Cannabis buds have a tendency of letting off small flakes when broken down. These small grain-sized flakes are actually concentrated with THC, making them highly potent when put together in large amounts. 1 gram of these flakes is much more potent than 1 gram of regular bud. These flakes do have a name, and we call them kief. Collecting kief can be tricky, so we put together the best methods for doing so.
There are a few ways that you can go about collecting kief. Since it is so small (literally the size of sand grains), you must be extra cautious and often times use special tools to do the gathering for you. Once you get it down, you can easily gain enough kief to sprinkle on a blunt, smoke a bowl of. or whatever else you may use it for!
What Is Kief?
Before you go off collecting kief, you should first know exactly what kief is. If you already know about it, then go ahead and skip this section. If not, then let’s take a look at what kief actually is.
Kief is concentrated cannabinoid particles that flake off of cannabis buds when they are broken apart. As one of the many cannabis concentrates, kief is highly potent in THC and will offer a strong high when clumped together and smoked. You can also use kief in some edible recipes.
One popular use of kief is to wait until you have enough and pack a kief bowl, which is much more potent than a regular bowl (so beware). Another method is to sprinkle some inside or outside of a joint/blunt. This makes your joint or blunt more potent, offering a stronger and faster high. Ever heard of moon rocks? These highly potent buds use kief as one of their main ingredients!
Now that you know what kief is, and how valuable it can be to a stoner, you should know how to collect it. After all, simply doing so by hand is not the most effective method, by far. Instead, try one of our three methods below.
Four-Piece Grinder
The most common way of collecting kief is most likely through a 4-piece grinder. These grinders are some of the best on the market, and offer a built-in kief catcher. These catchers do all the collecting for you, so all you need to do is use the grinder as you normally would. The more you grind up, the more kief you will have stored away at the bottom of the grinder, in the kief catcher.
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Using a 4-piece grinder, you can grind up buds, store them and collect kief. As you grind up the buds initially, they fall through the teeth and gather up in the third piece, the screen. This screen prevents the broken down buds from passing through, but does allow kief to easily head down to the fourth piece, into the catcher.
My advice for using a 4-piece grinder to collect kief is to let the kief build up for a few months. Now, this does depend on how often you grind up buds in the grinder. Let’s say you grind up 2 grams of buds every single day in your 4-piece grinder. At this rate, you should collect your kief after about 2-3 months of steadily grinding buds. This may seem like a long wait, but it sure is worth it for a large amount of kief.
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The Coin Trick
Want to improve your kief catching abilities in your 4-piece grinder? Of course you do, that is why you are a reader of Reefer Post! As I stated, these are the best methods for collecting kief. With that being said, I could not leave out the popular “coin trick”.
This trick requires two items: a 4-piece grinder and a coin. Pennies and dimes work the best since they are the smallest. After you grind up your buds, you can use a coin to break apart the kief inside and help it make its way to the kief catcher. Here’s how:
- Start off by washing your coin! These coins can be very dirty and contain contaminants, especially coins that have gone through many hands. Wash it good before you put your buds on it.
- Once it is washed, set it aside and add some buds to your grinder. Go ahead and grind them up normally.
- After grinding, and before removing the finely-ground bud from the grinder, place the cleaned coin into the third piece, or the screen, of the grinder. This is the same place that your broken down buds will be in.
- Now close your grinder back up fully and shake it like crazy! Seriously, shake it as much as you can. What is happening here is the bud and kief slamming into the coin, causing the small particles to fall through easier and into the bottom.
- When you are all done, open the grinder and remove the coin and your buds.
Optionally, you can leave your coin in the grinder. Just remember to shake it up after you finish grinding so that the coin can do its magic (or trick in this case). Of course, this trick will not result in massive amounts of kief, but it will get you slightly more than usual since the coin is working to break the greens down even further.
Freeze THC
The last option for efficiently collecting kief is to freeze your buds. That’s right, have you ever heard of a frozen bud? Now you have, and you finally have a reason to try it out for yourself.
Freezing your bud allows for kief to fall off much easier. If you plan on using buds solely for collecting kief, then this is a great option. You can simply place your buds in a freezer until they have frozen. And no need to worry about the THC, since freezing does not affect or harm it.
Once frozen, place the buds in a jar and shake them up rapidly. The more you shake, the more kief you may acquire. When you are done, you should have a layer of kief in the jar waiting to be collected.
Do All Three
Here is a good idea: combine all three of our methods together. First freeze your buds. Next, place a cleaned coin in your grinder. Use the grinder to grind up the cold buds, then shake the grinder to get off tons of kief. This method is the best method for collecting kief from buds. In addition, with a 4-piece grinder, you can simply leave all your kief stored in the kief catcher!
Once you have collected enough kief, it is time to figure out what you will do with it all. My favorite thing to do is to sprinkle it in a blunt while rolling up, to add some good potency to the smoke. What is your preferred way of using kief? Let me know! Also, if you found this post useful, please share it with others. Thanks for reading!
