, “Hey, you know this is my budget. I want to be able to get at least this quality, so I’ll purchase, you know this much in this star range.” Then some people are like, “I want the very best,” and they’ll only look for four or five and six star. There’s different patients out there that have different needs and this helps fulfill them and gives them a path to walk down.
As far as the future, we’ve come into 2015 with this working really well. It’s getting widely adopted. A Greener Today, a dispensary around here that helped publicized the star rating system has now jumped onboard. They’ve got a six-star on their rating system because they see the need for having these different high-quality differations.
The industry is really picking up on which I think is great for consumer, but we don’t really have anything to differentiate anything of it in melt, at this point. How well is your hashish melting, that’s a direct relation to what is the level of cannabinoids and terpenes in your extraction. The more you have, the better it’s going to melt. It definitely shows quality but there’s a category of quality that it cannot cover and that’s flavor. Flavor is pretty much left out in the star rating system.
Moving forward, having things such as Rosin coming forward, basically every Rosin is a six-star plus but when you heat it, not every Rosin tastes great. Some things that are made from low quality hashish don’t have a good flavor, they have a flavor similar to the low quality hashish. Now they’re way higher in quality, way higher in purity than that low quality hashish was, but they’re still on that lower end. Where if you take a higher quality hashish or a flower and make the Rosin from that it’s going to hit that higher quality level.
I think that really, we need to device a system for that that’s above and beyond the star rating system, something that really we can apply a quality standard to the products so that consumers will be able to say, “Oh well, you know, this is only this good and that one is way better, because it was rated that way.”
The one issue I see with that is that the star rating system is very easy to determine just by looking at it. Everybody has a very good visual cue, you can look at it but every person’s palette is different. Something that taste wonderful to me could not taste as good to you. That’s the struggle. We’ve got to try and figure out a way to reflect the quality but not have it be in such a way that somebody might think that it’s higher quality more than another.
The star rating system really keeps hash producers honest, as well as informing the consumer. I think that if we’re just saying, “Oh well, this tastes better,” it would be really easy for a hash maker to just say, “Oh well, all of mine are in this higher category,” even if they’re not. We’ve got to work together as community to figure this out.
Shango Los: Sure. I could imagine that that we all have our favorite strains and the terpene profiles that we like the most, and maybe not a judgment call about which flavor is actually preferred but actually how much terpene there is to begin with, and then so that we know how much a [inaudible 00:17:27] it’s going to have to begin with. Then within that you find your particular niche.
Jeff Church: The one funny thing about that, I’ve told you that let’s just based it on terpene milligrams, and then I started really thinking about there is a huge difference in between all of the different terpenes. If you’ve got something that’s very, very close to what the flower is, you’re going to have a profile very, very similar.
If you heat it a little bit too much, those terpenes are going to transform into other terpenes. What maybe an off labor could register in a lab as a very high terpene result, but because they were changed so much in the process it’s not very palatable for consumers even though its numbers are very high. It’s an interesting thing, possibly how close is that ratio to the flower that you originally extracted it from could be the mark of quality. How far off are you?
Shango Los: Right on. It will be really, really interesting to find out how that evolves, now that legalization is taking hold in so many states there’s going to be more people taking about this. The information is being exchanged so much more quickly through Facebook and Instagram, and people meeting at Cups, and all these things that it seems like there is … If you were looking at it on graphic, look like a hockey stick where suddenly hashish have come this far during the last couple thousands of years and then suddenly it just taken off.
Jeff Church: To the moon, for sure. It’s quite drastic. We look at Rosin in its infancy and thousands and thousands of people around the world are doing this brand new extraction technique.
Shango Los: Let’s go right into that. I was going to hit on the Rosin Tech in a little while but since we go that way, let’s talk about it, because a lot of people probably have not come across this yet.
I came across it … I think it was soon after Soilgrown down in Southern California developed his technique. I was lucky enough to be following his Instagram feed and he started posting this how-to videos, but since you have spoken with him directly and have been teaching people around the world now how to do it, why don’t you just go ahead and summarize what this new evolution is, and give the credits where they’re due for folks.
Jeff Church: I’d love to give a little quick history of what happened for Soilgrown, at least from my third party account of what’s going on here. Soilgrown is a ice water extraction maker down in California and he loves to smoke melt, that’s his favorite, he loves the melty hash. He started running low on his melty hash. He had noticed when he squished some lower quality hash that squeezing it out to make a dab, that when he squished it a little too long some hash oil leaked out to the edges of where that hashish was, and the contaminant stayed in the center.
