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Before we share our favourite ways to use weed stems, let’s answer your most important question. Can you smoke weed stems? Yes, you absolutely can. However, weed stems contain a much smaller concentration of cannabinoids than the flower. This means they will get you less high, and the flavour will be harsher.
You might be surprised that smoking your weed stems is not the best way to use them.
The above picture shows a cannabis stem placed under a macro camera. As you can see, there are many cannabis pistons available for our extraction. Don’t let this fool you, though; you wouldn’t be able to see these pistons with the naked eye. Relative to the weight of the stem, there’s a minimal concentration of pistons, and smoking them would waste most of them.
We’re going to share our three favourite methods for using weed stems.
1. Brew A Weed Stem Tea
The easiest way to use weed stems is by steeping them in hot water and making tea. This method isn’t just easy; it’s incredibly efficient and potent. Unlike conventional edibles, which take a while to take effect, weed stem tea is fast-acting. You’ll feel its effects only a few minutes after consuming, depending on some key variables.
What you’ll need to make weed stem tea:
- A few teaspoons of weed stems
- 3 cups of boiling
- Cheesecloth or coffee filter
- Saucepan
- fat-rich milk (dairy or non-dairy)
- Bring 3 cups of water to a boil in your saucepan.
- Add the weed stems to the boiling water with your preferred milk.
- Once you’ve reached a boil, remove from heat and stir for 7-10 minutes occasionally.
- Strain the tea using a coffee filter or cheesecloth.
- Your weed stem tea is ready to drink, don’t burn yourself!
2. Make Weed Stem Cannabutter or Cannabis Butter
Cannabutter or cannabis butter are terms for the popular infusion of butter with cannabis. It can easily be made using weed stalks, and as the weed stem tea, it’s straightforward to prepare.
To make cannabis butter with weed stalks, you’ll need:
- A few tablespoons of weed stalks
- ½ cup of coconut oil
- Baking dish
- Foil
- Cheesecloth
- Glass jar
- Preheat your oven to 215 F
- Once warm, place a baking sheet with your weed stalks in the oven for 30 minutes.
- Once time has passed, remove the baking sheet from the oven, and set the weed stems aside.
- Pour coconut oil into a pan and heat it to be liquid.
- Mix weed stems into the oil, using a spoon to mix thoroughly.
- Cover the mixture with foil, and place the pan in the oven for 1.5 hours, stirring halfway through.
- Once time has passed, remove the pan from the oven, and set it aside to cool.
- Once it is cool, prepare your cheesecloth over your glass jar and pour the coconut oil mixture through the cloth to strain the stems.
- You’ll now have a glass jar filled with weed stem cannabis butter that can be used to infuse anything.
Be careful when consuming cannabutter; it’s highly potent and can take some time for its effects to take effect. Always wait 1-2 hours before consuming before taking further doses to avoid having a bad experience.
3. Make Hash From Weed Stems
You can turn your disappointing-looking weed stems into a high-quality smoking product. To do this, you’ll be best off with a large number of stems, especially if they’re of high quality and have many trichomes on them. To extract the hash from weed stems, we’ll try to remove all the trichomes and isolate them from less pure parts of the branches.
Trichomes are also known as kief, and if you’ve ever owned a high-quality grinder like the four-piece grinder made by The Goods, then you’ll have seen that it collects keif for you over time. It does this by sifting your ground-up weed through a mesh screen every time it is shaken.
To remove the trichomes from weed stems, we need to make the individual trichomes as brittle as possible and induce a similar shaking motion to encourage the trichomes to fall off the stems.
How to make hash from weed stems:
- Place your weed stems into a sealed plastic bag.
- Place this bag into the freezer for 10 minutes.
- Once time has passed, remove the bag and shake it for 30 seconds to encourage the trichomes to fall off the stems.
- Place the bag back into the freezer and repeat the freeze and shake process until you notice a brown/green powder build-up at the bottom of your plastic bag.
- Once you have a powder build-up at the bottom of your bag, you’ve got hash!
