The following is our word-for-word close encounter with a strange, fraudulent, and down-right scary new technology to have emerged during the earliest years of retail cannabis in California. What resulted from this experience has kept us from returning to anything of the sort, starting that day forward. This was when solventless extracts still required an obsessive passion to locate and crazy price markups, yet the alternatives became not just unthinkable, but wholly un-stomacheable. Here's the occurrence documented just as it was before, with these notes and a follow-up at the end of the encounter. Enjoy!..
Sunday, April 2nd, 2023
-Hashwriter
C.R.C. Extracts: The Fast Food of Weed?
With endless companies putting forth products extracted from cannabis, a long list of terminology has developed, often describing a product's final texture rather than the extraction technique. B.H.O., or Butane Hash Oil comes as live resins, cured resins, sauce, badder, budder, sugar, or diamonds and each one requires varying techniques. BHO and distillation techniques fill vape carts, make shatter and other less expensive crumbles. Recently, a solid white hash hit the Bay Area as: "Frosting". Sold for cheap, these extracts are white, white like the background to this post. Not an off-white gorgeous rosin, where different shades of white coalesce into a buttery delight, but a shelf-stable, powder-white extract. Appearing to be the cleanest B.H.O. ever, I made sure to get my hands on some...
Opening a gram of Papaya Frosting the scent is overpowering with an intense floral bouquet that my nose read with a skeptical delight. We were immediately turned off, stacking price, appearance, and smell. It smelled too good and looked too clean to be sold for half of what live resins sell for. Playing around with this extract, I was able to compress the chunk of frosting into a puck-like mold in the bottom half of a wide, clear jar. I compressed it with my fingers until it was about a third of its original size. It felt like pressing my thumb into densely packed-condensed baking-flour, but leaving almost nothing on my fingers, unlike sticky live-resin.
I don't normally stick my finger in a jar of cannabis concentrate (wink-wink), but this stuff was too strange not to touch. It's texture looks like real cake-frosting, but lacks the weight or density you would expect. Anyways, I took a big, strange first dab. Overwhelmed by the taste of papaya fragrance, I threw the rest in my drawer until I could figure out what the hell I was smoking on.
Understanding the techniques used to extract cannabis goes a long way in earning the trust of consumers. I asked around and was given a lot of half-assed, dodged answers that all wanted to tell me it was just B.H.O., which it is. Partial answers, misinformation, and customer confusion reigns in the early awakening of the C.A. recreational cannabis industry. While a certain amount of procedural integrity surely must be given to manufacturers and producer's, sustainable and successful companies know the customer deserves to know more.
Here's the real scoop on C.R.C.:
C.R.C. is a "color remediation column" helping to produce the colorless and white concentrates extracted with chemical solvents and sold in California. Through this second-stage extraction-filtering technique called "color remediation," dark hash oil can be drastically lightened in color. The butane or solvent passes through a secondary column that uses a combination of "T5 Clay", "Silica Gel," and "Celpure P1000," otherwise known as commercial fryer grease filtration powder, to help filter solvents and other impurities from the hash oil, according to TrimScene. "The CRC is a secondary column used as a filtration cartridge for hydrocarbon and ethanol extraction systems," states the C.R.C. product kit on Trimscene.com's website. Using this additional filtration column for BHO, a purely white and even clear extract is coming out of buckets of dark brown shit with consistent results. Sounds pretty sketchy to me, but who knows as its passing lab testing in order to be on CA shelves, but then again, so are cigarettes. The high was similar to other low-grade B.H.O extracts and deserves recognition for its price alone, however until learning more about the method, I'm good, and will not be purchasing C.R.C. extracts anytime soon.
Overall, I'm somewhat torn on C.R.C. and the use of food-grade materials that are seldom used outside of fast-food. Whether it is safe or not, I do not want my cannabis filtered through "fryer grease filtration powders" that are packed into the Color Remediation Column itself. I demand so much more in my hash, and see C.R.C. cannabis concentrates as the fast-food of cannabis extracts. If I'm looking for really inexpensive extracts that do not taste like hotdog water, then CRC extracts begin to make sense. The real fear however, is that the quality of cannabis, which solvent extraction already helps to hide, will matter even less in relation to the final product. C.R.C. concentrates are being produced from bulk cannabis biomass, often contaminated, making it even cheaper.
Without the use of C.R.C., a products color is determined naturally by the trichomes, the quality, and freshness of the product or plant. Dark brown extracts have always been the enemy, but thanks to C.R.C., the features that make for quality hash can be overlooked, opening the door to even more mass produced, mid-grade, trim-run products that will sure as shit, ...be white.
Follow-Up
Sept. 9 2024
Today it's rare that anyone calls their product a C.R.C. extract as the CRC column has become a mainstay element in many BHO producing labs. As a secondary column to the BHO process, it's become a part of the whole chemical solvent extraction racket. This along with a list of even worse plant-violations, have led us to avoid anything made with chemical extracts going on five to six years already. The only way to consume safe products is to deny these disgusting methods outright and demand solventless products. As you can see, our menu reflects this as we do not carry BHO products or extracts.
Smoked distillates and other solvent based extracts for a few years and then bam, got a bad cart with some residual left that led to a pretty bad health episode. It'll always be solventless or nothing since then for me!