How To Make Your Own Rosin At Home Right Now

We’ve all been here: You have some of the prettiest, aromatic, and SUPER sticky buds you’ve ever come across. A true gem from mother nature. But you don’t have any papers or glassware to roll it up. And you’ve waited all day to finally light up.

Oh no, what are you gonna do?

Well you do have a dab rig, but how are you going to use flower with that?

You can turn your prized nugs into a sweet, dab-able goop much quicker and easier than you think by turning it into rosin.

What is rosin?

Rosin (pronounced rah-zin) is the sticky end-result of distilling terpenes by using heat and pressure. Not the dark, charred resin that builds up in your pipes or bongs. It’s a way to turn your buds into an extract without any solvents, and it’s increased in popularity significantly the past few years. Larger manufacturers use specific equipment due to their need to put out high yields at once, but you can easily make it at home with a few simple items:

• Your bud of choice (you can also use trim or kief; you just want to have as many trichomes as possible.)
• A hair straightener
• Parchment paper

Simple, right? So here’s all you need to do:

Cut the parchment paper into 4×4 in. pieces. You’re going to fold the pieces in half and place your plant material in between, then use your fingers to firmly press it. You’re putting this in a hair straightener, so do not use wax paper because the wax will melt into your final product and definitely cause health problems.

For the best tasting and higher-purity result, use lower temperatures on the hair straightener.   250-330º is a good range to work with. If your straightener is significantly above this range, you can warm it up to full heat and then unplug it, so while it’s cooling down it will still be hot enough for your extraction.

Place your folded material in the straightener for 3-7 seconds. You want to hear the sizzling, which means the terpenes are hot enough to melt onto the parchment paper. Now, the end result should look familiar to you – golden sticky material that you can gather with a collection tool (nothing special here; go with thatever you’d normally use to set up a dab). Discard the plant matter and repeat as many times as necessary.

If this is your first time smoking rosin, you may be surprised at how the flavor differs from other extracts, especially butane extracts (known as BHO). Of course, the opinions vary and everyone has their own preferences. But it’s also cool that you can do this rosin method quite easily and virtually anywhere. You can also collect rosin from different buds and combine them on the same dab, and eventually figure out your favorite home-made combo. Or, if you get some CBD-dominant strains you can make extracts from that and also combine that with THC strains.

While this is overall a straightforward process, I must kindly warn you to be careful when using the hair straightener due to the high heat. Be patient and just have fun.