Resin Ranch

Outlaw Dry Sift Hash and Flower for Your Holiday Enjoyment.

December edition of Pot Talk

Todd Franciskovic is the Dry Sift Jedi of Resin Ranch Extraction. Joey Burger, aka the Humboldt Local, is the man behind the Mendo Hideout, a farm in Northern Mendocino. They provided Berry White flower and dry sift hash for this holiday edition.

Berry White is a delightfully classic cross: Blueberry X White Widow. The flower was grown at the Mendo Hideout. And Franciskovic from Resin Ranch made the dry sift hash from some of the trim.

According to Franciskovic, dry sift is a solventless extraction, a “separation,” really. Technically, it is isolated resin heads collected by sifting cannabis trim or flower through a series of silk screens. Resin Ranch is all about the solventless extractions — they make ice water hash and rosin too.

When making dry sift, Franciskovic uses four silk screens to separate the resin heads from the “contaminant,” where the word “contaminant” in this context refers to “the leaf itself, decapitated stalks, pistils or hairs, and even dirt and dust that’s sometimes in [the trim].”

So he sifts the trim or flower through the first screen, refining resin from the material. He repeats this process with the second and third screens, and the silk screen mesh gets tighter as he goes. Franciskovic refers to the fourth and final screen as the “refining screen” because it has the finest mesh: 196 lines per inch, or about 70 micron. Sifting the material through this final screen effectively cleans any remaining contaminant from the resin heads.

And what’s left is the dry sift, a fine, powdery and remarkably pure concentrate (on the order of 60-75 percent THC, Franciskovic says) that can be pressed into a patty and dabbed.

Burger from Mendo Hideout got the two Berry White plants for his garden at an Emerald Grown Cooperative plant swap with “all small, sustainable farmers.” The two source plants he got at the exchange were seed starts, and Burger says they “came out great, nearly identical.” In other words, these were “stable seeds.”

The two Berry White plants were organically grown in no-till soil, full-term in full sun — “no lights used.” He says the plants stood out because they ended up with a great nose. “They smell great, they smoke great, and they’re really frosty. Incredible bag appeal. I mean, the plant wasn’t anything special, honestly… It wasn’t a monster yielder. Just really good genetics.”

It does have incredible bag appeal. Burger showed me three different pounds of flowers, and Berry White drew me in the most.

Time to dab.

Franciskovic measures a bit of Berry White dry sift onto the center of a small piece of parchment paper. He folds the parchment paper in half, then uses a warm knife to press the dry sift into a little patty, “so it’s easier to handle.” Now that it’s in patty form, it looks more like shatter or BHO — we can dab it.

I ask Franciskovic what makes a quality dry sift, in his expert hash-maker opinion. “I prefer a drier resin that’s more sandy feeling than greasy,” he says, “because if it’s a really greasy resin, say like the Phantom Cookies, it’s hard for me to clean because it gets gummed up on the screen.”

We start talking about the “melt” property of the hash — whether residue is left on the nail when you dab it. Full melt equals no residue. It’s important to note, Franciscovic says, that “with water hash and dry sift there will always be something left behind because we maintain the wax membrane on the trichome head.”

Good to know. So many variations on hash… And more developing all the time.

The Berry White Dry Sift:

The Berry White dry sift looks like honey blonde grains of fine sand. The texture of a small pressed patty of the dry sift is snappy, more brittle than sappy. The color of the pressed patty is a dirty blonde sunset, a golden sky with a gentle sheen. The flavor is peppery in the nose, like hash champagne. The effect is euphoric and invigorating out of the gate, tending toward a more relaxed feeling as time passes.

The Berry White Flower:

It “smells as smooth as Barry White’s voice,” my weed-loving friend says. She thinks it looks great too, that it looks organic. “This will make you sing in the shower.” Well said. The Berry White buds have the size and bulk of fir tree cones. The trim job is tight, and the color is kind of a mellow green, the hairs a rich brown. The smell is deep yet still hits a high note — it’s an effervescent blueberry rush. What a pleasure to roll some Berry White flower in a joint. I gave thanks for the Northern California kind.

Written by Emily Hobelmann