A new approach to Curing

[grouchyoldman]

Roger on that @alltaup, I ended up only burping the jars in the grow room where the dehumidifier is in control. The rest of the house was still too humid to be helpful.

We are currently on a fly fishing trip on the Deerfield River in northwestern MA and I had to bring some jars with me to continue curing. Only problem is that the humidity here is 81% in this morning fog! To play this game you gotta have some air near the target to burp with. Hopefully this afternoon the sunshine will dry things up.

We have two hundred Boy Scouts nearby in the campground and my Saintly Spouse isn't too happy about the Bruce Banner "perfume" wafting through their tents!

[alltatup]

In principle, there is a problem with this method: clearly, if it stays too humid both inside and outside the jar, you're going to have problems. I say get a dehumidifier and keep the cure room at around 60% RH.

[Puglover1]

Mine were a little on the dry side. I opened 15 jars then closed them back up, this was during winter. I was getting carpal tunnel symptoms. 6-7 months in jars and they smell divine, not dry at all.

[bboyfromwayback]

This isn’t my preferred way but that bud spinner is the berries. You can harvest a big plant in less than an hour. That’s cleanup and everything

[Floopydoop]

Last year's harvest time it was way too hot and way too humid, so mine ended up in jars with cheesecloth over the lids in the fridge. Took a couple weeks until they were in the correct range, as a plus, self burping. Negatives...dont have baking soda in the fridge....and expect everything to stink of weed. Lotus Slow Cure, there's plenty of infos out there if you choose to go that route.

[Catfish22]

10-4 to both of you!

Thanks for the weight parameters! I won't be as worried about "over running" the target weight.

I got one of the 75% test kits from Boveda and 11 of 12 of the hygrometers were within 1%. I now have confidence that I'm getting a correct humidity. All temps were either correct or high by 2 degrees F.

Happy farming! 🙂🌱

[grouchyoldman]

Thanks for the feedback!

Your "wet versus dry weight" approach is a nice addition. Dry it down to 25-30% of the wet weight, then break out the jars & hygrometers.

By the way, those little black hygrometers on Amazon are about three dollars each and the ones I received are both accurate (compared to a calibrated model) and consistent in relation to each other. Cheap enough to sample a batch of jars at once.

[bboyfromwayback]

When I use my bud spinner and dry on a rack I weigh out 100g sections. When that group of buds weighs 25-30g range they’ll be in the low to mid 60% humidity range once jarred

[Catfish22]

I've been using this approach and I realized at the end of last grow about the humidity difference as did grouchyoldman .

What I want to try to quantify is drying. I'm gonna try to do it by weight, as in at what percent of weight loss are buds ready to start in jars. It would be a ballpark figure but that's really all you need.

Heuristic, thanks for the new word!! I believe I will use your newly established heuristic while burping this Northern Lights that is bout to be chopped.

[bboyfromwayback]

Those colors look fantastic!

I approach curing the same way, if the humidity in the room is higher than 64% it’s counterproductive to open the jars. As long as it doesn’t get over 68% in the jar I leave the lid on and let the buds stabilize on their own. May take longer but I’m in no hurry 😁

[grouchyoldman]

There have been several great discussions on Drying and Curing lately and I thought I'd share what I recently learned.

I'm curing a harvest of Bruce Banner right now and this time I decided to get a bit more empirical about the process so I put a hygrometer in each jar and monitored the inside humidity closely. The result was instructive.

The buds were dried over five days using my normal routine: two days hanging untrimmed on the branch, third day trim all the saggy fan leaves, fourth day trim the buds off the branch and begin drying on a tray with good ventilation, fifth and beyond, stick with the tray until the little stems snap off clean. So five days can become longer depending on the humidity of the room and the nature of the bud.

After drying they go into quart Ball jars filled half to three quarters full. Pretty standard process, but a close watch of the humidity in the jars drives the next steps. I'm shooting for about 62% RH in the final cure. The dilemma I found with burping is that it can be counter productive depending on the humidity of the outside air versus the humidity you are shooting for in your cure.

As I understand the curing process, it allows the curing herb to slowly release the humidity in the buds by periodically exchanging fresh air with the humid air in the jars. The problem is that the outside air may be higher in humidity than the target you are shooting for. For example, one of my jars spiked up to 75% RH after drying and being jarred. Probably because I left some of the larger buds on their stems (because they were so pretty!) and the stems still had some residual moisture. Obviously time to burp, but the outside air was 85% RH due to a current rain squall and the result of burping was to spike the sir in the jar up over 80%. Wrong outcome.

I left the jar sealed to see what would happen but the inside humidity stayed high until the next day when I burped the jar again, for half an hour with the outside air at 60% RH. After that, the inside RH rose again, but only up to 63% where it stabilized.

So, the moral of this tedious story is that mechanically burping on a schedule may not be the right approach for a perfect cure and that you should consider the environment in which you are opening the jars as a factor.

My new heuristic (rule of thumb) is to only burp when the inside RH is more than 10% off target, then burp in an environment that pushes the jar towards the target goal. Leave the jars open long enough to approach the target cure zone then seal em up and keep watching.

I've been following that approach with this cure and after 10 days in the jars everything is stabilizing between 60-63% RH. The bud is already good to the touch, dry but not crumbly, the smell is beautiful and the taste, well, joyous. Going forward I'll only burp them once a week and only in outside air that is close to my target zone.

I don't know if this approach is correct, but it gave me a definable process and seemed to work. Your mileage may vary, caveat emptor, etc.