Using a dab rig
If you’ve never used dab rig before, it’s not that complicated. It only looks a little intimidating. At the end of the day, it’s not much different from a bong. All you’re doing is encouraging the resin to evaporate, rather than burning it.
You fill the dab rig with water just above the percolators, the same way you would with a bong. Your live resin is sticky, so use a dab tool with a scooper to load it into the little bowl. The piece that holds the bowl is called a nail, and that’s what you heat to make your dabs rig work.
Since you need to carefully control the temperature of your dabs rig when you use live resin, it might be a good idea to get an e-nail. An e-nail is a device that looks like a car battery in a little suitcase. Again, it’s not as complicated as you’re thinking.
It has a little connector piece that you fit to the bottom of your bowl. You turn it on and it regulates the temperature for you. These devices usually come with a pre-setting for low-temperature dabbing, which makes your life so much easier.
Alternatively, you can use a butane torch like the ones made for creme brulee and aim a digital thermometer near your bowl to measure the temperature, stopping when you’ve hit your desired temp. That’s a lot cheaper and a lot less involved than an e-nail, and you might already have a butane torch out in your garage or near your grill.
Prolonging the life of your live resin
The way you smoke your live resin won’t matter if your live resin is wrecked. An important part of smoking it correctly is storing it correctly. A low temp dab won’t bring back the lost terpenes. You need to keep them there.
The best way to preserve your live resin is to treat it the same way you’d treat an essential oil. The properties of the terpenes are the same as the properties of floral aromatics in essential oils.
The best thing you can do for your live resin is to put the container it came in into a larger airtight glass container. You probably don’t want to stick the tiny little jar into a giant flour container. Look for a quart-sized airtight container. They make even smaller airtight containers for freshly harvested spices and herbs, which feels a little more appropriate for an herb product.
Keep that lid closed at all times, and store it in a dark, cool place like your refrigerator. A small container won’t take up too much space, even in a minifridge.
Never open the container in the heat or in direct sunlight. Take out only what you need and immediately close the container and put it away. If you forget to do it before you start dabbing, you’re going to be in a world of trouble. Even leaving the lid off for an hour while you’re having a social dab session can be enough to destroy your live resin.
You know you’re going to forget to put it away when you’re high. Do it while you’re still good.
If you take really good care of live resin, it can last you for up to six months before it starts to degrade. It probably won’t take you six months to go through a gram of live resin, but if you’re the type of person who wants to treat your special cannabis like a bottle of fine wine, you probably won’t be using it every day.
The takeaway
The first time you try live resin as low-temperature dab, you’ll immediately understand what all the fuss is about. You’re going to experience the flavors and smells you’ve been missing in all the time you’ve been using cannabis. It’s an eye-opening experience, and everybody should give it a try at least once.
Emjay is here to make it easy for you. We have a wide variety of live resin and other cannabis extracts, and we can deliver them to your house in about 30 minutes. Keep your comfy clothes on, put on some Queens of the Stone Age, and get your dab rig ready. We’ll be there before you know it.