cannabis edibles - a friendly guide · 2020. 5. 29. · 3. decarb your weed •cannabis needs to be...

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Chapter 1 .................................................................................................................. 1

The Rules of Edibles.................................................................................. 1

Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................. 2

Eating Cannabis ............................................................................................ 2

Different than smoking ........................................................................... 3

Bioavailability and Tolerance ............................................................ 7

Absorbed in Your Guts ........................................................................ 10

Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................... 15

Decarboxylation ......................................................................................... 15

Extraction ........................................................................................................ 22

Dosing ............................................................................................................... 26

Dosing Examples ..................................................................................... 32

Chapter 4 .............................................................................................................. 36

Turning a low dose into a high dose ........................................ 36

Home grown cannabis ........................................................................ 37

Chapter 5 .............................................................................................................. 39

Closing Remarks ....................................................................................... 39

References ......................................................................................................... 40

Preface This book does not contain recipes to make food. We cannot deny that delicious food is a big part of why we want to make cannabis edibles. But when it comes to infusing food, the largest challenge for both amateur and professional chefs is making sure that you’ll feel the right sensations, yet also remember the meal afterward. This book is meant to help you find the right amount of THC for your edibles and ensure that what you put into your recipes, makes it onto your plates.

© 2020 Friendibles Page 1

Chapter 1

The Rules of Edibles Not everyone needs to know everything. Not everyone

has the time to read a couple thousand words. We’ve

distilled our knowledge of edibles down to four clear

rules.

1. We are all special snowflakes•Everyone will react to cannabis in their own way. You may need a little, you may need a lot.

2. Start small and work up•Start with a little (like 5mg THC) and work your way up to a lot. You can always eat more; it’s difficult to eat less.

3. Decarb your weed•Cannabis needs to be “decarbed”. Chemicals in cannabis must be converted using heat to get THC.

4. Strap in, chill out•Edibles are not a quick trip, the effects can last 2-6 hours. Clear your schedule.


Chapter 2

Eating Cannabis Cannabis edibles, or infused food, are treats, snacks and

meals that have been infused with tetrahydrocannabinol

(THC) or some other cannabinoid chemical like

cannabidiol (CBD). There are many different types of

cannabinoids that can be extracted from cannabis;

however, it is THC that is of main interest since it has

psychotropic effects that often give you a feeling of calm

and euphoria. It is important to keep in mind that

“psychotropic” does not mean “psychedelic”. Cannabis

and THC can cause an intensification of ordinary sensory

experiences which are often confused as hallucinations.

THC does not cause psychedelic effects in a person,

meaning they do not cause visual or auditory

hallucinations. Although you may feel an altered state of

consciousness and experience new perspectives on life,


this is not considered to be a psychedelic effect, at least

medically.

Edibles can be purchased from licensed businesses in

ready-to-eat forms and more types are becoming

available every day. If you’re not the type of person who

eats take-out for every meal and you can navigate your

way around a stove, then edibles are very easy to make

at home too. While ready-to-eat edibles are convenient,

the advantages of making your own infused food means

you can ensure quality ingredients, variety of flavours and

personalized dosing. Buying a pre-made edible means

you’re stuck eating convenience store quality food with a

level of THC that could be too strong or too weak. In this

guide, we’ll discuss what you need to know about

edibles, what’s great about them, some important

considerations and how to enjoy edibles at home.

Different than smoking The most well-known way to get THC into your body has

been smoking it or vaping it. When you inhale smoke or

vapor, the active chemical enters the lungs, where it is

absorbed by the alveoli and pass into the bloodstream as

illustrated in Figure 1. Your lungs have a lot of surface


area for adsorption of THC and a rich blood supply

enabling rapid onset and high bioavailability (more on

these terms later). This translates into a quick delivery to

your brain where THC works with endocannabinoid

receptors to produce that ‘high’ feeling. Through your

lungs, absorption into the bloodstream occurs quickly,

and the effects are felt anywhere from a few seconds to

a few minutes. The experience typically would last

between 1-3 hours but could be longer or shorter

depending on the amount of cannabis that you consume.

Figure 1 - THC that is inhaled through smoking or vaping first

enters the lungs where it is rapidly absorbed into you blood stream and circulated through your body. Within seconds, THC reaches receptors in the brain that produce


the feeling of enhanced well-being, relaxation and an intensification of ordinary sensory experiences.