He started collecting that up and really turning like two-star hash into five-star hash. It was quite an amazing thing. Then he ran out of his half melt that he had been making into higher melt and kind of processing. He says he was just standing around, he says, “I don’t know what made me do it exactly but I was just standing around with my father in-law, and I just took a piece of button and put it in between the parchment and squished it, because I had been doing that with the hashish and was just like, let see what happens.”
Shango Los: Suppose you don’t know what he’s squishing in it, what’s he squishing in it? That’s a pretty big deal.
Jeff Church: Basically what it is, is you take a piece of silicon coated parchment paper, baking paper, and fold it in half and you put a piece of flower in there. Then Soilgrown’s original method was take a flat iron which is just your basic hair straightener, $20 or less, and you put it at, it depends on who you’re talking to what the temperature is. I personally like 230 degrees, it’s not as quick but if you like, the terps are a little bit better, but you basically just, you’ve got your bud in between a parchment and you squeeze it with this hot iron.
What happens is the cannabinoids and terpenes rupture out of the resin heads that are on the flower and they become liquid. There’s a little bit of steam action because there’s some water that, the water content in the flower, but basically that steam action and the cannabinoids becoming liquid because of heat drives them out to the sides of the bud with the pressure that you’re applying. What you end up with is a completely solvent-less dab that is very, very similar to BHO. In my opinion, better flavor, more terpene content than BHO made from the same type of material. It’s from bud to dab in 30 seconds.
Shango Los: People are … What people come across is on his Instagram feed, which you can find at Soilgrown or in the Facebook group that’s presently exist called Rosin Tech, people are really blown away. To go from a position where we’re using all these complex recipes and expensive technologies, if we’re talking about CO2, to get the hash oil and then suddenly to have somebody realize that you can just wrap a bud at parchment and squeeze it in a hair straightener, and suddenly you’re getting six-plus star hash with no solvents. It’s perfect for patients. It’s a real game-changer for everybody.
Jeff Church: The only thing that’s holding back right now is the ability to produce it on a large scale. When I was down with my buddy, down at The Bazaar in Oakland, the guy who helped create the star system, we used the flat … a t-shirt press because he didn’t have a flat iron. He knew nothing about it at all.
We were just messing around and grab this t-shirt press and started squishing out hash, and then we said, “Oh, you know, we need to filter to hold back this hash,” because we’re only getting five star. He said, “Well, let’s use the pressing screen from the bubble bags and we’ll just toss it, and toss the hash and then see what happens.” Lo and behold, six-star shot out of it and it was quite an amazing discovery that’s kind of changed the world.
Soilgrown, I don’t know if he realizes it but he has created a whole new category of extraction. I knew we had mechanical extraction with his dry sift and bubble hash, and then we had solvent extractions which is CO2, BHO, PHO, ethanol, you name it. You can use pretty much most non-polar solvents. This has created a whole new no solvent heat extraction, heat and pressure extraction.
I think moving forward in the world, this being such a small footprint when you look at what is your production method doing to the resources of the world. Ice water has been great, you’re using water. Water is scarce is some places in the world but you’re not really polluting the water that bad, unless you’ve got horrible material you’re using that’s coated in pesticides and such, but it’s been a minimal footprint. Then you jump over to this Rosin Tech and every day the footprint is getting less and less. You’ve got a little bit of electricity required and a small amount of equipment and you’ve got a product that is solvent-free.
Shango Los: It really liberates hash oil for the people, if you will, right? Because so often you either need an advanced technical skill or you need expensive machinery, and you need to have access to a lot of product to justify that as well, but now suddenly if you want to do it real small you can literally take one of the buds out of your eight and squeeze it, and now you have your own personal dab that you made at home yourself. You don’t have to go through all these intermediary people, and even if you upgrade and you’re doing larger amounts in a t-shirt press, it’s still something that you can do with a $300 piece of equipment, and some parchment paper. Now suddenly this power’s in the hands of everybody.
Jeff Church: That was the most important thing for me, within a new technology we see a lot of hoarding going on and it’s tough for every human. We are designed to go out there, find the best thing, hold it for ourselves to make a profit off of it. That’s just built in to our genes, and it really just blows me away that there are people out there such as Soilgrown that didn’t have that thought, that said, “No, let’s just give this to the people.”
