Solventless cannabis rosin creation techniques are all the rage for at-home marijuana enthusiasts and for good reason: It’s simple to make using equipment you have at home keeping quality high (pun intended) and cost low. In this tutorial, we’ll teach you how to turn kief into a premium, full-melt rosin using a flat iron (hair straightener), unbleached coffee filters, and parchment paper.
- Flat Iron. We recommend one with 2-inch plates over 1-inch models. Cheaper models may crack under the pressure of the clamp.
- Coffee Filters/Micron Bags. You can buy specially made filter bags for rosin making, or you can use coffee filters. Seriously. I use Chemex coffee filters. They are huge flat squares that can be cut in 4 or more pieces. As a bonus, they’re made without any chemicals like bleach.
- Parchment Paper. Any will do, just make sure it’s not wax paper.
- Trigger Clamp. No burnt hands or brute force necessary! I use a 12-inch model. Cost me around $10.
- Pollen Press/PVC. Kief is easier to work with when pressed into little pucks than in powder form. Get a piece of remnant PVC pipe and a wooden dowel as a cheap alternative.
- Dowel. Buy these in any size at most hardware stores for a few dollars.
- Kief. Buy some for much less than buds, or make your own. My blog has a tutorial on harvesting with dry ice.
HOW-TO CREATE ROSIN
First, we press the kief into little pellets. Cut a piece of PVC pipe about 2 inches long. Fill it with kief and hammer it down a few times with the dowel until it is compacted to about a 1-inch pellet. Then lift the pipe and use the dowel to pop the pellet out the back of the pipe onto a piece of parchment paper. Making these pellets allows us to process more material in a smaller space, and makes it less likely you’ll spill loose kief on the outside of your bags, which will end up in your final product.
Fold a small piece of coffee filter over the pellet. You can roll more than one layer of filter over the pellet, but more paper will hold onto a little bit of rosin, so it’s best to cut off excess.
Fold a large piece of parchment paper in half and stick the pellet pouch in the crease of the parchment paper.
Turn on the flat iron. Keep the temperature between 200° and 280°. Lower temp means less terpenes burn off, but you’ll need more force. Our iron just has settings from 1-30. we use setting 17.
Slide the pellet/filter/parchment sandwich into the flat iron. Leave as much of the excess parchment paper hanging outside the flat iron as possible, so the hot rosin has somewhere to go. Getting rosin too hot or heating it for too long will change the consistency from flavorful golden amber, to sticky dark muck.
Attach the clamp to the area over the puck with very little force at first. As you start to hear it sizzle slowly increase the pressure and watch the magic happen! after about 30-45 seconds, remove the clamp and pull the rosin/paper out of the flat iron.
Set the paper aside for a few minutes until it’s cooled. At this point, you can dab it right this very minute! Store any extra in silicone jars or a clean piece of parchment paper.