As time passes, the THC circulates through your system

until it is metabolized out by your liver and kidneys. It

takes several hours after your last puff to metabolize

down to ineffective concentrations in your bloodstream.

Some people may feel groggy or worn down after the

whole experience, although that sensation disappears

after a few times.

The story of eating cannabis is thematically similar, but it

takes you on an entirely different journey. Smoking will hit

you faster when compared to eating cannabis. Lungs to

blood is very fast. You peak quicker and consequently it

is out of your system quicker too. Even for first time

smokers of cannabis, there’s a pretty good chance that

by hour 4 they will be feeling normal again. The graph in

Figure 2 is from a 2003 study that looked at the impact of

THC depending on consumption method. The plot shows

us the subjective rating that test subjects provided the

researchers over time for about 4 hours. For the smoking

route, we clearly see the effect start within seconds to a

few minutes, reach a maximum after 15–30 minutes, and

taper off within 2–3 hours. After eating the cannabis,

psychotropic effects set in with a delay of 30–90 minutes,


reach their maximum after 2–3 hours and last for about

4–12 hours, depending on dose [1]. It’s important to keep

that in mind when experimenting with edibles; you are

committing yourself to an afternoon or evening of this

experience, so it’s good to plan accordingly. Later in this

chapter, we’ll go into details about why eating cannabis

is so different, but the early message is that you should

expect them to be different and treat them as such.

Figure 2 - Plot of relative effect rating provided by test

subjects who either received a dose of THC through the lungs or by eating it. This figure is adapted from data in [1].


Bioavailability and Tolerance Although we show a nice graph in Figure 2, it represents

an average of many experiences. The variability can be

fairly drastic between onset and peak feeling for different

people. The cause for this variability isn’t intuitive either

and has little to do with body weight or a person’s age.

What causes the variability is something called

bioavailability. This is a term that describes how two

people can take the same amount of THC and hit their

peak blood concentrations at different times, as well as

have a different intensity of experience. Bioavailability is

closely linked to a person’s unique metabolism. Some

people have a fast metabolism while others have a slow

one. Metabolism isn’t consistent either. Just because you

can crush a half-dozen cheeseburgers and not gain any

weight doesn’t mean you’ll metabolize THC quickly too.

How your body processes the things you ingest or inhale

can change from substance to substance just as easily as

it changes from person to person. Think about how your

body reacts to drinking caffeine, eating sugary foods,

drinking a glass of wine, getting sedated at the dentist or

eating asparagus. You may feel the effects from all of

these things instantly, or not at all. While many of us will


react similarly, we know that they won’t all impact

everyone the same. Bioavailability is best visualized in the

data from a 1992 study that looked at the THC blood level

after smoking a 0.5 gram cannabis pre-roll cigarette with

3.25% THC [2].

Figure 3 - Onset and peak THC concentration in the blood of

six test subjects in [2]. Each person smoked a 3.25% THC cannabis cigarette containing 0.5 grams.

The six coloured lines represent different test subjects for

this study and we can clearly see that despite the same

method and amount of THC consumed, there are at least

4 profiles of onset. But every person has a distinct time of

peak blood THC and or overall level of THC in their blood.

The only thing that is common to each person in this


study is that by 4 hours, the THC had been scrubbed from

their system by their liver.

Seemingly similar in practice is the concept of tolerance.

Tolerance is the effect of requiring a higher dose of THC

in order to feel high. Bioavailability and tolerance are

separate forces at play. While the bioavailability of THC in

your system might be large, you may have also built up a

tolerance to THC, meaning that you do not feel the sense

of well-being that anyone else with that same level of

THC in their blood would expect. While bioavailability is

inherent to your metabolism, tolerance is something that

you can build up over time. The more you do it, the more

you need to take to get the same effect. It is important to

note that THC tolerance builds faster than tolerance to

other substances like caffeine and it builds no matter if

you’re smoking or eating it. Overtime you may find that

you need to adjust the dosage to get the desired

experience. A 5 mg edible may put you on the edge of

your seat today, but within a few weeks of regular use,

you could be demanding something super-high potency

to feel the same effect.

