Ground bud in bowlIn my opinion as a tokin' Mama, there is no smokable cannabis derivative that gets you more baked than oil. Whether you call it honey or hash oil, it's the concentrated liquid essence of marijuana and it doesn't take much of it to completely stone you, though its mind-numbing power makes it an acquired taste.
Whether spread on a paper and rolled into a joint, inhaled through a straw from a hot knife, steamed in a Vaporizer or dropped onto ashes in your favorite bong, if you can manage to wrangle this gooey gold first from the plant and then from the teeny bottle it's usually stored in, you will be rewarded with lung-searing, brain-blasting fun!
Pouring ground bud into...The solvent situation
The process of making oil always involves using a solvent of some sort to dissolve the cannabis resins off the plant material, then somehow separating the solvent from the resin. The quality of the oil depends on the quality of your plant material, the amount of solvent you remove from the finished product, and the amount of time your solvent is exposed to the plant material.
...the Honeybee Extractor.Like hash, you can make premium oil with shake or trim rather than bud. It's a fantastic way of using every last bit of foliage from your girls and easily turning it into something as valued as bud, or more. So of course, if you use trim from healthy, well-flushed, fully matured plants, you'll end up with more good resin to extract. If you use schwag, you'll end up with very little, less potent resin.
The amount of solvent removed from the oil is dependent upon what type of solvent you use and how you go about removing it.
Traditionally, isopropyl alcohol is used as a solvent as it's cheap, easy to come by and doesn't generally arouse suspicion from your local drugstore clerk. However, the problem with isopropyl is that it boils away at a relatively high temperature, making it fairly difficult to remove all of it from the finished product. Have you ever smoked thin, watery oil that tasted acrid? That's because not all of the isopropyl was removed. It's very unhealthy to be burning and inhaling alcohol. It's also a fire-hazard.
Fitting the butane...Making oil with alcohol poses the same threat of fire, as you need to slowly boil off the isopropyl in a water bath, something that requires an open heat source such as an electric element or gas burner.
Alternatives to alcohol are ether and chloroform, both of which boil away at almost room temperature and therefore have a better chance of being completely removed from the oil. However, they are very hard to come by and there is the risk of not just fire, but succumbing to the anaesthetic fumes of either.
...onto the extractor.The butane solution
In recent years, those in the know in Amsterdam have been using butane. The beauty of butane is that it's widely available, not outrageously expensive, and can reasonably be bought from your local hardware store as lighter refills.
Dutch seed guru Soma uses butane-derived oil in a 1:3 oil/bubble hash concoction called Jelly Hash, which can be stretched and played with like Silly Putty.
Butane flowing out the bottom of the ExtractorAnother strength of butane as a solvent is that, because it's under pressure, it shoots out of the can quickly enough not to be dallying around the plant material. In ord