When [inaudible 00:27:48], Milton Bubbly and I came up with the method down in Oakland of using the 25 micron screen, it was pretty much a no-brainer. We have to get this technique out to the world so that everybody can be able to do this. For one, I want it to be applied on a commercial scale, and I feel that releasing this technique to the world is going to up the research that is going into this. Every single person that’s doing this now is researching some way to make it better, which is just, it’s great, and posting it on this Rosin Tech’s group.
But even more important than that is the children. We have kids that are getting a little turkey baster, stuffing it full of herb, and putting a coffee filter on the bottom of it, and blasting butane in their kitchen, which is the worst thing that you could ever do. They’re endangering themselves and others. People have died. People have burned themselves really bad from processing of cannabis just to get a dab that is the same dab as you’d be able to get from Rosin.
Now this technique is out there for the world so that we don’t have to have as many hashish manufacturing explosions which are very bad for our progression into mainstream culture of cannabis and cannabis extracts. A lot of places have been scared off and banned cannabis extracts from even being produced, because they don’t want people doing it at home and blowing themselves up. I hear that.
The reason why I haven’t done butane extraction for many, many years now is because of the safety. I felt that the way that I was doing it was only so safe, both for my health in breathing all the fumes, but also for everybody else around me. What if I blew myself up while I was doing it? That’s why we gravitated towards CO2. It’s still a dangerous procedure to do, but you have to buy clothes, loop equipment, that is manufactured to really high quality specs to be able to even do CO2.
We felt comfortable that the equipment we were using was good, and that the footprint, our ecological footprint from CO2 was a lot better than just open blasting cans and allowing them to evaporate into the atmosphere. We’re using really clean CO2 for our extractions rather than using something that’s mined out of the Earth.
Shango Los: You touched on the idea of crowdsourcing the evolution, right? I remember seeing Soilgrown’s post to Instagram and he was, it was like four, five days in a row. Each day he was posting another short video of each step of the process. I started seeing them in like day three or something. As I watched the first three days, being a cannabis entrepreneur myself, I can almost feel the ground shake and the industry that this is such a disruptive technology. I was like, “My God, I can’t wait until day four to see how he finishes this, because this is amazing.”
Then the idea that he was just giving away his intellectual property and letting this be open source so that folks didn’t have to use butane, and that they can make it at home. All sorts of folks in the Midwest who are in states where legalization is still coming along but coming along slowly, this has suddenly allows people to be able to make their own clean dabs at home while they get their local laws straight. It’s pretty radical stuff.
Now we’ve got Facebook group where people are exchanging their technologies. I think it’s pretty incredible that now we can all work together. Heck, even our conversation here, this is thanks to ganjapreneur.com and the internet, and the fact that you and I find each other on the internet, and we get together in a talk. This is all stuff that the generation before us didn’t have a chance to do. That’s pretty great.
Jeff Church: Right, I feel that in this new time that we’re in, with the internet being so readily available for everybody, it’s really important for everybody to utilize that. There are going to be trade secrets in the cannabis industry.
I know, I actually have previous knowledge, it was maybe two months prior to Soilgrown’s experiments of people doing hydraulic and heat extraction, is what they said. They said heat and pressure rather, I don’t know the actual machine that they’re using because they were very secretive. They said, “We have this solvent-less shatter that we had made from bubble hash.” They were selling it and they had come up with a great method for it that was working but they were unwilling to tell anybody anything more than heat and pressure.
With the internet being out there’s only so long that you are going to have to hold down any technique nowadays, because somebody else is going to figure it out and post it online. I think that Soilgrown, he’s not the guy that first did this. The first guy that did this was probably a long, long time ago. Honestly, really the first guy that ever pressed some Rosin was … there’s Compassion, who was the guy that did it back in the late 90’s, early 2000’s?
But before that it’s the guy in Morocco that was manning the press. He squeezed his hashish into bricks and oil would squirt out on the sides. They would collect up that oil and it would be a red oil, because it had been heated a whole bunch, but that was the first Rosin. It’s been this progression but nobody’s really picked up on it as a technique, only kind of like a side thing that’s happened.
Shango Los: Certainly no one’s put it in the hair straightener.
