One of the most frequent questions I get at my dispensaries in Tacoma, Tonasket, and Twisp is how to accurately dose edibles that you make at home. It’s not too difficult, and hopefully in this primer, I can impart the knowledge of how to do it at home, and I’ll provide some follow on instructions to make sure we get this product combined, because just eating dried cannabis raw or preparing it correctly will lead to a less than altering experience.
Back in the day, you had some herb, some butter/oil, and a crockpot. Cannabis that wasn’t actively cultivated tended to be weak, so You’d load the crockpot with cannabis and butter, and let it simmer on low for a few hours, strain out the cannabis particulate, and make a recipe of brownies or some salad dressing with infused oil. Sometimes you’d get loaded. Sometimes you wouldn’t get high. Sometimes you’d hit the sweet spot.
What are the three things needed to get high from cannabis, when eating it?
- Proper dosage – this is personal preference.
- Activated THC
- Bonding to fat, oil, or solvent
We’ll break these down after a little historical context.
As you might infer from getting totally loaded, you can really saturate a fat or oil with cannabis – perhaps too much so…. But that’s a matter of personal preference. I’ve seen people get pretty loaded on 2.5mg of THC, and I’ve seen people blow right through 400mg without batting an eyelash.
Washington State mandates a maximum of 10mg per piece / serving in I-502 regulated cannabis market. That means any edible finished cannabis products you buy at a dispensary is a MAXIMUM of 10mg per serving. Drinks that are 100mg are technically multiple servings, and solid edibles must be individually partitioned or wrapped into 10mg servings.
At this point, we can really dial you in…… Go ahead and bookmark this page, so you can keep this info on tap. You won’t want to lose it.
GETTING STARTED
First – your starting materials.
A plan of what you are making with infused oil, butter, or solvent (generally high % alcohol like Vodka – Everclear)
at least 1 gram of FECO / RSO from your local House of Cannabis or another dispensary.
PROPER DOSAGE
Alrighty… So you have all of your starting materials. First, we must check out some information on your FECO / RSO. Go ahead and look for the THC %… It should say something like “75.8% THC”….. if it’s higher, or lower, don’t worry – every sample is different, and with FECO / RSO, the remaining leftovers are canna-goodness anyways…. But – this gives us a basis on which to work our (limited) math.
So… my pretend sample is 75.8% THC. When you have a gram of this FECO / RSO, all you have to do is that that percentage, get rid of the decimal and the percentage symbol…..
75.8% THC = 758.0 mg of THC.
See how I did that? No big deal. I moved the decimal point one place to the right, and now I have a rough idea of how many milligrams of THC are in the gram of FECO / RSO.
Ok, so we have 758 mg of THC. So what?
Well, let’s assume we want to make 50mg edibles. If we divide 758 by 50, (758 / 50) = we get 15.16 — This represents how many edibles we can make at ~ 50mg with our RSO / FECO.
So – how many pieces does your recipe call for? The recipe on the back of the Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie makes 60 pieces, which means that with 4 grams of RSO / FECO, we could make the whole recipe…. Or you could adjust and use the single gram of RSO / FECO to all 60 pieces, and they would be ¼ as strong (12.5mg as opposed to 50mg), and you could enjoy 4 cookies instead of 1 to achieve 50mg… Or we could just make 15 massive cookies (don’t forget to bake them a little longer if you go this route!!). You can also use only a portion of the RSO if your recipe is coming out too strong.
Let’s recap, very quick —- To determine how strong your edibles will be, you divide the mg of THC in your RSO / FECO by the servings in your recipe. For example:
Your brownie recipe makes a dozen brownies and your RSO / FECO is 758mg:
758mg / 12 = 63.16mg per brownie
OR
Your salad dressing recipe makes 60 servings, and your RSO / FECO is 758mg:
758mg / 60 = 12.63mg per serving
OR
Your cookie recipe makes a 36 cookes, and your RSO / FECO is 758mg, AND you decide to only use half of the RSO / FECO:
379mg / 36 = 10.52mg per cookie
ACTIVATED THC
Well, there is a reason I suggested RSO / FECO as your starting cannabis material, and that’s because the manufacturer has already taken care of the key component of this need. If you are using RSO / FECO, go ahead and keep reading for further information, or you can skip down to BONDING WITH FAT, OIL, or SOLVENT.
If you start with dried cannabis flower, trim, or another type of concentrate like BHO or PHO, you need to worry about this. A significant portion of the THC in your product has not been ‘activated’. It’s scientific description is called decarboxylation. Basically, the THC molecule has a carboxyl group molecule dangling off the central core. To get that THC molecule to bind to our system, we need to heat it to break the carboxyl chain in a chemical reaction, initiated by heat. It happens automatically when we burn cannabis to smoke it, and the process of making RSO / FECO involves heat, and inherently causes the decarboxylation process.
It’s not hard… You can put your dried cannabis on a baking sheet and bake it for 40 minutes @ 250 degrees. If you are using BHO or PHO, put it in a small glass container, or a baking ramekin. Silicone lined baking containers, when working with BHO or PHO, keep waste to a minimum, and make cleanup a relative breeze. You can bake BHO/PHO at around 230-250 for 30 minutes. After,
BONDING WITH FAT, OIL, or SOLVENT.
Simply put, your RSO / FECO can be whipped directly into soft butter, stirred into oil, or dissolved into high proof (140+) drinking/cooking alcohols. After fully blended, add to your recipe as directed and finish your prep.
FINISHING UP
Be sure to consider serving size, or you might get a high powered surprise, understand that edibles can take 40-60 minutes to come on and in large doses can hit hard right up front, and be sure to store your self-produced edibles in a place where children cannot access them.
Have fun, friends!
