Wanting to share some information I have acquired over the last two years In the process of freeze drying cannabis.
There is not a lot of information on the Internet as to Settings to use and how to do it properly. When you google it you’ll see many articles talking about the benefits of it and how well it works and the final product but no information on how to achieve it…
So the goal of this post to hopefully help somebody here or somebody directed to this post just by a Google search and brought to our amazing community here.
So let’s get it started, first, I like to start with wet trimming, I find this works better and you can fit more and it’s not as difficult for me.
Some key points here are if you have a harvest right freeze dryer you will need to contact the manufacturer and ask for the pharmaceutical update. They will only ask you for your serial number. Send it over to you free of charge.
Load them trays up, I found I can load about 2 1/2 gallons into the freeze dryer at one time.
Let’s get started with the settings. I like To set my initial freeze temp To -30, only reason being is I wanna make sure the product is good and frozen solid before moving onto the next step.
In this Second picture here You can see shelf heater temperature this is the temperature which it heats the product for drying as you can see I have mine set to 40° nice soft gentle heat. You can see my drying Target as well. I want the product 88% dryness which leaves 12% moisture content left which is perfect for cannabis.
Now let’s hit start and get this thing going. After hitting start, it’ll go through a couple phases first being freezing. Once the chamber gets down to the set target that you chose mine being -30, it will move onto vacuum freezing temperature will continue to drop while the pump is creating a vacuum. once it creates a near perfect vacuum, it will move onto drying process.
This process will add gentle heat, allowing ice and water to essentially boil at near freezing temperatures. The technical term is sublimation. This process allows moisture or ice to evaporate and stick to the chamber walls, removing It from our precious flowers Even at temperatures of -47 Fahrenheit, like the picture below illustrates.
This process only takes 14 to 17 hours to have smokable flower, They come out practically cured, now I will say a couple weeks in a Grove bag only does them good but the product comes out smelling just like it did in the tent, preserves All of those terpenes that would Otherwise be lost at higher temperatures.
And here we are, the next day With our final product. I hope this is helpful to someone.
