Don’t miss Dr. Allison Justice and Dr. Markus Roggen speaking at their session titled “New Research Results: Understanding, Modulating and Optimizing Drying and Curing” at the Cannabis 2018: Cultivation Conference! Justice and Roggen will present their research at OutCo Tuesday, March 13 at 3:30 regarding how to use drying and curing processes to affect and control the chemical makeup of the flower, new protocols to monitor the dry and cure of cannabis to modulate the terpene and cannabinoid profiles in strains and more. For more information, visit www.cannabiscultivationconference.com.
While wine and whiskey are aged for years in oak barrels, and tobacco is air-, fire-, flue- or sun-cured, cannabis is generally dried quickly and stored in a plastic bucket. Many cultivators have proprietary ways of making flower flavorful and aromatic, but little to no research is available to help the industry achieve consistent drying and curing methods. This lack of data prompted OutCo to research what happens during these processes to eventually learn how to optimize them.
Hanging cannabis from a roof to dry and then placing it in buckets, glass jars, paper bags, cardboard barrels and similar sealed containers are common drying and curing methods cultivators use today, says Dr. Markus Roggen, OutCo’s vice president of extraction.
“It’s very low-tech,” he notes.
Roggen says OutCo is on the hunt to figure out exactly what a cure is, and will then start optimizing the curing process once the team understands what it does to cannabis. One of the things they will investigate is the burp, or the opening of the sealed container during the curing process, according to Dr. Allison Justice, OutCo’s vice president of cultivation.
The OutCo team wants to find out what exactly happens during the burping process and investigate the strains of gases to see what happens to the levels of carbon dioxide, oxygen and ethylene during the burp, Justice says.
“If we know what gases are optimizing the flavor change or the smell, then we can … optimize it,” she says. “We also can figure out [if] the burp [is] letting any moisture out, or [if] it [is] just the gases that are being exchanged.”
OutCo’s research may also reveal what happens to chlorophyll during the curing process, Justice says, to determine if it is being broken down, and to analyze the conversions of sugars.
“Everybody has their guesses right now, and … our goal is … to figure that out,” she says. “You can’t optimize any of these processes [and] you can’t recommend different types of container materials until you know what’s happening inside.”
“Hopefully experiments and research like this will give us the answers we need to make proper recommendations because until then, it’s just going to be everyone’s opinion,” Justice adds. “[Cultivators are] just going to do what they’ve done for ten years because it works well. Maybe it does, but somewhere down the road it’s going to be very different protocol.”
Top image: © Mitch | Adobe Stock
