A new approach to Curing
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.
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.
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