There are a few factors that affect how much bubble hash you’ll get from one ounce of cannabis. And aside from the yield by total weight, you also need to take quality into account. If you’re calculating potential yields for commercial applications, it can be helpful to think about yield in terms of percentage rather than grams, as percentages are easier to extrapolate. Commercial processors also need to think about the efficiency of the system to make sure that they’re using each part of the cannabis plant to its full advantage without spending any more than they have to in order to deliver a great product.
Bubble Hash Yields by Starting Material
To help you make calculations quickly, we’ve broken down the potential yield from the bubble hash process by starting material. You can easily halve these amounts for the yield from a half oz or multiply them if you plan to make hash with larger amounts of cannabis bud or trim.
| Starting Material | Average Yield from 1 Oz |
| Trim | 1-3% of the wet weight or 4-12% in the dry weight equivalent |
| Fresh frozen or dried-and-cured cannabis buds | 1-6% of the wet weight or 4-24% in the dry weight equivalent |
As you can see, you can get more bubble hash from marijuana buds than from trim, and the difference can sometimes be substantial. Additionally, the bud structure, trichome detachability, and trichome head size averages of the strains you use will also have a lot to bear on the resulting yield.
Calculating Bubble Hash Yield by THC Percentage (Extraction Efficiency)
Some people use THC percentages as a guide to how much hash their plant material can be expected to produce, something that’s referred to as extraction efficiency. For example, a strain with 20% THC could theoretically produce up to 20% of the starting volume in extract form (definitely no more than that) as the THC is contained in the trichomes, and the trichomes are what you separate when you make an extract.
When using a solventless extraction method like ice water extraction, you would expect your yield to be slightly lower than the THC percentage due to the fact that a percentage of the content of your trichomes is made up of the trichome “husk,” other cannabinoids like CBD, CBN, and CBG, as well as terpenes and flavonoids. Whereas solventless extraction methods like ice water extraction have a middling extraction efficiency, solvent-based extracts tend to have a higher extraction efficiency, with average yields of 25-80%, depending on how much THC was in the starting material.
Tips for Getting the Best Value from Cannabis Extracts
As a processor or extraction technician, you’re probably concerned about more than just yield—you’re also concerned about customer satisfaction and getting the best return on investment (ROI) from each crop. Keeping this in mind, here are a few tips:
Start With the Right Strains
Not all strains are equal when it comes to making solventless concentrates like bubble hash (AKA ice water hash). For washing, the best bubble will be produced with large trichome heads in the 73µm to 120µm range. To figure out if a strain will yield well in a commercial wash, begin with a test wash to see which sizes you collect in your bubble bags and how abundant the best-sized trichomes are.
If you’ve tried making bubble hash and you only got 1 gram per ounce, either your starting material isn’t rich enough in trichomes or your equipment isn’t up to par. Remember, too, that you need to break up large buds before washing them for bubble hash, to expose the maximum number of trichomes and help them detach more easily from the buds.
Use the Right Equipment
To get the highest possible yield and make high-quality, 5 or 6-star bubble hash, you need professional hash washing equipment. Our favorite piece of equipment for making bubble hash is The Original Resinator.
This innovative machine can be used as a bubble hash machine by rotating your buds in a mixture of half ice and half cold water (distilled or reverse-osmosis-purified) with injections of liquid CO2 as needed to keep the chamber cold. It can also be used to trim buds and separate dry sift when the chamber is dry.
Using The Original Resinator, we’ve seen bubble hash yields of up to 24% or more in dry weight conversions with full-melt quality, and all with as little as 2 to 15 minutes of rotation. The clean-up afterward is also a breeze. What is usually a laborious and time-consuming process is as simple as “drain and rinse” with TOR.
Do you want to add high quality live, solventless products to your brand’s lineup? Talk to our team of post-harvest experts today and we can help you figure out exactly what to do.
Use a Range of Extraction and Separation Techniques
When you’re a commercial cannabis grower and/or producer, you need to get every last cent out of your cannabis. A single percent can be the difference between barely breaking even and making a profit.
For example, if you freeze your buds after harvest, maintain the cold chain, and use an Original Resinator for processing, you could:
- Cryo-Trim® your buds, freeze dry and cure them, jar them, and distribute them to dispensaries (this process—which is part of our proprietary Crop-to-Cure® method—can result in award-winning live-dried buds). Popcorn buds work great in pre-rolls.
- Wash your fresh-frozen buds, freeze dry the resulting live bubble hash, and press the hash to make live hash rosin.
- After either of these two options, you can wash or Cryo-Sieve® the trim to make live dry sift or live bubble hash, which you can then freeze dry and use to make edibles or infused joints or press into live rosin. You can further process rosin into edibles, topicals, carts, and more.
- After pressing rosin, you can decarb the rosin chips into oil and use the oil to make some pretty potent edibles.
- If you don’t process your wet or dry trim in-house, you can sell it to other processors and extractors for an additional income stream. The full-bodied trim that results from our Cryo-Trim® process is highly sought after due to the fact that the trichomes are completely intact and the sugar leaves aren’t streaked with chlorophyll or plant particulates.
Want to learn more about how you can maximize your trichomes for the most profitable SKUs? Make sure to take a look at our helpful Micron Chart.
Maximize Your Bubble Hash Yield With the Right Buds and Processing Equipment
If you wash your cannabis using a manual, DIY system, you can expect to produce bubble hash yields in the low-to-average end of the ranges we’ve provided. However, if you use The Original Resinator to trim, sieve, and wash your buds, you can not only achieve a very high-quality result and excellent yields, but you’ll be able to make a wider range of SKUs—making sure that every last gram of your cannabis is being used to full advantage for the highest ROI.
For the best quality bubble hash and the largest yields:
- Start with trichome-rich, fresh frozen cannabis buds.
- Trim and wash the buds at cold temperatures using The Original Resinator.
- Freeze dry the hash for further processing, pressing into rosin, or packaging and distribution.
Using this process, you too could achieve yields of up to 24% with a quality of up to 6 stars or full melt. It really doesn’t get much better, or easier, than that.