A person’s tolerance typically starts out low, but some

may find that they have a natural resistance to THC’s


psychotropic effects. While this is not the common

experience, a natural tolerance to cannabis is still very

normal. If it appears that cannabis doesn’t work for you, it

is unlikely that you were doing it wrong or that the

cannabis was bad. The explanation could be as simple as

a high natural tolerance. If you’re interested in consuming

cannabis and experiencing the relaxing new perspective

that it brings, you may want to consider progressively

increasing the amount of THC that you consume until you

find an effective level. We strongly discourage you from

drastically increasing the dose just to get it to work. Being

overloading by the effects of cannabis is not pleasant.

Whenever you’re trying something new, start small and

see how you feel before taking more. You can always

take more, but it’s difficult to take less.

Absorbed in Your Guts We’ve been learning about how eating cannabis is so

different than inhaling cannabis, now it’s time to get down

to the why. The adsorption of food through your digestive

tract depends on the nature of the food. Water and

sugars are adsorbed rapidly in the stomach while carbs,

proteins and fats need to breakdown further before they

can be absorbed too. THC is no different. Cannabinoids


dissolve in fats, and are adsorbed in the same places of

your gut as fats and oils. Eating cannabis means it has to

pass through your stomach and into your digestive tract,

before being metabolized by your liver, pass into your

blood stream, hit your brain and finally get you high.

Figure 4 - The THC from eating infused food is absorbed in

your stomach and intestines where it is passed to your liver before getting into your blood stream. The speed of absorption in the guts limits the onset of the effect from THC. The liver metabolizes a portion of the THC into a much more potent form, 11-OH-THC, which is mainly responsible for the increased intensity of experience often felt with edibles.

That long process, laid out in Figure 4, is why it can take

anywhere from 30 mins to 90 mins for some people to

feel the effects of an edible, but that doesn’t explain all of

it. Adsorption of THC through your guts into your blood is


a much slower, but more regulated process. This is why

it takes so long to hit you and why the time can vary so

much. If you consume an edible after a big meal, it will

take even longer for it to work its way through your

system. Think of it this way: empty stomach, faster onset,

full stomach slower onset. Unfortunately, though, eating

THC will never have as fast an onset as inhaling it.

Eating THC may mean a slower onset, but it also hits your

system more evenly over a longer period of time, and

why you stay high so damn long. The effects of an edible

can last between 3 and 10 hours. While we can blame

some of this on the way THC is absorbed into our bodies

from edibles, a lot has to do with some extra chemistry

that is going on.

Did we mention chemistry? Maybe you haven’t already

been told, but raw cannabis doesn’t actually have much

THC in it. Anyone who told you that they got high when

they accidentally ate a bag of dried flower was lying to

you, either about being high or about how much bud they

ate. Raw cannabis flower has an infinitesimally small

amount of THC in it, but it is full of tetrahydrocannabinolic

acid (THCA). When THCA is subjected to high heat, it

decarboxylates (“decarb” for short) into Δ9-THC. When


people talk about THC, what they mostly mean is the Δ9

version. Δ9-THC is psychoactive, but THCA is just

flavouring for a bunch of plant fibre. The two oxygen

atoms and hydrogen atom that come off of THCA in a

decarb are the only difference between getting high and

a pile of dung. This is a similar situation for most of the

cannabinoids in cannabis, including CBD.

When THC is eaten, it is metabolized in your liver from its

Δ9 form to another chemical in the THC family known as

11-OH THC, which is a much more potent version of the

drug. Where you only get Δ9 from smoking, eating

cannabis delivers a cocktail of 11-OH and Δ9 to your brain.

Not only does 11-OH THC pass through the blood-brain

barrier faster but it also possesses 3-7 times the

psychoactivity of regular THC. That means it gets to your

endocannabinoid receptors first and just puts the pedal

to the floor. This more potent form of THC is why many

people will describe their experience with edibles as

more intense than when they smoke, especially if they

are taking the same amount of THC. This isn’t a rule, there

will be exceptions. Just because you have had a great

time smoking cannabis doesn’t mean you’ll have a great

time eating it and vice versa. Just because you have had


a high tolerance when you smoke cannabis also doesn’t

mean you’ll have a high tolerance for edibles. We must

stress again that everyone should find their own sweet

spot when it comes to effective levels of THC, whether

you’re smoking or eating. Start with a little, work your way

up to a lot. Working your way down from a lot will

guarantee that you’re going to have a few terrible

experiences.

With infused foods, it is extremely tempting to eat more

while you wait for the effects to hit you. This is an easy

trap to fall into, remember, the 11-OH THC is several times

stronger than the smoking version of THC; meaning you

don’t need to take as much to get the same effect. If you

are tempted to eat more, you’ll likely end up being much,

much higher and for longer than you wanted.


