Best Way To Store Weed and Keep your Marijuana Fresh
The best way to store weed depends on conditions and resources. The best way to keep your weed fresh is to keep it cool, dark, and dry. Storing marijuana, like preparing it, requires a certain amount of art. Storing weed can also create legal problems in some contexts. The best way to keep marijuana fresh is to keep it away from the natural enemies of light, diseases like molds, damp conditions, and proximity to light sources which can degrade its compounds.
Correctly stored cured bud can last for up to three years. The buds should be stored intact, not ground, so as to preserve the trichomes, cannabinoids, and terpenes in the long term.
Best Way to Preserve Weed
The best way to keep marijuana fresh is in a glass jar in a dark, cool, dry place. The best bud is fresh off the lot, processed correctly, and transported quickly, right to your hungry lips. However, sometimes you receive a nice batch of the pot, and it is far too much to consume immediately. Or hash that needs to be stored.
Signs of improperly stored weed are a dry, crumbly, stiff weed that burns and smells like paper and reduces to fine ash quickly. Cannabis from proper storage is full of fragrance, resin, and cannabinoids. It burns slowly and is full of strong fragrance. There are a few ways of keeping bud fresh. We are going to explore the newest and best, time-tested ways to keep marijuana fresh.
Don’t
First, let’s get this out of the way, things you must NOT do:
- Don’t roughly handle your weed
- Don’t freeze
- Don’t store in the refrigerator
- Don’t store above the stove or other heat sources
- Don’t store in plastic bags
- Don’t store in paper or aluminum foil
Storing Marijuana
Dark, Glass, Air-tight Container
This is the traditional way to correctly store your pot for later use. Choose a glass jar that is the size that allows you to fully stuff the glass with your intact buds, leaving little air that can dry out your weed. Plastic is a big don’t. Never store your weed long-term in plastic. Plastic will expose your weed to degradation by light, air, and temperature fluctuations. Even worse, it can leech the estrogen mimic, BPA, into your weed. None of us want that, especially the guys.
You need a glass jar that seals completely, leaving no air or fumes capable of leaking out. These kinds of jars are used for preserves, and the complete sealing of the container is what keeps the fruit preserves fresh. In a way, you are putting your own kind of fruit preserves in your jar and you want to keep in all the flavor, original moisture, and therapeutic plant-medicines in your cannabis. Once the jar is closed, and wiped clean, after a few days, you should be unable to detect the smell of weed. This is necessary to preserve your weed, and so that your storage area does not wreak of marijuana.
Now that you have your pot in a jar, you need to find a cool, dark place in which to store it. A cabinet or drawer are good choices. Be sure to choose a place that does not experience a lot of temperature changes that could affect the freshness of your weed. Also, it needs to be dark because light will cause your THC to break down. When you take some of your weed out for use, use smaller, dark colored jars to store it.
Cannabis Humidor
You can use a cannabis humidor to store your bud. This is a wooden, mahogany container that helps maintain the proper humidity, as well as provide a nice, stylish way to store your medicine. Cannador is a popular and stylish brand that has many different marijuana humidors available to help keep your weed fresh. It is important not to use a tobacco humidor, as the cedar is inappropriate for weed storage and will transfer oils and odors which are great for tobacco, but destructive for your bud.
Boveda Packs
Even with your cannabis humidor, you can take more steps for storing weed. A neat technology is Boveda Packs. Boveda Packs use salts and water absorbent beads that will keep a precisely specified level of relative humidity in your weed. This, combined with the Cannador humidor is a candidate for the best way to keep your weed fresh. The Boveda pack precisely regulates relative humidity by absorbing moisture when humidity is high and adding moisture when it drops too low. It maintains the RH to the specifications on the label.
Light, Humidity, and Oxygen
- You want to limit light exposure because it destroys THC. You can do this by storing in a dark place or in a dark container.
- You want to maintain humidity around 54 to 63 percent relative humidity which is easy to do with Boveda packs. Try to limit air exposure to increase the shelf-life of your Boveda packs. Other humidity systems include VaporBeads and Integra Boost.
- Oxygen can be the enemy of the integrity of your weed as it will take the moisture out of the weed and dry it out. Even with Boveda packs, limit exposure to oxygen. Although oxygen is a minor enemy, because it can allow the bud to dry out, or provide an environment for mold, you also don’t want to vacuum seal your weed without expert knowledge of how to do this without harming your medicine.
