People who are used to smoking cannabis are usually familiar with the term “resin” referring to that nasty black stuff that populates pipes after repeated use. While this gunky substance is known to contain at least a little THC, it’s mostly tar and is absolutely not good for you.
But when you hear about cannabis resin from a budtender in a dispensary, they’re talking about live resin – a very different topic. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of regular pipe resin!
Live resin looks similar to other types of concentrate, and usually comes in a consistency like oil or sometimes shatter.
Live resin is marketed as a top tier concentrate because of how it’s made. With regular concentrates, producers use flower that’s been dried and cured. While this makes for lower storage costs and cheap production, cannabis buds lose a great deal of their terpene content. In fact, dried and cured buds are up to 55% lower in the essential oils that house terpenes.
Since terpenes are responsible for a lot of cannabis’ effects and flavor, you can see that this approach isn’t ideal.
To circumvent the degradation caused by drying and curing buds, live resin is made with fresh, flash frozen whole flowers. By skipping the curing process and using whole flowers, the resulting concentrates end up keeping far more terpenes intact. This results in:
✓ More complex flavors and aromas
✓ A more dynamic psychoactive profile
✓ Extreme potency
For these reasons, live resin is king of the concentrates. In fact, when it became commercially available around 2011, it was so scarce and so impressive that you could only find it at prices upwards of $100 per gram!
Thankfully, the market has stabilized enough that the retail range for live resin is now nearly half its original markup, and grams can be had for around $50.
Since live resin is a concentrate similar to others, you can expect to use it in the same manner. Many people today enjoy the benefits of vaporizers, and many are made specifically for the use of concentrates or are capable of dual concentrate/herb vaporization.
For a more cost effective option, you can always do dabs with a fairly simple setup. If you’re not familiar with dabbing, you’re missing out! Check out our quick how-to guide on dabbing to get up to speed on this simple way to get started with concentrates – including live resin.
-Spencer Grey
