How to determine the potency of green dragon tincture

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The potency of cannabis tinctures made with marijuana buds depends on several variables. How strong is your weed or concentrate? Did you decarb properly to maximize THC? How much alcohol evaporated? Did your alcohol bath fully extract all of the available THC?

The potency of tincture using marijuana flower:

Here’s how you can find out how much THC is in your cannabis tincture. If you make your extract using marijuana buds, your potency can range from as low as 5% THC for low-quality seeded Mexican brick weed, 15% – 20% for high-quality flowers, even up to 30% and beyond for some strains.

If you don’t have the luxury of using tested buds from a dispensary, you’ll need to estimate. For example, if I have 4 grams of really good (but not super sick) AK-47 flower, I’d estimate the potency to be about 17%. Each gram of flower is 1000 mg, so there would be 170 mg THC per gram. 4 grams of weed would be 4 x 170 mg which equals 680 total milligrams. Assuming proper decarb and a thorough extract, your final tincture would have 680 mg THC. If you have a final product equaling one liquid ounce or 30ml of a tincture, each ml will have 23 ml of THC.

How to determine the potency of tincture using kief or dry ice hash:

Estimating the THC content of weed tinctures made with kief or dry ice hash employs similar math. The THC content of kief varies based on the amount of plant material in it. 73-micron dry ice hash is a pale yellow and very pure, whereas higher sizes such as 160 microns have more green material. 160 is as low quality as I’ll use to make a tincture, but realistically even 220 kief would be preferable to using the flower from the same plant since there’s less chlorophyll to contend with.

I use 160-micron kief extracted using dry ice hash in tinctures and other edibles recipes frequently since I save the 73 for smoking. I estimate that the 160 kief is about double the potency of the flower itself, so for that same AK-47 flower above each gram of kief would be an estimated 340 mg. Using 4 g of this kief would yield 1360 mg THC total per batch. If the final product was 1 oz. or 30 ml, each ml of extract would have about 45 mg THC.

The potency of tincture made using shatter/dabs/honey oil/butane hash oil (BHO):

Using shatter to cook edibles is a great idea for several reasons. The purity of the cannabis concentrate means your tincture will have a less planty flavor than if you used buds. Plus it’s a lot easier to determine how potent your tincture is. Since most BHO is in the 70-75% THC range, you can estimate 72% which means each gram (1000 mg) of concentrate has 720 mg THC. Using 1 gram of shatter in your BHO tincture recipe that yields 1 oz of the final product means that you’ll have thirty servings that are 1 ml each, with 24 ml per serving. To double the potency use 2 grams of shatter instead of one. Use our easy edible calculator for a quick estimate.

The potency of tincture made using marijuana trim or sugar leaves:

Please don’t try this recipe with trim. It will taste like a chlorophyll smoothie. For best results, make dry ice hash to get some kief for this recipe. Or just rub dried trim across a 72-micron screen such as your trim tray, it’ll take a while to get the 4 grams of kief needed but it’s well worth the effort compared to going through all the steps above and still yielding a planty, an impotent tincture that makes everything taste like crap.

The potency of CBD tincture made with a high CBD marijuana strain:

CBD tincture can easily be made using any of the recipes on this page. If you’re getting your CBD buds from a dispensary you’ll be able to tell easily the amount of CBD in each gram of flower. If a strain is 11% CBD, then each gram would have 110mg available. Assuming a thorough extraction with 2 washes of Everclear, if you used 10 grams of CBD flower you’ll have a potential of 1100 mg CBD or 110 doses at 10mg each. Adjust the math accordingly depending on what type of source material you’re using.