Cannabis producers in Michigan are held to some of the strictest testing standards in the country and are producing some of the highest quality cannabis in the nation. But once you have purchased it, how do you store your product at home so that it keeps its potency and flavor? How you store it will have a significant effect on how much you enjoy it weeks and months later.
Your Three Biggest Challenges: Time, Light, and Moisture
It’s all about chemistry. The strain you choose gets its unique characteristics because of how all the different molecules (guided by genetics) bond together to form the flower. Terpenes, cannabinoids, and THC are just a few of the natural chemicals found in the plant, but they are the important ones that determine the smell, flavor, and effects.
These compounds are all affected by time. The molecules are not completely stable and slowly interact with other elements in the environment. Whether it is light, moisture, mold, pests, or even other bits of organic molecules in the air, your flower will encounter things that will slowly change it. The longer you wait to consume it, the more likely the characteristics will have noticeably changed.
So, cannabis has a sort of “shelf life.” Fortunately, you can control the time factor pretty easily. Just consume the stuff! Most products will come with a harvest date, so you will always know how old it is. Depending on how the product was stored, you could have at least one year to use it up. Past that, things get a bit sketchier. Cannabis has been successfully stored without significant changes for up to two years, but to pull that off takes effort.
Besides, you didn’t really buy it to keep it in a jar, did you?
Light is your second biggest challenge. Sunlight in particular is bad for your stash. As sunlight hits the cannabis, small chemical reactions happen on the surface of the dried flower that will change its flavors and effects. The rate of change here depends on time and the quantity of light it receives. Wherever you keep your cannabis, try to keep it out of bright light, especially direct sunlight, as much as possible.
Moisture is the next challenge, and it’s the hardest one to control. When your cannabis was grown, harvested, dried, and packaged, it should have been done under tight environmental controls. Growers are constantly fighting to keep mold and other impurities at bay, so packaging facilities often resemble clean rooms from NASA.
Once it is out of the grower’s hands, moisture becomes an issue again. Air is naturally full of water vapor and mold spores. Every time a container of cannabis is opened outside of a controlled environment the air in the container mixes with outside air. When that happens, anything in the outside air is able to reach your flower, which means mold spores and water get a chance to interact with it.
No one wants to smoke moldy cannabis. It doesn’t taste like the product you bought, and in some cases, it may even be harmful. Fortunately, the adverse growth of molds can be slowed. The two greatest factors are how often the container is opened and how long the product has been sitting.
Some people try to control moisture by keeping their cannabis in one of the driest places in the house–their freezer. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
When you take something out of your freezer and set it on the counter for a while, what happens? It doesn’t take too long before water from the air condenses on it. The same thing will happen to your cannabis.
Once you remove it from the freezer, water will condense from the outside air. Where you once had a bit of water vapor in the air, you now have water droplets! Unless you wait for your container and its contents to come up to room temperature before you open it, you run the risk of increasing the moisture content inside your container each time you open and close it while cold.
The cold temperatures in your freezer may keep mold from growing, but forget to put it back or leave it out for a while and you have given the molds a much better environment to grow. Using your freezer has its pros and cons, but to get the most benefit from storing your cannabis there, you will need to pay attention to how you handle the product.
➡️ Read More from The Clean Cannabis Blog: What to Know Before Visiting a Dispensary for the First Time
Storage Containers
In general, the container you store your cannabis in will also play a role in preserving the awesome effects of your chosen strains. Here, again, the largest issue is time. If you don’t plan on keeping your stuff around very long, you have a lot less to consider.
Glass jars offer some of the most consistent protection. Some jars are tinted which helps to filter out harmful light (think beer bottles that are brown). The glass is chemically inert, so it won’t interact with the organics inside of it. If you have to keep your stuff for a long period of time, you probably want glass containers as your number one choice.
Plastic containers are often the most convenient and least expensive options. These range from plastic jars and Tupperware all the way to plastic bags. There are two main considerations when using plastic.
The first is that plastic can have a static charge. The wonderful little trichomes in the strain you bought can get knocked around and fall off. No big deal unless the static in the plastic causes them to stick to the container and keeps them from being consumed. Certain plastics and containers may have more of a problem with this than others.
The second consideration is that plastic is not chemically inert. Plastic is always shedding little molecules that can interact with your cannabis and change the chemical composition, and the effects you get when consuming them. The longer you store your product in plastic, the more likely it will be to change the cannabis’ characteristics.
Some plastics even allow chemical interaction with the outside elements. Ever notice that you can smell your food through the plastic baggies that wrap up your sandwiches or vegetables you take to work for lunch? That smell is made up of tiny molecules. If they can escape from your lunch foods, the same thing is certainly happening with cannabis kept in baggies.
Just Use it to Keep it Simple
The great thing is that as long as you use reasonably airtight containers and keep them in a dark and cool environment, your cannabis isn’t going to change that much if you consume it within a couple of months. Glass will almost always be a better choice, particularly for longer storage times, but plastic can be ok, too.
The most important thing for both short and long-term storage is to keep things airtight, don’t subject them to bright light, particularly sunlight, and try to use them up. Growers are going to continually be harvesting new crops. Dispensaries will have fresh products. Just go use it and enjoy yourself. The more you do that, the less you have to think about how to keep it!