Chapter 3

Decarboxylation

Figure 5 - Decarboxylation reaction of tetrahydrocannabinolic

acid (THCA) to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Reproduced from [3].

Cannabis has a very potent taste and aroma and putting

it directly into your food will flavour it strongly like dried

weed, but it doesn’t guarantee any THC infusion. The

sublime effects of edibles can’t be achieved by eating

cannabis raw. It is missing a very important step. Like we

said before, that’s because raw flower doesn’t contain

much THC, it has THCA. In order to get THCA to turn into

THC, cannabis must be decarboxylated (see Figure 5).


Decarboxylation is a fancy science word for a chemical

reaction which removes a carboxylic acid (COOH) from

THC, releasing carbon dioxide in the process. In the

curious case of cannabis, decarboxylation turns THCA

into the active ingredient THC. Drying or curing the

cannabis can cause a small amount of decarboxylation to

happen, but it’s still not very much.

Figure 6 - Health Canada cannabis package labelling

requirements showing THC% and Total THC% [4]. The same values for CBD may also be displayed.

Next time you buy some dried cannabis, just look on the

packaging. It’s unlikely that there’s much more than 1%

THC displayed on the label. But there’s a secondary

number on the label, Total THC. This is the total THC +

THCA amount determined by advanced chemical

analysis. This number is required by government

regulation and gives you the best idea of how potent the


weed is. We have an example from Health Canada in

Figure 6.

Decarboxylation starts at 90°C and is basically caused by

applying heat over time [3, 5]. When you smoke or vape

your bud, a high level of heat will cause the

decarboxylation to happen almost instantly. When you

inhale the heated vapor or smoke, you feel it’s effects.

Unfortunately, Total THC doesn’t translate directly into

THC that you can realistically decarb and then consume.

This is because there’s a chemical battle going on for

your THC. At 85°C, THC starts to degrade into cannabinol

(CBN) from oxidation. CBN is a super weak version of THC

and makes you sleepy. At 157°C, THC evaporates and

unless you’re constantly inhaling this means you’re losing

it to the sky. One scientific study discussed in a report by

the European Industrial Hemp Association (EIHA)

observed that decarbing reached a peak THC

concentration at 145°C after 7 minutes. But after 40

minutes, half of that THC had been lost to degradation

and evaporation. Going for a high decarb temperature is

dangerous to your THC because you need very even heat

distribution to get results like in these scientific studies.

When you’re doing it at home, either in a bong or an oven,


how can you guarantee that the middle of your bowl is

the same temperature as the edges? Are you over

converting one part while barely decarbing another? To

visualize the relationship to time and temperature, we’ve

reproduced a graph from the EIHA report in Figure 7.

What does this all mean for you? Take for example, 1.0 g

of cannabis that has a Total THC content of 15% (or 150

mg/g). If you were to decarb perfectly, the maximum

THC you could make is 150 mg. Perfect decarb means

perfect heat distribution throughout the cannabis and no

oxygen present in the air. This isn’t realistic for anyone. In

real life, the cannabis is probably being smoked, but is it

rolled, in a pipe or being vaporized in a Volcano? Every

method has a different efficiency of converting the THCA

into THC depending on the time and temperature

relationship. Vaporizers are very controlled and are

advertised by manufacturers to achieve up to 80%

conversion efficiency [6]. For the 1.0g of 15% bud, that

means you’re able to pull out 120 mg THC.


Figure 7 - Complete decarboxylation of THCA into THC. The data is presented on a partial logarithmic

scale. The lines represent the theorical relationship between time and temperature required to reach complete decarboxylation from various scientific studies. The thick blue line is the average of all the data.


Compare this to a joint or pipe where the burn

temperature can be as high as 900°C [7]. Even if you’re

practicing proper puff-puff-pass etiquette, you would be

lucky to get a 50% efficiency and 75 mg THC.

