What Is The Best Environment For Hang Drying Cannabis Flowers?

There’s more to cannabis cultivation than simply growing high quality flowers from premium genetics. After plants are grown to full maturity and the flowers are carefully harvested, drying remains a key piece of the puzzle that allows the buds to reach their full potential. Drying is a make or break process that can raise your cannabis to trophy-level status or actually diminish its therapeutic value. Without proper drying techniques, the best flowers from the best genetics will fall short of delivering the optimum effects. 

The most obvious reason to dry cannabis flowers is to remove enough moisture so they can catch fire for smoking. Wet flowers don’t combust, which is why picking flowers from a live plant and rolling them into a joint won’t work! But there are other factors at play beyond just the moisture content of cannabis flowers, and how readily they’ll combust. Other noteworthy changes occur within cannabis flowers while drying, although they’re not completely automatic. The right environment must be created and maintained for drying to be most effective. 

How do you know when to harvest and hang dry for peak ripeness? The answer can be found in the trichomes, and we wrote an article to help you time your harvest for optimum ripeness.  Read more in How To Harvest Cannabis for Peak Ripeness.

When the trichomes are displaying ideal maturity, the plants are carefully taken down branch by branch and hung upside down to dry. Delicate handling minimizes the amount of trichomes that inadvertently drop from the flowers. 

What Happens to Cannabis Flowers While Drying?

The most evident change that occurs during drying is the reduction of weight of the flowers, accompanied by a reduction in volume. Like humans, plants are composed mostly of water, meaning most of the weight of fresh flowers will disappear as moisture evaporates. Cannabis flowers lose around 80% of their weight during drying. 

But there are also unseen chemical changes that are taking place. For example, chlorophyll, which is the green pigment in cannabis that’s essential to photosynthesis allowing the plant to convert sunlight into energy, breaks down into metabolites. This is significant in part because chlorophyll imparts a harsh, unpleasant taste in smoke, much more so than the metabolites. Drying not only readies the flower for combustion, but it gives the chlorophyll contained within the opportunity to break down for a smoother and more mellow smoke. 

 

 

Another chemical change takes place with the conversion of cannabinoids from the acidic into a non-acidic form. Cannabinoids in their acidic form (e.g. THCA) can offer therapeutic value, but not to the extent that their non-acidic counterparts can. While THC is known for its psychoactive and euphoric effects, THCA doesn’t provide those same benefits. While drying, the THCA in cannabis flowers (and more specifically within the trichome heads), naturally converts into THC. The same goes for CBDA and others. So even if you could smoke freshly picked, wet buds, they wouldn’t get you high. This is because the cannabinoids are still in their non-psychoactive, acid form. 

In addition to the transformation of acidic molecules into non-acidic molecules, some cannabinoids will transform into others while drying. The most noteworthy is the change of CBGA into THCA. CBGA isn’t a highly desirable cannabinoid, but THCA is. CBG is a precursor to THC, but the transformation doesn’t happen in full until the plant is dried. While the cannabis flowers are drying, CBGA changes into THCA. And from this acidic form, further drying allows it to convert into THC. 

Do You Always Have To Dry Cannabis?