Jeff Church: Right. Now, we had this whole dab culture that came on, that really was BHO prevalent. Now we’d move it over towards dry sift and solvent-less. Everybody got a hair straightener to press out their bubble into a dab before they heat it. Most people had the equipment at home to make this as soon as Soilgrown was just willing to give it to the world. I think the internet is going to continue to be one of the best places to learn.
I just went over to Spain. I met with a lot of people from all over the world. I feel like on the West Coast here, we’re a couple years ahead of anywhere else in the world, but the guys from the UK, they really have a very similar level of product. Their product is very well refined. That’s very similar to the BHO that we’ve got on the West Coast is what they’re producing in the UK, and that’s because the language barrier is non-existent. They can follow as many Americans as they want and read every single comment, read everything on there, and Instagram has really taught these people how to make high quality extracts.
Where you go to Spain and talk with the Spanish people, and they definitely have a love for it but their knowledge that they’ve been able to gain from everybody else on Instagram is not as high, because they have this language barrier. It’s not in their main language so there’s less of them that are going there.
Shango Los: We’ve been talking a lot about getting the cleanest dabs possible and getting as close to the source, from a flower material as possible, and a lot of people are still using BHO for extraction, even though it gets a lot of flak for both the health concerns and the potential danger in the extraction. What do you think? Do you think that BHO still has a place in the legal hash oil market?
Jeff Church: I definitely think that the BHO has a place in the legal hash market. I think Rosin is definitely going to become more and more popular but there’s something to be said about a hydrocarbon extraction. You can get near a 100% of cannabinoids out of the material utilizing enough solvent. I think that for a lot of the recycling of material, butane’s going to be very much in use.
If you think about it if you’re making flower Rosin, you’re going to have a ton of leftover material to grind that all up and do a hydrocarbon pass on that after you’ve gotten your Rosin, then you have another product that can be utilized to all kinds of different ways. You can make that into the concentrate type of product or you could make that edible oil. It’s not going to be something that you’re going to want to smoke without purification probably but it’s … I think that there’s always going to be a place for it. You know that not all trim is high quality.
If you make Rosin from low quality material, it’s going to be lower quality flavor. There’s always going to be the best process for any given type of material. I just think that Rosin is going to fill a lot more of that gap. It will kind of eat away from bubble hash and CO2 and butane. I feel that CO2 extraction, a lot of people love that, they definitely do but it’s … and PHO are going to be the less used process, kind of more on the recycling, getting all the waste taken care of.
There’s definitely been lots of people giving into purified cannabinoids. I think that the market is always going to want that but terpene content for me, is always a huge thing. It modulates the effects of the cannabinoids, it acts as a solvent on the CB1 and CB2 receptors to allow for THC and CPD that are take on the receptive surface, to be dissolved so that they may more readily pass in through the receptors.
There’s a lot of use to having that whole plant but that’s not to say that some of the fractions aren’t good.
Shango Los: You mentioned that you had just gotten back from Spain, where you were there for The Secret Cup and for Spannabis. Because I follow your Instagram feed I got to see some of the celebrities that you were interacting with. Why don’t you tell folks a little bit about Spannabis and what you got to see and do there, just so that we can all geek along with you?
Jeff Church: Spannabis was an epic adventure. It’d been many years since I’ve been to Barcelona and it was way different. Last time I was in Barcelona the experience of cannabis there was going to La Rambla and going down to the little park at the end and scoring some Moroccan hashish from the street dealer. That was the best I can do back in 2002.
I came to Spain, and lo and behold they have social clubs there and it is very similar to what you would have in Amsterdam back in 2002. Back in the day they have a bar there where you can get drinks, whether it’s a smoothie, or a fresh juice, or coffee, or beer, or wine, they have that going on. Then they’ll also have a bar where you can buy flowers and concentrates, and they’ll have different ice water extractions, butane extractions, and flowers, and it’s really quite an amazing atmosphere.
They’ve done it as a social club rather than it being just purely recreational or purely medical. It’s kind of not any of that, it’s just you’re coming in and socializing and using cannabis. I guess it’s more on the recreational side, but that being said everything, I guess it’s illegal in Spain. They just have really good privacy laws so people have said, “Well, we’re just going to do this within our own home and the police have no right to come inside our home or business, so we’re just going to do it,” but that was, it was really wonderful.
