I’m having a discussion with some other growers in another group on curing methods and water curing was brought up.
Water curing is a curing method that uses water to dissolve solids from the plant material (including sugars and salts.) It also removes much of the taste and smell (so not for everyone,) but supposedly is supposed to make for a very clean, very smooth product for smoking.
Has anyone tried this before or has experience in it?
YouTube is full of videos using baking soda and lemon juice to bathe plants
when you take them down. We haven’t tried it, but they got caterpillars and
dirt and other things out of their buds. And said it made a smoother smoke.
Anyone done this. 1 bath and 2 water rinsed.
I used this method in my first ever grow! Definitely reduced the small and flavor, but it smoked beautifully. Never any char, the ash would always turn snowy white.
Yeah I did it once. Stuck an oz in a quart Mason jar and filled with RO water. Changed the water every day for 2 weeks. The first week the water was black, then green then brown. Eventually clear, then dried it (dries fast) and ready to smoke. The weed was now a pale tan color, and was very smooth and almost odorless. Still works just as well to get you high.
Water curing removes all the chlorophyll and fertilizers in your flowers,anything water soluble gets leached out.
We have some back-and-forth conversations about what might be left as a residual in some of the concentrates we’re consuming, it would be really interesting to see how water cured buds test out versus traditionally cured buds when it comes to contaminants, especially once they start being processed.
And they’re using just water? I know that some people do a sort of purging method with concentrate using water, salt, and a bubbler. The salt apparently attracts any and all contaminants.
There really isn’t much use for water curing (unless you want to smoke around cops and confuse them). We have watered cured many many times. We even experimented with a method we called a Sun Tea Cure in which we would water cure in the hot summer sun to create CBN. Yes, you may remove some undesirables such a foliage spray, chlorophyll, etc, but you are really just ruing the product. Most terpenes are not water soluble so you aren’t destroying the terpene profile. We have tested and confirmed this from labs. However the flavor is greatly compromised. So, what is the good stuff that you are removing then? Our guess is that water cures remove flavinoids. Although water cures are fun to learn from, I really don’t see this method to have a future in the cannabis industry.