Education
How Much Weed For Edibles? How to Make Edibles
How much weed for edibles? If you’re making edible for the first time, figuring out much weed to use for your infused concoction can be difficult. After all, consuming cannabis-infused edibles comes with a lot of uncertainty. You might inadvertently give your edibles a very high dose without even knowing it!
When it comes to DIY edibles, knowing how much mg of THC is contained inside is almost impossible. Unless you have the (costly) lab equipment to lab test each edible, you’re most likely never going to be able to find out how potent your homemade edibles have.
However, there is a way to determine how much THC your flower and bud have before you use it in your recipes!
If you’re making cannabis edibles at home and you don’t want to end up suffering from the adverse effects of cannabis overconsumption, here’s our guide on finding how out how much bud you need for edibles!
Why Measuring is Important For Weed Edibles
Weed edibles are notorious for either delivering an unexpectedly low dose or an unexpectedly large dose. If you’re making them at home, you have to accept the fact that your DIY edible dosage will be unreliable at best and straight-up wrong at worst.
Instead of delivering THC throughout our bodies, our digestive system takes the THC from ingestible cannabis products and metabolizes it into a compound known as 11-Hydroxy-THC.
Also known as 11-OH-THC, this metabolite is magnitudes more potent than THC and can easily penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
Put more simply, 11-OH-THC hits you fast, and it hits you hard.
If you consume cannabis through a joint, a gram of a strain with an average THC content of 15% will contain 150 mg of THC.
On the other hand, if you consume an edible with 10mg of THC, it might just hit you with ten times the potency, making it a 100mg edible instead.
Everybody’s endocannabinoid system is different, so these numbers aren’t completely concrete, but the difference in magnitude of psychoactive effects will stay the same. The human body is just weird like that, which makes finding out how much bud to use for edibles that much more important.
Fortunately, you can get ahead of the game by determining how much THC is in your starting flower and moving on from there.
How Much Weed Do You Need For Edibles?
Before diving into the specifics, let’s explore the actual mechanisms behind edible making and how this influences the amount.
Making Edibles 101
Anybody who’s made marijuana edibles before will know that weed has to undergo decarboxylation before its effects can be felt by the human body. In quote-on-quote ‘raw cannabis,’ THC is actually not present. Instead, THCA and CBDA make up most of the cannabinoid content.
THCA and CBDA are the acidic forms of THC and CBD, as denoted by the extra ‘A’ in their chemical name.
As an acid, the human body has a difficult time processing it and making its effects bioavailable. The acid chains are removed by removing a carboxyl group, and the compounds are converted into their non-acidic forms, THC and CBD.
Decarboxylation sounds like a complicated, scientific process, but in reality, it’s something that weed smokers do every time they light a joint, spark a bowl or take a dab.
Weed can be slightly decarboxylated during the curing and drying phase, but the majority takes place when heat is applied, like when weed is lit up and smoked.
Unfortunately, marijuana that has been decarboxylated through heat and fire usually burns and destroys the rest of the plant matter before it can be used. While its effects are inhaled and absorbed by our bodies, we’re also inhaling the tar, plant matter and other compounds that the weed may have.
Vaping cannabis, on the other hand, ‘bakes’ the weed until it’s decarboxylated, preserving its integrity. Already vaped bud, or AVB is a great option to use to make edibles since it’s already been decarbed and is bioavailable to us right away. It’s also the only kind of edible cannabis that you can actually eat ‘raw’ and feel the effects from!
THC Potency
So, now that we understand the mechanics behind decarboxylation and how it affects cannabis, we can start determining how much to use for our own edibles.
Let’s say, for example, that you have a gram of weed that’s listed at 20% THC. Quick math will tell us that this strain will have 200mg of THC per 1 gram of flower, not including CBD and any other cannabinoids.
Making edibles requires precise measurements, so figuring out the correct dose to use is extremely important. If we were to decarboxylate this one gram of flower and use it to infuse a fatty substance with it, such as butter or oil, we would have a solution with around 150-200mg of THC – some milligrams will stay trapped in the plant matter or lost during the straining process.
Since THC is not water-soluble, it needs to be combined with fat to bind. In this case, we can be 100% certain that our weed butter or weed oil will have 200mg of THC, but how well does this translate when we use this oil as a cooking ingredient?
Say you’re making brownies, and the recipe calls for 150ml of butter. We can infuse 150ml of butter with our 200mg of THC and use that as a cooking ingredient, but the actual dosage of your brownie per piece will vary depending on how it’s portioned and served.
All of this is to say that determining the amount of THC in your homemade edibles is incredibly difficult and almost impossible, at least when you’re making and using your own weed-infused ingredients.
Fortunately, there are some easier ways to cook with weed that don’t require you to be a mathematician.
Infusing THC Accurately and Reliably
A common mistake that many first-time edible makers make is that they underestimate the very high doses of their end product and end up suffering as a result. Homemade edibles made with weed are incredibly unreliable and can lead to anxiety, a rapid heart-beat, and a downright bad time if consumed without a high tolerance.
However, there are alternative ways to cook with weed that don’t rely on infusing your own ingredients with weed.
Use Distillate
THC distillate is one of the best ingredients to use if you want to make edibles at home. Flavourless and odourless, THC distillate is a medical cannabis product that offers upwards of 99% THC purity on average.
Usually, distillate is vaped through vape pen cartridges. Still, you can also find THC syringes that allow you to dispense precise amounts that you can use to cook, dab and eat with. THC distillate is also already decarboxylated, so the only thing you have to do is squirt a little bit out and mix it thoroughly to incorporate it into your recipe.
Use a THC Tincture
Tinctures are cannabis products that have THC and/or CBD suspended in alcohol. Tinctures come included with a dropper and offer users precise dosages of weed without smoking or vaping cannabis.
THC tinctures aren’t as flavourless as distillate, but their accuracy and purity make them another great option to cook with.