By @ medsforheads

Last Saturday, following the screening of Frenchy Dreams of Hashish, Kimberly “Madame Cannoli” Hooks and “Cherry Blossom” Belle (the late Frenchy Cannoli’s wife and apprentice, respectively) presented “The Lost Art of the Hashishin,” a comprehensive workshop for hashish enthusiasts, at Aroma Grow Store in Wheeling. Participants learned about the traditional techniques and scientific principles behind the original cannabis concentrate before watching a step-by-step demonstration of the bubble hash process using a relatively inexpensive setup of mostly generic tools that any hobbyist or professional could easily replicate.

Chatting with my classmates, some of whom came from out of state to get a glimpse of hash mastery, I felt a bond of kinship forming over our shared fascination with quality cannabis and the preservation of ancient methods. As coffee cups were polished off, donut crumbs brushed away, and joints extinguished, Hooks began her slideshow recounting her husband’s travels, including the eight seasons he spent rubbing charas in the Kullu Valley of Himachal Pradesh, India.

As Frenchy worked his way across the subcontinent, he came upon a phenomenon involving the acute influence of local terroir: plants that had grown near walnut trees and strawberries astonishingly took on aromatic properties of their neighbors. A staunch believer in the ability of flora to communicate with other organisms, Frenchy would often reference The Secret Life of Plants in reverence of the unique ways that nature expresses its will.

From the romance of adventure, Hooks transitioned to an overview of the chemistry at work in the trichome head from before harvest until well after processing. She remarked that even without a formal understanding of decarboxylation, hashmakers in places like Nepal knew that resin had to be physically “stimulated” in order to activate it. Throughout the life of the plant and beyond, cannabinoids and terpenes continuously develop as they mature, contributing to the uniquely exquisite flavors and effects that aged hash can impart if stored properly. In fact, a rare monoterpene discovered in 2014 and dubbed “hashinene” is thought to be the product of myrcene oxidation, only appearing as fresh resin comes into contact with oxygen over time.

During a break for Belle to set up, the day’s students passed around homegrown buds and chunks of hash to a reception of nods and approving rumbles. The elitism that can sometimes pervade modern cannabis circles, especially among those who consider themselves connoisseurs, was totally checked at the door, and all I heard in the crowd was praise, encouragement, and appreciation. Though the term “apprentice” describes Belle’s relationship to Frenchy, she is, of course, an expert hashmaker in her own right. As the director of manufacturing at her company Heritage Hash Co., Belle continues Frenchy’s legacy by working with Mendocino county farms to source the best sun-grown material available and oversees a small workforce carrying out solventless production to scale in Heritage’s dispensary-attached facility in Ukiah, which she calls “the world’s first public hashery” thanks to the street-facing windows that give passers-by a look into the process.

Belle began by recalling how she met Frenchy through her brother, Leo Stone of Aficionado Estates. She had dabbled in cannabis in Singapore, risking life and liberty to do so, before moving to California and seeing how the plant soothed Stone’s PTSD resulting from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. After becoming connected with Frenchy and Madame Cannoli, she lived with the couple for seven years while learning, teaching, working, and very often, reading. “The first thing I did on my journey was read,” she says, recommending a similarly patient and studious approach for novices.

The complete bubble hash apparatus, engineered to separate resinous trichome heads from plant matter using an ice water vortex (as opposed to the friction, static, or percussive force applied in rural regional methods), consisted of a portable washing machine, a series of sieve bags fitted over cut-off bucket halves and stacked concentrically, some stainless steel kitchen tools and a wine bottle filled with boiling water for pressing.

The machine had been modified slightly with smooth drainage tubing to replace the original corrugated hose for ease of cleaning. At several points throughout the process, Belle reminded the class how critical cleanliness was when working with plant particles, water, and sticky resin. She described a multi-stage process for all her equipment that includes soap and hot water, peroxide, and a minimum of isopropyl when absolutely necessary.

Every detail counts when making such an involved product as bubble hash, from the size and shape of ice cubes to the settings on a spray nozzle, to the characteristics of the bud or trim being washed. For this demonstration, Belle placed in the washer roughly 300 grams of smalls and trim over an initial two-inch layer of ice meant to act as a coarse filter for larger pieces. After topping the material with more ice and filling the machine with water, she allowed the mixture to rest for a short while to rehydrate the dried, cured trim in hopes of avoiding buds crumbling into bits of contaminant.

The machine ran for just three minutes in the first wash cycle. Belle subsequently ran three more cycles, each increasing in duration, over the course of the workshop, with Hooks noting that Frenchy would sometimes perform as many as fifteen washes on a single batch of material, separating the yields as distinct “degrees of ripeness.” After each wash, the water was drained through the stack of buckets, depositing particles of different sizes on each progressively finer screen. The largest micron size Belle collected was 190, which captured large trichome heads, stalks, and some possible contaminant. She called this bag “infusion grade,” as she would much sooner allocate its yield to the production of edibles than include it in the smokable spectrum.

More than once, Belle compared trichomes to human beings, appealing to pathos, as she urged both growers and hashmakers to handle their resin gently and minimally for best results. Rhetorically, she asked the room, “Would you want to be slammed around and over-trimmed?” As such, she pointed out that hand paddling required more of a tumbling motion to knock resin loose from plant mass rather than a circular stirring in attempts to reproduce the machine-created vortex.

Gingerly, she lifted each bag out of the bucket and folded it inward, gathering resin into the center and squeezing out residual moisture before flipping the bag inside out against a Frisbee to create a taut drum from which she was able to scrape clumps of moist hash onto a collection screen. To prepare a freeze dryer tray, this step was replaced with spooning a pancake batter-like slurry of water and hash onto a sheet of parchment and carefully shaking the tray to spread the puddle out for even, thorough sublimation.

Between washes, Belle cleaned her tools, remarking that hashmaking in California is largely seasonal, “which is tough when we have deps (light-deprivation grow ops) going all year.” Her team at Heritage is but one small militia in what she calls “the battle of the boof,” or the struggle to compete with and wade through the deluge of mediocre cannabis that has flooded the regulated market from large-scale operators.

With four cycles completed and the yields from each sat side by side in rectangular patties to air dry, Belle tossed the spent cannabis into a compost pile and shifted the focus of the demo to more pressing matters. Fortuitously, one participant produced a jar of powdery, green-tinted dry ice hash from a Portillo’s bag, which she tapped through a wire sieve onto parchment and transferred to a heat-resistant plastic turkey bag that had been cut into sections.

Using the wine bottle full of hot water as a heated rolling pin, she pressed the loose resin glands together into a cohesive substance that darkened as it congealed. Once the pressed hash was folded, kneaded, and rolled into the recognizable “temple ball” shape to ensure a complete removal of air bubbles, it was wrapped again in a section of the turkey bag, now protected by an outer shell of oxidation that will prevent degradative exposure of the soft inner resin.

The workshop concluded with a Q&A session, among other kinds. Belle happily fielded inquiries about her favorite tools (Dexter Russell seafood cutlery), preferred cultivars to wash (gassy classics like Sour Diesel and Chemdawg, “anything that isn’t Gelato, please!”), and admired colleagues in the solventless field, shouting out Rosin Bell, Simp Lee Adam, Kevin Jodrey and more. In her parting words, she encouraged all to remain communal and collaborative in our pursuit of hash excellency. “We’re a really competitive country and sometimes that strength works against us as a weakness,” she said. “You don’t have to like each other but you’ve got to respect each other.”

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