I got to go to Spannabis for a couple of days and met with people from all over the world that brought samples of hashish to be turned into Rosin. My favorite extraction that I did while I was there was, met a great gardener from Canada. He had his second place winning bubble hash made from [inaudible 00:42:16]. At Dabadoo he won second place. He actually put in, the stuff that he put in as an entry wasn’t quite as good as what he had wrapped for himself.
When I met up with him he had this, what was the second place winner but the better grade of it. We took that and turned it into Rosin and it was just spectacular. It was a really great experience seeing well-known extract artists from all over the world, just geeking and freaking that this was happening in 30 seconds in front of them. They’re like, you just took that hashish and turned it into hash oil like that. It was amazing, that was …
Shango Los: It kind of puts you in a role like Johnny Appleseed of Rosin Tech.
Jeff Church: Right, exactly. We really got to show it to the world. At Spannabis I was hanging out with Mark Bubbleman, he sells bubble bags up there. He had a little booth there at Medical Seeds, who actually the guy, Javier, from Medical Seeds, he was the first place Secret Cup Solvent-less winner, and I got the pleasure of making some Rosin from his Secret Cup entry as well. It was epic.
One of the best parts was during the Secret Cup finals we got to have them in the Hashish, Hemp, Camino, and Marijuana Museum … or wait it’s Hashish, Marijuana, Camino, and Hemp Museum in Barcelona. Camino is cannabis in Spanish. It’s a 15th century building and Ben Dronkers, I believe he sends his [inaudible 00:44:25] he did a 15 year restoration on this 15th century building before he put the museum in there.
He’s got another museum in Amsterdam. This one is over the top. There are pieces of history from everything that you could imagine that cannabis has touched, whether it’s textiles, or medicine, or recreational culture, so many different facets of society were represented through its love of cannabis. I was fortunate enough to go to the awards ceremony which is one of two times that anybody’s ever been able to smoke cannabis in the museum, because it’s usually no smoking because it’s a museum. You don’t want the artifacts damaged.
We got to smoke in there which was really wonderful with all of the judges of The Secret Cup. I was having a little conversation with one of the judges and Bubbleman Mark he yells over to me, “Jeff! Jeff! Get over here.” I walked over there and he said, “Hey, you want to make some Rosin?” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, give me an adaptor.” I have the US one, I needed the European plug. He said, “Okay, give me a minute,” and I walked back over to my conversation that he pulled me away from.
Then literally 10 seconds later he’s, “Jeff! Jeff! I got the adaptor. Come on back.” I’m like, “Okay, okay.” I walked over there and he says, “Here, here, come, come up my seat.” I’m like, “Okay, okay.” I looked to the right and its Marc Emery and Jodie Emery sitting there. I didn’t see them at all before, and he’s like, “I want you to make some Rosin for these guys. They’d never seen it, never tried it, they want to try it. They want to see it.”
Jodie gave me a flower and I pressed it up and made some flower Rosin for Marc Emery, and he got to have his first dab of it. Then she gave me another bud and I pressed it up and packed one for her and one for myself. It was just really enjoyable to be able to bring this new technique out to so many people in the world, and have people that I really respect highly just blown away by this.
It really showed me how you were talking about the ground shaking earlier. That is really what Rosin is doing right now and it’s crazy. It’s quite, quite an adventure. That Spain was wonderful, lots of good cured meats there and good fun time.
Shango Los: Right on, that sounds like a really great thing. Now you’ve told us all sorts of really cool stories, if folks want to follow your social media feeds, to see pictures of you pressing Rosin for Marc Emery or any of your other adventures, where can they go to find you?
Jeff Church: On Instagram I am @cannabisreverend and on Facebook you can find me as Jeff Church, although friend request I’m not always on top of that, but you can go at least follow me and see I cross-post most things from Instagram to Facebook but Instagram is really where I’m at. Like I said earlier it’s where the wealth of knowledge is right now, and where all the knowledge is being transferred is Instagram at the moment.
Shango Los: Right on. Thank you, Jeff. We’ve been listening to Jeff Church, also known as Cannabis Reverend. Jeff Church is an internationally respected hash producer and researcher, and owner of Conscious Extracts, and is also Vice President of Research and Development at Think Extracts in Washington State. I am Shango Los, Founder of the Vashon Island Marijuana Entrepreneurs Alliance, thank you for listening to ganjapreneur.com.