To get the best decarb efficiency and extract your

money’s worth of THC from the cannabis, you need to

use appliance decarburization. Wait, “appliance”? That’s

just another fancy term that essentially means the oven

in your kitchen. With modern temperature control in

convection ovens, you’re capable of achieving 80-90%

efficiency in your decarb. There are some specialty

appliances like the LEVO1 that claim you can get 100%

recovery, but considering the scientific evidence we

already discussed, that claim is hard to believe. Since the

LEVO is not considered a medical device and doesn’t

require US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA)

approval, the manufacturer is not required to provide any

data to back up their claim. Ignoring wonder-product

claims that are too good to be true (and probably are), 80-

90% THC recovery from cannabis is amazing, equaling or

better than top-of-the-line vaporizers. With only your

1 DIY Edibles Kits, https://friendibles.ca/diy-edibles-kits/, 5 Dec 2019

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oven. Obviously, if you’re decarbing with your oven, you

shouldn’t smoke or vape it afterward. Double decarbing

is essentially the same thing as decarbing for too long or

too hot. Appliance decarburization means one thing. You

want to make edibles and eat your THC.

Here’s our recommended method of decarbing your

cannabis:

To decarb your bud, grind it up semi-finely and put on a

baking sheet in a preheated oven at 220°F (~104°C) as

shown in Figure 8. Bake it for 45 minutes (up to an hour if

you’re feeling dangerous) and then let it cool. It’s that

simple. We’ve verified the effectiveness of this method to

be ~ 90% efficient using the testing kit available from CB

Scientific2. Fair warning, baking your cannabis can release

a strong odour into your kitchen. If the smell makes you

uncomfortable, we suggest you turn on the exhaust fan

above the stove if you have one, or open a window.

2 Combo Kit-TEST4 CBD Medical Marijuana Kit &THC Percentage Kit. CB Scientific.


Figure 8 - Man grinding cannabis onto a baking sheet to be

decarburized in an oven at 220°F.

If you easily understood all our talk about time and

temperature, you can also try a considerably higher

temperature and shorter amount of time. This could

potentially allow you to preserve certain terpenes and

secondary cannabinoids which would just evaporate

away with longer times. This takes a lot of trial and error

and can’t provide any guidance on how much THC you’ll

end up with.

Extraction You’ve successfully decarbed your cannabis, but unless

you’re interested in crunching on cooked flower, you

need to do an extraction to take the THC out. Ideally, you

want to extract the THC into something more usable like

butter, olive oil, coconut oil or duck fat. These things all


have one important thing in common, they’re fats and oils.

This is hugely important because all cannabinoids are

hydrophobic. Hydrophobic means that cannabinoids, like

THC, cannot dissolve into water, they will only dissolve in

oils and fats. This is the same for terpenes too. THC will

also dissolve into some organic liquids also like, ethanol

(a.k.a. drinking alcohol). The higher the proof the better.

Spirits with 40% alcohol means that the other 60% is still

water. Water that doesn’t want anything to do with

cannabinoids. Getting THC to dissolve into alcohol is

more complicated and takes some practice. We suggest

focusing on butter or olive oil if you want to easily make

great edibles and infused food. To make the next few

sections simpler, we’ll only use the term butter, however

you could substitute any other cooking oil or fat and still

get great results. Cannabutter is a common term that you

may already be familiar with, but it gets confusing if

you’re not using butter. Canna-oil, canna-fat, it doesn’t

always matter what it is, as long as it is THC infused. We

prefer to use the universal term Cooking Canna to

simplify communication, however since we said we’ll

focus on butter, we’ll say “cannabutter” for familiarity.


Figure 9 - Extracting THC from decarbed cannabis into butter

melting in a double boiler. The cannabis is contained within a tea bag to make clean-up easier and to prevent any bits from lingering in the butter once the extraction is finished.

To extract THC, you need to soak the decarbed cannabis

in the butter like in Figure 9. Extracting THC can happen

at room temperature as long as the oil or fat is liquid,

otherwise a little heat may be required. You only want a

little heat because you don’t want to double decarb. If

you don’t have a specialty appliance, a double boiler is

the most foolproof method of adding a little bit of heat to

melt your butter. If you don’t have the parts to setup a

double boiler, a small saucepan is good enough, but you

might want to supervise the whole time to make sure you

don’t boil or burn it. Doing an extraction this way is very


similar to steeping tea. So similar in fact, that you could

even use a metal tea steeper or fillable tea bags to make

clean-up faster.

We return to the concept of time and temperature again

for the extraction. You need to give the melted butter

time to saturate all the decarbed cannabis bits and pull

out the THC. If you have an oil that is already a liquid, this

will take much longer at room temperature than it would

with a little heat. Using the double boiler method, we

suggest letting the cannabis steep in the butter for 1 hour.

