You may have heard your friends talk about kief, no, they aren’t talking about your Uncle, it is concentrated THC and it could change your smoking experience.
Kief is a name for the collection of loose cannabis trichomes that form as a dust or fine, concentrated, powder.
You may have found it at the bottom of your grinder and have been wondering what to do with it, you may just be sitting on a gold mine.
What Is Kief?
Kief is one of many names for the concentrated powder of THC that can form within much of your cannabis paraphernalia.
There is no actual name for this powder, so names can often differ from ‘kief’ to ‘keef’, ‘chief’, ‘poly’, ‘gold dust’, almost anything.
The word Kief comes from Moroccan Arabic. Traditionally, what ‘kief’ refers to in their culture is a mix of cannabis leaves from the flower, this THC powder, as well as some local tobacco.
Morocco used to be the cannabis epicenter of the world, before the plant was exported to the west from these endemic countries.
In modern day cannabis usage, we often use mechanical grinders to break up cannabis flowers, the preferred form of cannabis consumption in the West.
You may notice that once you extra the ground up bud, there is often a fine dust in the grinder.
You may have seen, or even own, a grinder that has a third compartment underneath a mesh sieve.
This small compartment is made for the purposeful collection of kief, you can find it on a grinder such as this one. This is commonly called a ‘kief collector’.
Kief is concentrated THC crystals that have been ‘dislodged’ from the flower. The flower is often laden with frosty trichomes of THC, this is also kief just yet to be dislodged from the flower.
Many people often sprinkle kief over their bowls, joints, and blunts, to get a stronger smoking experience, boosting the THC content of their smoke by a large amount.
Many people collect kief and save it for a special occasion.
Kief is very similar to hash, they are both forms of concentrated THC. If you collect enough kief, you can press it together into hash – they are one and the same thing.
There are a few ways you can smoke kief which we will cover.
Sprinkle It On
Kief is a very fine powdered substance so it can easily be sprinkled onto your chosen smoking form.
If you prefer to smoke with papers or blunts, then kief can be used efficiently in this capacity.
Before you close up your roll, place your ground up flower in the joint or blunt, maybe a little less than your regular dose, and proceed to sprinkle a little kief on top, then finish rolling.
Kief is concentrated THC, so it has a higher THC content than your flower, this means you should dose it accordingly and be careful not to unintentionally dose yourself too hard.
Figuring out your dosage will depend on how long you have been a cannabis smoker as well as trial and error.
If you are a bong smoker rather than blunts or joints, you can also do the same and sprinkle it onto your bowls!
Ingest It
The other way to use kief is to ingest it. In order to ingest marijuana with success, we need to decarboxylate the marijuana.
If you didn’t already know, when you smoke THC you are decarboxylate (or ‘decarbing’) the marijuana with heat.
THC actually isn’t effective at getting you ‘high’, when you burn the weed you’re turning THC into THCa which can effectively get you high.
This is why you can’t just eat weed straight up and get high, this scientific transfer has to happen first.
THCa also needs to bind to fat in order to effectively make you ‘high’. This already happens naturally in the smoking process, but when ingesting weed this is vital to a successful dose.
When trying to ingest any kind of marijuana for the purposes of getting ‘high’, this needs to be factored in.
This means that you can’t just put kief into your tea and it will get you high, the small amount of heat might decarboxylate it a little but not effectively enough.
If you want to use your kief in any edible or ingestible form of marijuana you have to decarboxylate it first, just like you would flower.
This usually involves placing it in an oven for a period of time: we suggest around 7 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit, although this can often be a game of observation without proper scientific equipment.
Once this decarboxylation has occurred you need to bind the THCa with some fat in order for your body to digest it properly.
Usually melting some butter and dissolving the kief in it is effective. You now have cannabutter that you can use whenever you want to.
Make Hash!
No, we’re not talking about eggs and potatoes. As we mentioned, hash and kief are more or less the same thing just in different forms, so you can make hash from kief, although not the other way around.
It’s actually a pretty easy process to make hash from kief, provided you have enough actual kief to form a decent amount of hash, in smaller batches this may not work so effectively.
Get some wax paper, the only thing your hash won’t stick to, and put a good amount of kief in between two pieces.
Create some form of buffer, such as an old t-shirt you can dampen or a dish towel so you don’t burn your hash.
Then set your iron on its lowest setting and carefully run it over the kief a few times and flip it over after every few strokes.
When the substance seems compact and no longer feels sticky, then your hash should be done and you can smoke it how you wish.
Final Thoughts
Kief is essentially concentrated THC that has become dislodged from the flower through grinding or general contact with other surfaces.
If you have smoked ground bud in a spliff or blunt then you will likely have smoked kief in some format.
The extraction of kief is a different matter, but can be achieved pretty easily.
Many grinds have a kief sieve which attempts to separate the kief from the bud, occasionally the kief will just build up on surfaces that your flower makes regular contact with.
Consuming kief can be pretty easy, smoking it in your preferred smoking method is the easiest and most effective way to use it.
Although some will have success with consumable forms of kief with practice and experience in the areas of consumable cannabis.
If you enjoyed this article, then you might like to read our post on the ‘How To Grow Marijuana‘.
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