Reviewed December 2023
When white smoke seems excessive up above St. Peter’s Sq. in Rome, Catholics world wide rejoice. A brand new pope has been chosen. Habemus papam! We’ve a pope! No extra black smoke, however white smoke and pleasure.
However the smoke colour seen by Catholics is just not a direct signal of God. What they’re observing is the results of burning paper and straw. The smoke colour, both white or black, was managed initially by burning dry (white) or damp (black) straw. At the moment components are used to manage the smoke colour: Black smoke is achieved by together with coal tar and sulfur; white smoke outcomes from added sugar and pine rosin. (And don’t all of us like some good rosin.)
Hashish cultivators and connoisseurs have come to imagine that, just like the white smoke seen in St. Peter’s Sq., white ash left behind within the bowl from smoking hashish is a trigger to rejoice. Black ash, they imagine, signifies that the plant was not flushed to take away minerals, nitrates and pesticides. White ash, in distinction, symbolizes correctly flushed, dried and cured materials.
Hashish customers rejoice when ash is white, however are they worshiping false idols?
What if the colour of the ash is just not a divine signal however a serendipitous prevalence linked to secular, mundane components?
A Chemical Background
Seeing divinity in fireplace and ash is just not new or distinctive to hashish consumption. Ash itself is a trinity; it’s a advanced combination of charcoal, char and minerals.1 As is usually the case, extra information and perception imply much less mystique. However there are methods during which information gained can open new alternatives. If we used to ask a burning bush for solutions about divinity, we now look to a burned bush for solutions about forest fires.2 Analysis into ash from wildfires factors to burn temperature as the principle consider figuring out ash’s properties.3 With rising combustion temperature, the charred natural materials and natural nitrogen concentrations lower, and the ash colour lightens from black to grey to white.4 The lightest colour ash is generally made up of crystalline or amorphous inorganic compounds.5 Additional analysis has yielded further perception.
At burn temperatures under 450 levels C, combustion is way from full, and the ash from low-temperature combustion is wealthy in natural compounds, with carbon as the principle element. The combustion course of progresses with rising temperatures (above 450 levels C), and carbon turns into volatilized, which means it turns right into a gasoline. What stays is mineral ash, composed primarily of calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, silicon and phosphorous within the type of inorganic carbonates. When the temperatures improve even additional (above 580 levels C), the most typical types of minerals are oxides.6 One other sufferer of upper combustion temperature is the ash’s whole nitrogen content material, as nitrogen has a low temperature volatilization.7
Insights from Tobacco Ash
Hashish shoppers will not be the primary to be obsessive about the colour of their ashes—the tobacco trade has studied ash colour for fairly a very long time. Already 100 years in the past, scientific literature explored the plant components that help or inhibit tobacco burn. It was described that chlorides stop full combustion, which then inhibits taste and aroma. Potassium salts of natural acids, however, help in combustion and improve the fire-holding capability.8
Realizing the significance of potassium salts and different alkali and alkali-earth steel salts, U.S. federal and state agricultural departments, together with educational establishments, started to review the impact of fertilizer use on tobacco smoke and ash.9 Researchers discovered that fertilizer remedy neither altered the alkali composition of the cured leaves, nor elevated the sulfur ranges within the leaves. What did make an enormous distinction in tobacco smoke high quality was the fermentation course of, particularly the excessive focus of chlorophyll in low-quality tobacco merchandise.
Early on, white ash in tobacco cigars and cigarettes was completed by including magnesium or calcium acids, nitrates or carbonates. Burning any of those acids in your cigarette will trigger alkaline earth steel oxide to type, which imparts a white colour to the ash that’s left behind.10
The principle takeaway is that white ash varieties at excessive combustion temperatures and is generally made up of minerals. This could lead us to query the doctrine that white ash comes from flushed hashish vegetation.
A Flushing Concept Debunked
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If ash colour is just not the signal of high quality we thought it to be, what are the components that have an effect on the standard of a plant or plant half after harvest? If we take a look at related industries, equivalent to tobacco or produce, we’d take into consideration nutrient content material, humidity, temperature, the addition or removing of sunshine, the discount of the ripening gasoline, ethylene, and time.