You could also let it soak in olive oil on the counter for 12

hours, kind of like cold-brew coffee. If you didn’t use a tea

bag, you can either try to filter out the remaining bits, or

just leave them there and be careful when you get to the

bottom of the batch. To make dosing easier later, it’s a

good practice to measure out exactly how much butter

you’re going to use for the extraction. We find that 0.5

cup3 (120 mL) is easy to measure out and is a good

amount for dilution into recipes.

3 A note on measurements used for cooking. The USFDA considers 1 cup = 240 mL while in Canada, 1 cup = 250 mL. We will be using the USFDA values. In both systems, 1 teaspoon = 5 mL and 1 tablespoon = 15 mL.


Dosing By now you should have a THC infused butter (a.k.a.

cannabutter). Now its time to figure out how much THC

you want to eat in your food. A common mistake is to add

all of the cannabutter into the recipe. Going back to our

example of 1.0 g of 15% cannabis that we decarbed and

then extracted, we would have 135 mg of THC

concentrated into our half cup of butter. For some heavier

cannabis users, or those with a higher natural tolerance,

135 mg of THC might be the perfect amount to add to a

single meal or snack. But for many first timers and people

who like to enjoy casually, 135 mg might incapacitate you

for many hours. It’s not very enjoyable to have to settle

for a nibble of a cannabis infused edible that is too strong.

With some simple math, 135 mg THC in 120 mL means

our butter has a THC concentration of 1.1 mg/mL. If you

want to divvy this out using a kitchen scale or an eye

dropper, that number might be meaningful, otherwise

our preference is to convert it into a teaspoon basis (5mL),

or 5.6 mg/tsp. Measuring spoons are much more

common in the regular kitchen and a regular teaspoon is

close enough in a pinch. Knowing this number, you can

infuse 11 mg THC into your meal by adding 2 tsp of your


cannabutter to your recipe. When you make a

concentrated infusion, you will only need to add a small

amount of it to cooking recipes for effective levels of

THC. Based on the typical purchasing amounts of

cannabis at 1.0 gram and 3.5 grams; we’ve put together a

helpful chart to quickly approximate the concentration of

your cannabutter by the teaspoon in Figure 10 when

you’ve used 0.5 cup of butter for the extraction.


Figure 10 - Quick reference dosing chart for infused fats and oils. The black numbers provide the approximate concentration of the infusion by the teaspoon (5 mL). Find your teaspoon concentration by matching up the amount of cannabis that you used during extraction and the Total THC value of your cannabis. The chart requires that you have used 0.5 cup of fat or oil for your extraction.


Knowing how much cannabutter to add to your recipe is

only part of it. You also need to be conscious about when

you’re adding it to your recipe. Infusing THC into your

butter, fat or oil instantly makes it “delicate” if it wasn’t

already. Delicate refers to the inability of the fat or oil to

withstand heat without burning or losing flavour.

Examples of delicate fats and oils are: butter, hemp seed

oil, flaxseed oil and sesame oil. Infused oils instantly

become delicate not because they’ll be easier to burn or

will lose flavour, but because you don’t want to lose the

THC. We’ve mentioned the term “double decarb” a

couple times before. This is where you’re destroying or

losing the THC when you subject your cannabutter to

high temperatures a second time. If you want to get the

best utility from your infused butter, you should avoid

adding it to high temperature cooking methods like

BBQing, frying or sautéing. Most baking will not impact

the THC, but you should also avoid roasting or broiling.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t infuse fried or roasted

food. Do your high temperature cooking first with regular

cooking oil. Add the cannabutter to the hot food after its

cooked, either letting it slowly melt and smother your

food, or mix it in for a better THC distribution.


The final consideration when properly dosing edibles and

infused foods is portioning. Sure, you have proficiently

decarbed your cannabis and extracted the THC into a half

cup of butter. You’ve also successfully figured out how

strong the cannabutter is by the teaspoon and you want

to have about 10 mg of THC in each “serving”. If you’re just

feeding yourself and you’ve only made one serving, you

need 2 tsp of the cannabutter. But what happens when

you’re feeding 4 people and your recipe caused you to

make 6 servings? The answer will depend on what you’ve

made. Some things are inherently portioned, like cookies

or candies. You divide out the recipe as a requirement to

make each piece. In this case you would add all of the

required cannabutter to the master recipe already

knowing how many portions (or servings) the recipe will

create. This scenario has been detailed out in Example 1

in the next section.

