HELP: Stinky high quality bubble

[sned]

Hello fellow bubblers!
So, I've been spinning with a buddy for a couple months now and decided to buy my own 20 gal bubblenow xl machine and 8 bubble bags. We ran 500 grams of fresh trim, mostly triched out sugar leaves and lots of popcorn nugs. frozen, soaked for 5 min, spun for 6 on soft, then 15 on soft, then 20 on normal. Looks like the yield was around 9% or so. bags NEVER SQUEEZED, dried on cardboard, cut up with a knife to powder. dried for 5 days with a dehumidifier. Did the same thing with another strain. Both runs came out beautiful; golden blonde throughout, with the exception of some amazing amber colored concentrates caught in the 45 bag of some chemdog. the 90, 73, and 45 are all extremely sticky and heavily stoney. once my housemate comes home ill take some pictures, but to me they look like all the other quality bubble I've made/smoked
HERES THE PROBLEM!
every batch tastes off. it bubbles, melts, smears, puts you on your ass, but it doesn't taste quite right. never quite tasted it before... but its very noticeable and quite unpleasant... we were planning on selling the full melt 73 bag to clubs for 20 a gram but that cant happen and we cant run anything else till we figure out the problem.
problems we think we might have are:
using an old garden hose water source, maybe the water is too hard?
drying area is slightly warm, maybe that has something to do with it.
new materials? everything is brand new, maybe plastic residue?
maybe the cardboard we used soaked some taste into it? we used standard cardboard...
ive smoked stuff with too much leaf matter in it and it doesent taste quite like this so i dont think im spinning it too long. please help!!! any advice, guesses, theories are much appreciated.

thanks,
SNED

smoke.nugs.every.day.

[Bubbleman]

the only bubble i've ever had that actualy tasted OFF... was basicaly sulferated.. the crop suffered from Powdery mildew and the grower basicaly used a sulfer burner to closer to flowering ( anytime in my opinion is to close to ) also i have seen some material that was dried in a grow room where the guy thought it would be a good idea to put BOUNCE in his outflow of air.. this somehow contaminated all the resin and was unsmokeable ( to me at least)
thats all i can really say.. sounds like the resin itself was contaminanted before you ran it

Peace
Bubble man

[Criceolation]

It sounds to me like a few things may have tainted your bubble. I suggest unbleached parchment paper instead of cardboard, or a 23 micron screen stretched in a frame. Use the cleanest water available to you or go buy and fill some 5 gallon jugs from the grocery store. Those jugs are handy anyway. Use clean ice too. Just like with buds, if you cure TOO FAST, the product comes out poor. Your best bet is to remove as much water as possible in yielding it and in the first 24-48 hours. Then it goes into humidor, then burp. Quick curing has led to harsh batches in my experience. The flavor is dominated by the residuals from the water and any noncannabinoid in the bubble. Flavor comes from terpenes, but melt is also determined by terpene content. Quick cures all seem to steal terpenes. A cure should be no less than a week, and mine run 10-14 days average. Especially when providing to people who may have compromised immune systems, I think it's important to take every precaution against contaminants. I'm glad to see you thinking the same way. Take your time in cure and use the best materials you can. The other suggestion I would make is to wash all your equimpent before doing a run, ESPECIALLY with new equipment. And especially if you bought it at a headshop. Your bags will work better and yield cleaner if they're wet when you drain into them anyway.

[Suh Carlton]

Hello FMB, and thanks for the quick, thought-out responses. Glad to see both of you echoing a lot of the ideas SNED and I had while trying to troubleshoot this problem ourselves, we'll be implementing a number of changes and then reporting back after our next run. I'm suspecting it's the water supply. Criceolation, I like your thoughts on humidity - it's always a balance trying to remove water and leave terpenes. Do you have any thoughts as to the prime drying conditions? We have an adjustable dehumidifier

[Hashrabit]

Ive experienced similar issues. I narrowed it down to the wet trim and the nutes used to grow. Less important with some nute lines, but a good flush at the end of flower is very important!

[Suh Carlton]

Hashrabbit, definitely agree about the importance of a thorough flush, but what do you mean when you say you narrowed it down to the wet trim? Do you prefer trim that has been dried?

[Hashrabit]

Really what I narrowed it down to is that you are way more likely to taste the nutes in wet trim. Freezing wet trim (or whole plants) does something special to the terpenes. Im tryin to figure out exactly what, but my intuition tells my that these insoluable oils are being somehow drawn into/concentrated in the trics. Freezing wet material for long periods will dry it out, the natural process of freezing will wick the moisture out to the surface, water freezes out of trics while the oils are drawn outward with the moisture to coagulate. I am nowhere near a botanist o a scientist. running wet plant intensifies any good or bad flavor profile. If youre wondering if you taste the hydro bloom ferts youre using in your dirt, be like me, go organic! Just kidding, people crack me up "i used expensive nutes, but it tastes like poo" feed the dirt not the plant, your head will thank you.

[Hashrabit]

Additionally, hash from wet trim is just like wet flowers, must be dried and cured properly to come into its own. You can grow bomb pot, but a quickdry and no cure turns it to booboo every time. Same principals apply to the bubble.

[Suh Carlton]

Hmm interesting, thanks for your input on the subject hashrabbit. I plan to grow organic when I get the space, but the batch of trim I used here was grown hydroponically and flushed for 2 weeks. I do wonder which has more nutrients in the final product, as you can't do an actual flush with soil.

Update on the stinkyhash:
We plan to powderise, mix with hot water, mix, drain, filter, repeat 3x, and then try another drying to see if we can get the terrible taste to osmose out.

Another question for everyone is water filtration. Buying filtered water is a bit out of the question for us, I was wondering if any method of filtration cheaper than RO would work just as well for hash making's sake. I don't really know what contaminants i'm working against here.

Thanks again for everyone's input, looking forward to building generative conversation.

[Hashrabit]

Municipal water wont be your problem. Chlorine is the only nasty thing ADDED to our water. You can make your own steam distillary with a stove top pressure cooker, very clean water.

[Suh Carlton]

There are plenty of things in the water before municipal adds anything, and that's before it goes through my house's sketchy plumbing, and I'm not sure if stovetop steam distilling will suit my water needs.

That said, we ran some more tests today. Results are preliminary as it's hard to tell, smoking partially dried product, but it seems that the problem is in the trim not the water. We just ran another small batch of trim from a different grower, with some of the house's tap water, hand stirred. We'll see how that turns out and let you folks know. I'm suspecting that the long flush and lack of intense chemicals during flower wasn't enough to avoid the ill effects of mites.

[Suh Carlton]

Update: ran the same trim with distilled water, got the same taste. Also I've started to notice the smell in the trim we haven't run from that harvest, even faintly in the flowers but maybe I'm just paranoid. We've also run some other trim and not gotten the taste. The crop suffered from russet mites, I'll get back with more info about exactly what treatments were used and when if I remember to. Also a sidenote for those interested, we re-processed some of the stinky hash with butane (i know, i know :pukers:) and it retained the stink :( boo

with that behind me I think there are great things to come. looking forward to a good harvest season, thanks for the help y'all I'll be sure to repay you in hashporn when things started turning out well :D:smoke3: