How to make your own canna-butter or canna-oil
Making your own cannabis infused edible oil is very easy and can be done at home with minimal effort. We can either use cured and dried flower, (smaller buds and sticks can all go in) or if you use a dry herb vape, you can save up the toasted flower that comes back out as its already decarboxylated! Decarboxylation is the process by which the THC is activated through heating.
Traditionally this would be done by breaking up the buds into popcorn sized pieces and toasting in the oven, however there are other ways to do this. My favourite is to do it inside a mason jar and that is the method I will cover today.
You can choose any carrier oil for this. Butter works well, coconut oil is another great choice but both these will set solid at room temperature. If you are intending on baking using the fat in place of non canna fat in a recipe then this is a great way to make dairy or the vegan alternative (Coconut).
If you are wanting an oil to stay runny, ie for oral dropper oil then you have a wide range of carrier oils to choose from. I’ve used rapeseed, olive, grapeseed and hemp oils in the past, olive and hemp have a stronger tasting end product than rapeseed and grapeseed. Ultimately its personal preference!
You will need:
- 50g dried and cured (ideally organic) cannabis flowers, small buds work very well
- 250ml of your chosen oil
- A sieve
- A few large funnels
- Coffee filters
- A few large mason jars with lids
- A large saucepan or a slow cooker or a lab style heated magnetic spinner plate
- A digital thermometer with probe is very handy, a standard solid cooking thermometer will also do
-
A timing device
Method:
Step 1: Break your flower up into small popcorn sized pieces and preheat the oven to 100c
Step 2: Fill a large mason jar with the buds, close the lid and lay it on its side on the middle shelve of an oven set to 95-100c. By keeping the flower in the jar we don’t lose any terpenes. The alternative way is to lay the buds out flat on a tray to decarboxylate. There are optimum timings here but my usual time is 45-50 minutes. Shaking the jar or tray a few times during decarbing.
(The chart above shows different temperatures and times for specific cannabinoids >if you’d like to have a higher CBG or CBD content)
Warning: doing it on a tray will create a smell!
Step 3: Fill your pan 2/3 full with hot water and set it on a small hob with low flame. If you have a slow cooker you can pour your oil directly into the pan and set it to cook. If using the pan method wrap a tea towel around the jar full of oil so it gets wet, this will help avoid burning dry, You will need to check regularly to make sure theres enough just off boiling water in the pan!
Step 4: >Bring your oil temperature up to around 90-100c. Once your bud isdecarboxylated/toasted and activated we add it to the hot oil and stir it in bit by bit.
(if using ABV: ‘already been vaped’ then skip decarbing and add the flower straight to the oil)
Step 5: Now we let the oil absorb all the cannabinoids and terpenes for four hours. Check it regularly, give it a stir every twenty minutes and if you have one we can do all this with a magnetic heated stirrer plate too.
If you have the jar in the pan please top up with hot water regularly as we don’t want it to boil dry and possibly catch fire or crack the glass (this happened to me once!) If you’re using a slow cooker then it will also need to be stirred regularly.
Step 6: After four hours we’re going to filter our mixture. It should be a lovely dark brown/green colour now. Set up two or three mason jars with funnels with coffee filters inside. Using the sieve we will carefully pour the hot oil through the sieve and into a funnel where the filter will take out any smaller pieces of material. Using two or three jars and funnels means we can spread it out as it filters better and faster when hot.
It may take a few hours or overnight to fully filter but then we have our end product! If you have used butter it can be stored in the fridge or freezer for baking or coconut oil we keep in the fridge. The runnier non setting oils will sit happily in a dark cool place for at least a year.
Notes:
- This covers just a couple of methods, there are lots more out there to make canna oils. Nowadays I prefer to use the heated magnetic spinner plate with a large pyrex beaker and a magnet bar spinning inside keeping the oil and plant material moving constantly. This way I can set my temperature probe in it, set the four hour countdown with a warning if the oil goes over 110c and leave it to do its thing!
- You can use any kind of flower for this, hashish or kief.
- Different strains make different tasting oils with different effects.
- Canna-butter can be used gram for gram in normal baking recipes or to replace part of the recipe fat content for a gentler high.
- Experiment with your oil choices!
Working out THC content
When working out the THC content of canna products we can use some basic rules. Our figures will always be approximations (unless you have access to a testing lab!)
If one gram of the flower you’re using is 25% THC then that’s 25mg per gram. If we’ve used 50g of the same flower thats 50 x 25mg, or 1250mg THC total. So our 250ml of oil now contains approximately 5mg THC per 1ml or 50mg THC per 10ml. Some of the THC will have burnt off so in reality it won’t be quite as strong!
This is infused shea butter for dry or sensitive skin
