Can You Eat Live Resin?

Weed is very versatile — you can smoke it, vape it as a concentrate, eat it, apply it as a topical, take it in a capsule, and vaporize it with a dab rig. There’s no shortage of ways to enjoy your weed. The most important thing to note is that the form of the weed should dictate how you use it. You can’t smoke a pot brownie or roll a joint of resin. You can’t put a cannabis capsule on your dab rig. 

Live resin is very special cannabis concentrate. It’s unlike any other kind of resin or wax. The process that goes into creating live resin is extremely careful and deliberate. Its goal is to produce the freshest and most complete cannabis product that anyone will ever enjoy. This difference is the reason why you should never even think about eating live resin. 

What is live resin?

Live resin is made from fresh cannabis flower. The flowers are harvested from the plant and immediately frozen on dry ice or in a bath of liquid nitrogen. This preserves them in their natural state. The buds don’t ever dry, change, or oxidize. The cannabinoids and terpenes are locked in time, maintaining the same level of freshness they maintained when they were still attached to the rest of the plant.

The flowers are then placed into a special butane extraction chamber that keeps the flower cold. Butane is introduced as a solvent to pull away the naturally occurring compounds from the plant material. The solvent is then evaporated and removed from the cannabis extracts, which are the finished product of this process. 

How is live resin different from other resin?

All plant material will begin to decay as soon as it’s harvested from the plant. Fruits and vegetables are a little heartier than flowers. If you pick a flower from a plant and leave it out on the table, you only have a few days before it turns brown and shrivels. Its smell is gone and it becomes dry and flaky. If it retains too much moisture, it starts to rot.

Cannabis is prone to the same phenomenon. If the flowers aren’t properly dried in a controlled environment at the time of harvest, they’ll crumble up or succumb to rot. The flowers are then cured in airtight containers that preserve the stability of the bud without allowing the cannabinoids and aromatic compounds called terpenes to escape. This drying and curing process is necessary to preserve them so they will eventually arrive at your bong intact.

Most of the cannabinoids stay intact, but the terpenes often do not. Aromatic compounds evaporate very quickly, and more than half of them have left your cannabis flower before you have an opportunity to smoke it. What you know as weed contains all the cannabinoids of weed, but its scent and flavor are nowhere near the same as the scents and flavors the cannabis plant actually produces. 

Live resin never undergoes this process. The goodness of the flower is extracted from the plant material before it ever has an opportunity to change or degrade. Every terpene is kept intact. Live resin is the closest thing to raw, fresh cannabis that you can actually inhale. It’s like the difference between a fresh organic apple and a bag of apple-flavored fruit snacks. The two are similar, and they can both be delicious, but they never directly compare. 

How do edibles work?

Edibles work by introducing cannabinoids into your bloodstream through your digestive system. Your digestive system works its magic, picking apart the nutrients, sugars, proteins, and carbohydrates in the edible. The cannabinoids, along with the rest of the edible, are processed and filtered through your liver.

This process causes a slow release of cannabinoids, causing a longer high that many people feel is significantly stronger than the high you get from smoking. Some people love it, but others prefer the more predictable experience and faster onset of the cannabinoids they experience from inhaling them. 

In order for edibles to have any effect, the cannabinoids need to be converted, This requires heat that’s more than three times your normal body temperature. If you were to eat a raw cannabis flower, it wouldn’t do anything to you. Your body can’t convert it, so you’d merely digest it. That’s why edibles are made with decarbed weed.

Decarbing the weed

Decarbed weed, or decarboxylated weed, is weed with its cannabinoids pre-activated. Low heat is applied to the cannabis for a long period of time, converting the cannabinoids into their active forms without burning the weed. Both extracts and cannabis flower can be decarbed and used to make cookies, brownies, or gummies.

Live resin cannot be decarbed. Since heat is the most formidable enemy of its valuable terpenes, live resin shouldn’t be heated until it’s actively being used.