"The art of vaporizing dry herbs as realized by a cannabis connoisseur"
by Steve Kelnhofer
Long ago I was introduced to a desktop vaporizer called the Vapor Brothers and instantly fell in love with the taste and how much more I got from my herbs. Now, this was back around 2002 and all we had were kind buds. That was if you knew someone with the green thumb, or else we just had the B'sters.
I really wanted that desktop vaporizer, but as a creator and frugal person I decided to build my own desktop vaporizer with more durable parts and a little sexier. This became the Silver Surfer desktop vaporizer.
Over the years we have learned that the flavor is amazing, but that vaping dry herbs is also perceived to be much healthier than smoking by reducing the tars and carcinogens. You can find a good article on vaping versus combustion in an Elev8 blog here.
With over 140 compounds in cannabis, we think there are some good things to be found in vaping cannabis using a desktop vaporizer for your dry herbs, but we are not doctors. We have put together a list of the compounds, what temperatures they vaporize at and the potential benefits the compound has for the human body. Going over this list you can see that the first compound like CBCA starts to vaporize at around 220 and at higher temperatures just below cannabis combustion at 450 with the last usable compounds like THCv and CBC vaporizing at 428 degrees.
Knowing that some of the compounds are vaporizing at nearly cannabis' combustion temperature, the art is to get the herb as dark brown as you can without turning it black or igniting it. When roasting your herbs at a higher temperature you are getting a full spectrum so you can feel the relief of the Entourage Effect and also offing a much higher bioavailability.
Now let's talk about why many people switch to vaping dry herbs over combustion, which is the amazing flavor you taste while vaporizing. Only with a vape can truly produce the taste of cannabis as it was meant to be tasted. Learning the art fo vaporizing is also gaining the flavor spectrum from a light roast to a deep dark roast. Different strains taste different on the front end and the back end when becoming fully roasted in a desktop dry herb vaporizer.
As a connoisseur, I run my Super Surfer at a temperature that if I inhale very slowly I would catch the herb on fire. Why do I do this? The answer is that with a whip-style desktop vaporizer, I can control if my herb is to catch fire or not. When I vape I like to inhale faster at the beginning to get a light flavorful hit. As I roast the herb I start to slow my inhale speed. This increases the heat to the herb allowing them to get a deeper darker roast that will allow the higher temperature compounds to vaporize. As you do this you will start to taste the herbs as they change from a taste that is reminiscent of the herb in the sack to a rich roasted flavor. This rich roasted flavor can be a deep sweet taste to a spicy almost hot taste in your mouth.
Vaping from the beginning to the end, and taking the herbs to a darker brown will allow you to enjoy and experience the art of vaporizing.