Within the normal horticulture world, the phrase “flushing” refers back to the act of operating a recognized liquid by way of a plant’s root ball so as to change pH or media electrical conductivity (EC). To hashish growers, flushing means one thing very completely different: It refers to growers utilizing low-EC water for irrigation throughout the previous few weeks prior to reap. The thought is that this “flushes” out the vitamins from the media which, in flip, flushes them from the plant. The idea is that this in the end yields a better-smoking flower. We’ve heard explanations supporting this principle that make no sense, equivalent to, “It removes minerals from the plant,” and we’ve heard extra believable theories, equivalent to, “Nutrient deficiency encourages ripening.”
My quick ideas go to out of doors hashish. What about hashish grown in residing soil? Media in addition to rockwool won’t ever get to an EC low sufficient to trigger true deficiency in a matter of every week or two.
The one scientific paper we’ve seen to this point on hashish and flushing is the thesis “Irrigation Administration Methods for Medical Hashish in Managed Environments,” written by Jonathan Stemeroff, whereas he was pursuing a grasp’s diploma at The College of Guelph. In his thesis, Stemeroff completes a sequence of experiments testing the nutrient content material of dried bud after flushing. He finds that in his quite a few flushing experiments, elemental content material is just not depleted, and yield is just not impacted. Mainly, until you’re utilizing a rockwool media, you’ll by no means decrease EC sufficient to trigger true deficiency in a one- to two-week interval.
This analysis doesn’t handle the various different issues that might be contributing to a greater smoke, however it does destroy the idea that flushing removes nutrient parts from a plant. It additionally encourages the sustainable and cost-effective apply of not making use of fertilizer within the final two weeks of progress, as component concentrations weren’t affected by the low-EC water. Additional analysis must be carried out to enhance this examine inspecting the impact of flushing on carbohydrates, chlorophyll, and so on.
Different Horticultural Practices for Higher Smokability
One other horticultural apply growers carry out to enhance smokability is popping the rising lights off for just a few days earlier than harvest and utilizing no lights throughout drying. This ritual is supported by quite a few research on varied sorts of stay vegetation and harvested/indifferent plant components quickly reducing in chlorophyll with the absence of sunshine. It’s proven that lowering the quantity of sunshine given within the last two days earlier than harvest and through drying slows the degradation of sugars, and reduces starch content material.11, 12, 13 Maybe jump-starting the degradation course of earlier than harvest does in the end improve high quality by way of smokability, which we count on to be represented by a whiter ash colour.
Moreover, one other methodology cultivators carry out to extend a product’s smokability is to drop the temperature the previous few weeks of the flowering cycle. The temperature drop will increase the purple pigmentation to these varieties which have this genetic predisposition. Analysis has proven that photosystem shutdown inflicting chlorophyll degradation is elevated at low temperatures, even with gentle. Might dropping the temperature and turning out the lights enhance your product’s smokability and smoothness of smoke, and trigger a whiter ash? Very probably, however bear in mind the problem of eradicating ensuing humidity and the elevated danger for botrytis progress at decrease temperatures.
What This Means
So, it seems the manipulation of temperature and light-weight with the objective of chlorophyll degradation and sugar transformation are main contributors to a pleasing smoke and “white” ash, not a superb pre-harvest “flush.” That is an instance of how simple solutions primarily based on poorly knowledgeable beliefs probably will not be appropriate. That mentioned, rituals and perception programs that each grower brings into how they develop hashish would possibly nonetheless end result of their desired end result. Simply take into account that placing a golden calf on high of your stash would possibly masks the underlying scientific causes on your success, due to this fact inflicting you to overlook the chance to additional enhance upon your practices.
Dr. Allison Justice is the co-founder of SC Botanicals and the founding father of The Hemp Mine. Dr. Markus Roggen is the founding father of Complicated Biotech Discovery Ventures.