Maybe your recipe isn’t inherently portioned but its very

easy to portion the food out evenly. Things like soup,

cake or pie might fall into this category where its very

straight forward to serve out 1 cup of soup per person, or

cut the cake into 8 evenly-sized pieces. This scenario has

been detailed out in Example 2 in the next section.


The most difficult food to do THC dosing well are items

that you need to measure out separately and pre-portion.

This is essentially anything where you could not add the

cannabutter from the start. This might happen if you

wanted to use a high temperature method like grilling on

the BBQ (burgers) or if there’s no cooking at all (salad).

This scenario has been detailed out in Example 3 in the

next section.


Dosing Examples

Example 1 – Inherently portioned food (cookies)

When you make cookies, recipes will always advertise

how many cookies they expect can be made. Our

recommended cookie recipe4 makes 24.

Concentration of infusion after extraction into ½ cup of

unsalted butter: 17 mg THC per teaspoon (using the chart

in Figure 10Error! Reference source not found.)

To get 5 mg THC in each cookie, we need 120 mg THC

(24 × 5 mg) for our recipe that makes 24 cookies. To get

120 mg THC from our cannabutter, we need 7 teaspoons

(120 mg THC ÷ 17 mg THC / tsp).

Don’t just add all of this extra butter to your recipe.

Substitute normal butter for how much cannabutter you

4 Cannabis Chip Cookies - https://friendibles.ca/project/cannabis-chip-cookies/

Amount of cannabis: 3.5 g

Cannabis potency: 13% (130 mg/g)


need to add. E.g. recipe calls for ½ cup normal, unsalted

butter. Take out 7 tsp and replace it with 7 tsp of

cannabutter.

Example 2 – Easy to portion food (soup)

A good recipe should tell you how many servings will be

made, either in some measurable unit like cups, or by a

relative unit like “servings”. Gourmet or ‘rich’ versions of a

cream soup recipe will call for heavy cream as an

ingredient. Heavy cream is a prime candidate to extract

THC into. Imagine you are making a cream of broccoli

soup that requires ½ cup of heavy cream and makes 6

servings.


heavy whipping cream: 8 mg THC per teaspoon (using

the chart in Figure 10)

To get 10 mg in each serving of soup, we need to add 60

mg THC (6 × 10 mg) to the entire 6-serving recipe. To get




60 mg THC from the infused cream, we need 7.5

teaspoons (60 mg THC ÷ 8 mg THC / tsp).

We can either substitute the infused cream from the

amount of regular cream that recipe asks for, or we can

just add the infused cream on top of the ½ cup of regular

heavy cream. The extra cream in this case won’t make

any significant change to the texture or flavour of the

soup. In cream soups, the cream is typically blended into

the recipe near the end of cooking because heavy cream

is already sensitive to heat.

Example 3 – Pre-portioning food (hamburger)

Figuring out the servings for hamburgers is pretty simple;

one patty + one bun = one serving. A great trick for

something like a sandwich or hamburger is to add the

THC infusion as a topping or a spread. Don’t bother trying

to put it into the meat. In this example, we’ll make 5

infused hamburgers.





olive oil: ~23.5 mg THC per teaspoon (we had to

approximate using the quick dosing chart in Figure 10.

Cannabis with 18% Total THC lines up just over halfway

towards “25” from “21” on the 3.5g track.)

To get 9 mg THC in a hamburger, we need to add 45 mg

THC (5 burgers × 9 mg THC) using our 23.5 mg/tsp

infused oil and we’ll need to pre-portion it out. Add 2 tsp

of the infused olive oil to 2 tbsp of mayonnaise and whip

it together. The mayonnaise is now infused with 47 mg

THC. Divide up the mayonnaise into 5 equal portions

(47mg THC ÷ 5 = 9.4 mg THC). Spread one portion of

mayonnaise onto the toasted buns of each hamburger.

After you add the burger patty and the other toppings,

you now have 5 hamburgers that are infused with ~9.4 mg

THC. Since you’ve already toasted the buns and cooked

the patty, the infused mayonnaise won’t see any extra

heat and the THC will be left intact.


