Know Your Herbs

World News

Blog

Cannabis aritcles

The 6 best games to play while high

Herbs

Contemporary canna-sseurs and boho game aficionados alike can agree that stoned game night is a singular pleasure, especially when the game in question is straight-up cannabis-themed.

Unlike other “mature” board games and card games that require some manner of focus, point scoring, rule keeping, and attention maintaining, stoner games are typically built on the premise that most, if not all, players are too high for that nonsense. In fact, the best stoner games are not focused on strategy or high scores at all. The best stoner games are focused on connection, getting absolutely zooted, and making you laugh till you wheeze and/or pee a little.

And while we’re still totally pro getting high and playing video games, in-person game nights with a few pals can also deliver some delicious memories and inside jokes that you’ll laugh about for years to come. Here are a few of our own game night favorites.

Find the perfect strain for game night on the Weedmaps app

Suddenly Stoned

This low-stakes card drawing game is super easy and can be played with or without score keeping. The directive is to draw a card and execute the command, the commands getting increasingly ridiculous the stonier the players become. Played with at least three players, some favorite cards include “play hide and seek,” “correctly guess what time it is,” and “draw the person to your left.” Some cards encourage every player to join in, and others contain solo, almost meditative tasks, depending on the players.

Bonus, the deck is about the size of a deck of playing cards, making it an easy game to pack up play just about anywhere.

Buy Suddenly Stoned

Cards Against Humanity Weed Pack

In case you missed it, the ubiquitous party card game of this generation has a cannabis-themed expansion pack. And it’s a must-have addition to the game chest of all card-gaming pot enthusiasts. The Weed Expansion Pack delivers signature CAH gameplay but with weedy overtures and grassy implications that won’t fly too high over any teetotaler’s dome in case there are a few non-smokers at the party.

Buy the Weed Pack

High Standards

Weedmaps’s own contribution to the field of stoned gaming is High Standards, a card drawing game designed in cooperation with Fitz Games. Unlike straightforward truth-or-dare style card decks, High Standards is a faster-paced card game that features a variety of mini-games inside its deck. Optimally, this game is played with anywhere from 4-10 smoked-up players who, in addition to the requisite dare/trivia-style game cards, can expect mini-games like “Pitch The Invention” and “What’s My Price?” Whether you plan on gifting it your fave game nerd or expanding your own board game trunk/cabinet/hollow ottoman, consider this game a stoner game night necessity.

Buy High Standards

Ganjaland

For pot-puffing players nostalgic for a game that’s candy-colored and whimsical, Ganjaland reimagines Candyland through a decidedly stoner lens. The gameplay is simple enough to appeal to heady smokers. Basically, characters race to a castle. They advance by drawing cards and either following instructions like, “take a solo puff, close your eyes, make a wish, and advance five spaces” or by completing more involved action cards. For example, the “Where’s Weedo?” cards require players to locate details on the elaborately detailed illustration of Ganjaland portrayed on the game board.

Buy Ganjaland

Hot Box Cypress Hill Expansion Pack

Hot Box is a fill-in-the-blanks, Q-and-A card game that’s an obvious effigy to Cards Against Humanity. But unlike CAH’s Weed Pack, Hot Box gets a soft endorsement rather than an enthusiastic one. Many of the cards in the Hot Box set seem written by people who do not smoke weed on the reg and thus rely on antiquated tropes. However, there is a Cypress Hill expansion pack written by the group, and for super-fans of the legendary hip-hop crew, that bonus feature is likely worth the price of admission.

Buy the pack

420 – The Card Game

Another simple card drawing game with ultra-low stakes is 420 – The Card Game. Players can keep points or just play in rounds, and this game can be played with an intimate trio of buddies or a room full of folks. Not unlike other card drawing games aimed at stoners, the actions are designed to deliver multiple hilarious moments that will hit especially well for the very stoned. There is a fun feature specific to this card drawing game worth noting. Each card played represents either a point scored or lost, and players are required to take hits for every point lost or gained. I.e., every player hits after every turn. Pro-tip: maybe fill up your stash jars before starting up a round of this game.

Buy 420 The Card Game

The post The 6 best games to play while high appeared first on Weedmaps News.

Source: wm

The best humidity packs (and hacks) for curing and storing weed, according to farmers

Herbs

Humidity plays a huge role in the quality of cannabis post-harvest, as well as its lifespan once in the jar. Properly cured and stored flower can remain a sensory smoke show of flavor, smell, and effect long after it’s sold. However, if moisture levels are off during the curing process or while being stored in the jar, even the highest-grade flower at harvest can fall victim to mold when too wet and harsh and degraded trichomes when too dry.

Like all good things in life, dank weed is ephemeral. But there are things we can do to slow its inevitable roll to the great beyond. Whether you’re a home grower with a heap of harvest or a customer looking to make the most out of your dispensary run, it’s essential information to know how humidity will affect your cannabis during and after the curing process.

Keep scrolling to learn about the complexities of maintaining humidity, or skip ahead to the best humidity packs for weed.

Storing weed starts with having some. Find flower on the Weedmaps app.

Cannabis and humidity: relative vs. ambient

There are two types of humidity to consider when curing and preserving flower. Relative humidity refers to managing the humidity levels of the flower inside an airtight container. Ambient humidity refers to the humidity of the room outside the jar.

The curing process occurs after the drying process. Freshly dried nugs are placed in airtight containers for 2 – 8 weeks, with the ideal relative humidity inside the jar between 55% and 65%, according to the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). To learn how to cure cannabis, check out our step-by-step guide.

