Everything You Need to Know Before Buying Cannabis Concentrates

Unless you live in a traditional growing region, access to fresh weed flowers is another modern luxury. Like any other agricultural product, the cannabis flower has an expiration date, which explains why , throughout its long, long history , the drug has often been consumed in its super-potent (and super-storage-stable) form, hashish.

Today, hashish is classified as a concentrate in which the psychoactive and aromatic ingredients of the cannabis plant are collected and converted into a potent condensed form. Although hashish is literally ancient, modern technology has created innovative specialized techniques that have completely changed the way we consume concentrates and have even created new types of cannabis extracts such as waxes, oils and isolates.

These are all unique manifestations of the plant that you can consume by steaming or burning, baked into treats, etc. Depending on the method by which they are created, they may retain the full flavor of the mother plant material or slightly resemble a “plant”. Figuring out how to navigate the world of concentrates as a novice consumer can be confusing, so it’s helpful to have an understanding of the vocabulary involved.

Because we don’t know all of this, we asked four experts to explain some of the basics of concentrates that some see as the future of the plant.