Chapter 4

Turning a low dose into a high

dose Start low, go slow is the mantra often repeated by

government and the cannabis industry but rarely do they

provide useful context. If you find out that you have a

natural tolerance, or if you’re a heavy cannabis user

already, starting low doesn’t do anything for you so

there’s no choice but to go slow, or not at all. Taking a

recipe that calls for a low dose of THC and turning it into

a recipe with a high dose of THC is straight forward. There

are three methods to easily increase the amount of THC

in your edibles recipe.

1) Increase the amount of cannabutter that you add to the recipe. In example 1, if we substitute more of the regular butter with the cannabutter, we’ll end up with stronger cookies.


2) Choose a more potent strain of cannabis. In example 1, if we choose a strain of cannabis with 25% Total THC instead of the one with 13%, we would have cannabutter that is 33 mg THC per teaspoon. That’s

almost double!

3) Decarb and extract more cannabis into your infusion. In example 2, we only extracted THC from 1.0 g of

cannabis. If we increased that to 3.5 g of cannabis, the heavy cream we extracted into would have ~27.5 mg THC per teaspoon. That would increase the dose

in each serving to 35 mg THC from 10.

Home grown cannabis Knowing the potency of cannabis that you buy at the

store is easy. It says right on the label. But what if you’re

growing your own. You would have to get it tested to

know what the Total THC value of your home-grow bud

is. Not only that but potency is known to vary from plant

to plant, even if it’s the same strain. To be precise, you

would need to get each batch tested, which can be

expensive and a hassle. Unfortunately, there’s no silver

bullet to be able to do precise THC dosing in edibles with

home-grow flower. The best we can suggest is a

qualitative assessment based on how potent you think

the cannabis is when you consume it. We know that not

a great method, but if that’s all you have, that’s all you


have. In our experience, a “weak” home-grow could

contain anywhere from 3 - 10% THC, a “medium” potency

home-grow could have between 10 - 20% THC and a

“strong” home-grow bud would probably have more than

20% THC. A quick glance at the chart in Figure 10 tells us

that an error margin of ± 5% THC is a huge swing in the

potency of cannabutter. We strongly advise against using

home-grow cannabis with an unknown potency to make

edibles for first timers and anyone who is not intimately

aware of their tolerance for THC.


Chapter 5

Closing Remarks This guided tour through the theory of eating cannabis,

edibles and THC infused foods is extensive but it is not

complete. There are a few rabbit holes that we did not

want to lead you down as we didn’t think they would be

helpful to anyone who just wants to make better edibles.

Things we skipped include: the endocannabinoid system

and a deeper look at cannabinoids and terpenes and; all

the reactions that go on during decarboxylation. There’s

still a lot of information in these pages, if you read

anything, we hope it was our 4 Rules of Edibles we listed

at the very beginning. If you’re new to edibles, start small

and see how you feel before taking more. You can always

have more; it’ll be very difficult to have less. Happy

cooking.


References [1] F. Grotenhermen, "Pharmacokinetics and

Pharmacodynamics of Cannabinoids," Clinical Pharmacokinectics, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 327-360, 2003.

[2] M. A. Huestis, J. E. Henningfield and E. J. Cone, "Blood Cannabinoids. I. Absorption of THC and Formation of 11-OH-THC and THCCOOH During and After Smoking Marijuana," Journal of Analytical Toxicology, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 276-282, 1992.

[3] K. Iffland, M. Carus and F. Grotenhermen, "Decarboxylation of Tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) to active THC," Europena Industrial Hemp Association, Hurth, 2016.

[4] Health Canada, "Cannabis Regulations SPR2018-144 Section 90(1)," 2018.

[5] WangMei, WangYan-Hong, AvulaBharathi, M. RadwanMohamed, S. WanasAmira, v. AntwerpJohn, F. ParcherJon, A. ElSohlyMahmoud and A. KhanIkhlas, "Decarboxylation Study of Acidic Cannabinoids: A Novel Approach Using Ultra-High-Performance Supercritical Fluid Chromatography/Photodiode Array-Mass Spectrometry," Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 262-271, 2016.

[6] C. Lanz, J. Mattsson, U. Soydaner and R. Brenneisen, "Medicinal Cannabis: In Vitro Validation of Vaporizers for the Smoke-Free Inhalation of Cannabis," PLOS ONE, vol. 11, no. 1, 2016.

[7] R. R. Baker, "Temperature distribution inside a burning cigarette," Nature, vol. 247, no. 5440, pp. 405-406, 1974.


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cannabis edibles - a friendly guide · 2020. 5. 29. · 3. decarb your weed •cannabis needs to be...

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