CVault
The CVault storage container goes perfectly with your cannabis humidor as an excellent way to store your pot. CVault partnered with Boveda to create the perfect container to maintain the best relative humidity for your cannabis products. The CVault combined with Boveda technology, in a Cannador humidor is one of the best systems you can buy; however, you can do as well or better with your own technologies.
Ideal Temperatures for Storing Cannabis
Your cannabis needs to be stored at temperatures below 75 F or 24 C. Fungi and bacteria harmful to plants like mildews and molds grow at temperatures above 75 degrees and these harmful organisms can ruin your weed. Find an area where the temperature doesn’t fluctuate too much, but remains around 65 Fahrenheit, or within ten degrees of 65 F at all times. This may be in a cupboard, closet, or drawer. Hot air rises, so you may want to find a location closer to the ground to store your weed.
Light Exposure
As mentioned earlier, you want to limit light exposure to weed that you intend to store. Light is actually the main factor that degrades your weed. UV rays and light from many sources will break down cannabinoids. Therefore, choose a dark place to store your weed, a closet or drawer that doesn’t receive much light. Use a dark glass container when you are ready to take out a portion for use.
Vacuum Sealing
This is a controversial issue among cannabis connoisseurs. Some claim vacuum sealing, properly, with plastics which don’t contain BPA, is a great way to keep your bud fresh for a very long time. It can also make it possible to seal small amounts, so that you can open a fresh pack when ready for use, like individually sealed coffee pods. Others claim that plastic will ruin your weed and vacuum sealing will suck out your cannabinoids and damage your trichomes. There is a happy medium however. You can vacuum seal individual doses, then store the individually sealed doses in a glass jar in a cool dry place so that it is still protected from temperature extremes, mechanical stress, and light exposure. You could even use a light-resistant plastic; however, you would need to be very careful to know the chemicals in your plastics because they can end up in your weed.
Pros and Cons
Jar Versus Vacuum Sealing
Let’s look at the pros and cons of the various methods of storing weed. First, the jar method versus vacuum sealing and plastic methods. We know already, using simple plastic exposes your weed to light, temperature, and mechanical stress and is only for short-term storage. Vacuum sealing, however, can be used for long term storage. The downside is that some plastics contain BPA and other chemicals that can contaminate your weed. Plastic is transparent, so it doesn’t automatically protect your buds from light damage. It is thin and so doesn’t protect well from temperature changes or evenly distribute temperature throughout the area. The upside is that it greatly protects from damage from oxygen drying out your weed, and it locks the concentrated phytonutrients into your weed as if locked in suspended animation. Another great upside is that you can vacuum seal individual doses so that you can use a dose without exposing the remaining weed to light and air as you must when using a jar. Ideally, you can seal individual doses of a batch, use one sealed packet now, and another 2 years later and it will still be as fresh as the first if kept with an unpunctured seal in a cool, dark place. There is an art to this that may take knowledge not a lot of people have, however. It is best for those already intimately familiar with vacuum sealing dried herbs.
Jar Versus Humidor with Boveda Packs and CVault
An obvious upside of the jar method is that it is cheaper than these new technologies of the Cannador, Boveda, and CVault. If you are intending to store your weed for less than a year, it may not be worth the investment and upkeep of these new technologies, if money is a factor. The downside of the Cannador, Boveda, and CVault technologies is the cost and the upkeep. The Boveda packs last a long time, but once the packs are stiff, they need to be thrown out and replaced. It’s safe to say they will cost you more than a glass jar. Also, these technologies are a bit more complicated than the old glass jar. That means you will need access to your own expensive set of brand name, patented products whenever you need more weed. If you need to store weed on the fly, it wouldn’t make sense to buy a whole new set, it’s much simpler to just buy a glass jar which you can get anywhere around the world for the most part. The simplest way to put it overall is that the old trusty glass jar does the job and is more resilient in practical terms than the newer, more stylish, more expensive technologies. So, unless you are a true connoisseur, and need to show off the most stylish and cutting edge weed storage products, you will want to stick to the trusty glass jar. But if you are that connoisseur, and you need to store various kinds of weed over long periods of time, then you will do better with the Cannador, Boveda packs, and CVault, these artful, stylish, and effective technologies.
