By: Tiyana Matliovski

The potency, aroma and effectiveness of your bud is determined by the little mushroom like crystal hairs on the flower known as trichomes. These are essentially what makes good weed, well, good, so it comes as no surprise that there’s a product made entirely from the good stuff.  

It’s called kief, a dustlike powder of concentrated cannabis trichomes that can be consumed as an additive to your favorite cannabis products. These little resin glands contain the key ingredients - terpenes, cannabinoids & flavonoids - that define the effects of any given strain of cannabis.

Kief is somewhat hard to come by, so making it at home from good quality bud is a great alternative. The easiest method is to use what’s called a multi-level grinder that will collect the falling trichomes for you. As you grind the flower, the kief will fall through a sifting a screen into a little compartment and all you have to do is scoop out the kief.

You can also extract kief with a dry sifting technique. While this will fetch you a better quality kief, it is definitely a more time consuming and labour intensive method. With a set of different sized dry sift screens, you rub the flower while working your way down from the biggest screen to the smallest until you have a fine light green powder.

Although kief looks like a powder, it is actually thousands of tiny fragile little sacs of oil, which shouldn’t be exposed to any unfriendly conditions, so it’s recommended that you refrigerate your kief.

It’s actually quite a versatile product and can be used in a number of ways, both in its raw form and decarbed. Giiven that kief is a ‘pure’ resinous form of cannabis, it will generally contain a higher concentration of cannabis compounds making it more potent than the cannabis flower itself. This is why it’s commonly used to “crown” a bowl of ground flower, giving the consumer a more elevated high.

Kief is also the raw material for making hash. By applying heat and pressure the delicate little oil glands are punctured, which releases a resin that makes hash. You can sprinkle a little hash into your joint or just smoke the hash chips straight from a dab rig.

More recently joints rolled with kief are proving to be quite trendy for both their unique look and higher intensity. If you’re keen on the high, simply sprinkle kief onto your dried flower before sealing your joint. If you fancy getting creative you can lather the outside of the joint with a smokeable extraction (or other various smokable glue product- we like this honey based one) in cool patterns and dust it generously with kief, resulting in some pretty neat looking joints.

Learn how to roll up a kief blunt with Rox.C.Rolla

On the other hand, if you’re making edibles at home, adding kief is a great (and quick) way to increase the potency. Keep in mind that when it comes to edibles it’s always best to start low and go slow, so be mindful of how intense you really want those brownies to be.

Lastly, if you’re looking to get super fancy with kief, you could consider making moonrocks. Moonrocks are essentially cannabis flowers that are dipped in an oil concentrate and then covered in kief. Only buy moorocks from a trusted source as we’ve heard of people hiding low quality bud underneath a layer of kief. You’ll need to use your hands to rip up the nug when it is time to smoke it as the sticky resin will clog up your grinder.

Remember, the next time you smoke that last bit of weed, scan the insides of the container and you might see the beginnings of some kief stuck to the walls, just waiting to be rescued.