What is Live Resin?

While this might look like a typo on the commonly known marijuana rosin, it is not. Live resin is the newest product to hit the cannabis concentrates market and it seems that people are excited by it but what is live resin? Like most extracts, it uses butane as its solvent, but it incorporates some nifty new technology that gets the most out of a cannabinoid and terpenoid profile. In all fairness, technology has advanced in many ways when it comes to the cannabis industry. If we just think about what has changed in the last few years with regards to lighting or soil, there’s no wonder our weed keeps getting better and better.

Marijuana live resin is just about the newest product of our technological savviness – or at least our chemical understanding of the herb. It is essentially an attempt to bring to you all of the qualities of a live marijuana plant – but in smokeable form. So you want to know how they did it? Here is everything you need to know about live resin and how they make it!

The best flavor profile in town
The thing I love about the true arrival of cannabis in the USA is that growing good weed is basically an art now. Once upon a time, we didn’t really care what we smoked. We were just glad our dealers had something on hand for us. But with the arrival of marijuana legalization, we have the opportunity to be using some of the finest products on the market. Smoking weed isn’t just about getting high anymore. It’s about dabs, and shatters, and waxes, and aromatic buds, and stickiness, and flavor and the perfect balance of physical and mental effects – and just about everything plays a role to a cannabis connoisseur.

Live resin is the result of all of that obsessing over what makes something a fine smoking experience. People don’t even just want the strong stuff anymore. They want the best flavors and the best smells. And that is exactly the aim of live resin. It was designed to bring users the best aromatic and flavor profiles, far closer to a natural herb than what you might get out of a regular BHO.

In the process of a regular extraction using butane, many of the terpenoids and cannabinoids get lost. In fact, the same is true of the decarboxylation process, meaning that you walk away from most of the benefits of marijuana as soon as you dry and cure it. Some people are using fresh herb to make juice for that exact reason. The process is being perfected every day, and live resin is a way of expanding the cannabinoid and terpenoid profile that finally arrives at the user. Ironically, more work has to go into bringing you more of the natural product – but if you’re not a grower, then getting your hands on a large amount of fresh buds is difficult. Luckily, there are people whose lives are dedicated to bringing you the best marijuana products, and live resin is, no doubt, one of them.

What is live resin?  How do they make it?

The first step of making any marijuana product is usually to dry, cure and decarboxylate the buds. In fact, we have always thought that this was the only way to activate the delicious components of marijuana we love, namely THC. On the other hand, the process of making live resin starts with flash freezing the buds to subcritical temperatures. Yes – they are extracting cannabinoids from frozen – rather than dried – buds. In fact, the buds are kept frozen throughout the entire extraction process.

It is this flash freezing that allows almost all of the terpenoids, flavinoids and cannabinoids to remain intact, rather than being lost to the drying process. We are essentially coming to realise that drying and curing bud isn’t really the best way to get all of the cannabinoids out of it and into our bodies. In fact, so many of the terpenes are lost in the drying process. This is why fresh buds are so much more aromatic than dried ones.

Why is it different to other extracts?
Although what you finally get on the end of your dab pen looks a lot like a regular shatter, it isn’t. Unlike regular shatters and waxes, the flavor and aroma of live resin is much stronger. But you’re not just signing up for a better tasting smoke. The availability of a wider range of cannabinoids and terpenoids means that you can have a more expansive psychedelic experience. As far as we know, the parts of marijuana work together synergistically to give you the best possible experience. When half of them get lost to drying, the experience can be diminished. For that, an experience with live resin can be more involved than an experience with regular herb.

Those who like to use extracts put a huge emphasis on taste and smell, because there is a fear of all of that getting lost with extracts. And let’s be honest. For marijuana enthusiasts, the characteristic taste and smell of ganja plays a huge role in the enjoyment of it. If you’re ready for a new kind of marijuana experience – kind of raw but not – then you should keep your eyes and ears peeled for live resin. It will change the way you view cannabis extracts.