The purpose of curing is to stop the loss of moisture and develop the buds to their utmost potential. According to Ed Rosenthal, a cannabis legend, “Curing is an art and should be tried with small batches first. The flavor becomes much more complex and refined, gaining in depth as well as in variation of bouquet. Like very good aged wine, there is something unique about a well-cured crop that any aspiring connoisseur should experience at least once.”

Since cannabinoid synthesis continues after harvest, the drying and curing processes can be as important as the growing process when it comes to the final product. Not only does a proper cure yield flower with a higher THC percentage, but it also stops the degradation of volatile compounds — like terpenes — that shape your experience with the plant, creating better tasting and smelling flower with a more potent high.

The best humidity levels for curing cannabis

To cure weed, growers loosely pack buds into Mason jars, seal them, and store them in a dark, cool place. Relative humidity should remain around 60%, which can be monitored using a hygrometer. Over the next weeks to months, growers “burp” the jars multiple times daily to release oxygen. Humidity levels are controlled using any number of tactics, from intuitively knowing what the flower should feel like to employing products like weed moisture packs.

Growing weed is an art form subjective to the person who grows it. It’s a thing of patience, care, and personal preference. “It’s a hundred percent intuitive on our end,” said Joey Gothelf of WildLand Cannabis, an award-winning regenerative farm in Mendocino, California. “I usually just monitor moisture by feel.”

He added, “The nugs shouldn’t be able to crumble easily with two fingers. That’s how I test the dryness. If I roll it between two fingers, and it crumbles easily into dust, that’s too dry. But if it has a little bit of a chew, a little bit of a squishiness, but not too much, that feels right.”

Walt Wood, a master grower and co-founder of Sol Spirit Farm, relies on experience, saying, “To me, curing actually just means evening out the moisture so the flower can undergo a microbial transformation, sort of like yogurt or something like that,” he said. To tell how the cure is going, “I just reach in a bin and do a gentle ‘touch touch,’ and I’ll know.”

The best humidity packs for weed

While master growers rely largely on intuition to achieve the perfect cure, humidity packs like Boveda and Boost are tools created to regulate moisture during the cure and preserve the flower after jarring.

The way these packs are engineered allows purified water to be released into the jar when needed, supposedly eliminating the need for burping the jars during curing and providing peace of mind for the grower after they send their flower into the world.

The most popular humidity packs on the market are Boveda and Boost, and both work similarly.

Boveda

Boveda packs control humidity using a salt and water solution that creates a “monolayer shield of purified water over the trichome,” according to the Boveda website. They have a large presence in the sun-grown craft farm community, a group that takes their terps extremely seriously. They are generally regarded as leaders in the humidity pack space.

Boveda packs come in a number of sizes to suit any amount of cannabis. For example, “Size 1” would be appropriate for a single pre-roll tin, while “Size 320″ would be appropriate to control humidity on a black and yellow bin during transport for a distribution company. The brand also offers “Home Grow” and other kits that include a number of packs, as well as metal C-Vault storage containers.

Find Boveda packs

Boost

Boost brands its packs as “salt-free, two-way humidity control.” They use a blend of water and plant-based glycerin to essentially do the same thing as Boveda packs. It’s another big name in the space and is regarded as similarly effective.

Boost packs are available at 55% or 62% relative humidity in a number of sizes that clearly dictate how much cannabis they are for, like 8-gram, 4-gram, and 67-gram packs.

Find Boost packs

Professional grower tricks

Despite the popularity of weed moisture packs, most of the farmers I spoke to were on the fence about their effectiveness, preferring to opt for simple, old-school tricks when it comes to curing.

“The humidity packs might be garbage, but I don’t really know,” said Wood. “If I want to bring my flower up to humidity because it got a little dry, I just put a couple of drops of water in there, you know, a little bit of moisture. But you have to be careful because putting too much is really easy, then you go swinging the other way.”

“If it’s dry, nothing beats the tortilla,” adds Jen Proccaci, co-founder of WildLand Cannabis. “It’s an old-school trick. You put a piece of corn tortilla in the bag. It moistens up the weed, and the tortilla turns hard as a rock.”

How to keep cannabis flower from degrading

cannabis flower in jars
Exactly what not to do.

While the cure is an art form in and of itself, keeping weed fresh mostly comes down to keeping the flower out of conditions that degrade trichomes. The biggest offenders? Heat, light, and humidity.

In the current market chain, growers deal with the issue of their flower degrading during transit or at the dispensary before the customer even has a chance to buy it. For this specific issue, humidity packets come in handy.

“Most of those humidity pack products are good for when you’re shipping it out, and you want to make sure that it doesn’t dry out when it’s going down to LA or something,” said Wood. “After it gets to the dispensary, you know that it’s going to be sitting on a store shelf out in the sunshine somewhere,” he said.

It’s good to keep in mind that the flower you buy could have already been through a lot by the time it gets to you. This makes it all the more important to store and care for it correctly once you bring it home. 

To make your flower last as long as possible, simply keep it in a cool, dark environment with moderate humidity. Think wine cellar, but weed cellar. Extracts and edibles should be kept in the fridge. Cannabis flower should be kept at around 60% relative humidity and out of any kind of light.

Editor’s note: Weedmaps does not get affiliate revenue from the brands recommended in this article. All products are chosen independently by the author. The only influence Weedmaps News is under is weed.

The post The best humidity packs (and hacks) for curing and storing weed, according to farmers appeared first on Weedmaps News.

Source: wm

Canadian Covid-19 Update

Get Your Canadian Covid-19 Updates Here