Where & How to Store Weed
It’s not uncommon to see people storing weed in a cookie tin, a pill bottle or a repurposed jar sitting by the side of the living room. And to some extent, you have to commend people for their resourcefulness. Before cannabis legalization—and its widespread acceptance in society—people didn’t always have access to the full suite of equipment available today. Likewise, there weren’t nearly as many resources, serious scientific inquiries, and online blog posts (like this one) steering consumers toward storage best practices.
Times have changed, and we’ve learned much more about storing weed. We run tests. We’re perfecting the curing process. We peer through microscopes studying those wispy trichomes. We know how to extract terpenes, and measure the degradation of tetrahydrocannabinol into cannabinol. And even the most novice consumers conduct a proper “sniff and smoke” test. We’ve learned so much, but do we really know the best way to keep weed fresh?
Allow the experts at Boveda to fill you in on this wealth of research. In this post, we’ve crafted a plainspoken “101” guide for cannabis storage, including why, where and how to store your cannabis flower.
Why Storing Weed Properly Matters
We can preach the gospel of good storage, but it won’t do much good unless we unpack the reasons behind the method.
Storing weed is more than tossing buds in a jar, and hoping for the best. We store our cannabis properly because it has the following benefits:
- Flavor: The terpenes in cannabis are largely locked onto those filament-y trichomes (“hairs,” in plain speak). If cannabis dries out under low humidity, the trichomes get brittle and break away, taking aroma and taste with them. The few terpenes left on the bud can also evaporate.
- Potency: Sunlight, air, heat and dryness degrade the main active cannabinoids in your flower (THC and CBD), tanking the potency far faster than flower kept in correct storage.
- Burn: Dry, dusty bud burns like paper – harsh and fast. By contrast, those sticky, fluffy buds you get with ideal storage burn like mother earth intended – slowly and richly.
- Longevity: Finally, you can’t discount the effects of ambient contaminants like dust, dander, pollen, etc. If you leave your bud in the open, these contaminants settle on the surface of your bud, eventually finding their way to your lungs. And no one wants that.
Storing Weed is a Science
You can read more about the mechanisms behind these phenomena in a couple of very serious, very scientific papers. (Don’t worry: there won’t be a test). The first is an older peer-reviewed research paper entitled “The stability of cannabis and its preparations on storage” that tests various storage conditions on cannabis potency. The second is a recent study in Forensic Science International supporting the damaging effects of light, non-ideal humidity, heat and air on cannabis.
Convinced that storing weed matters? Fantastic. We can move on to the practical portion of today’s article: where and how to store weed.
Where to Store Weed
As demonstrated, we can prove that open air, direct sunlight, heat, and non-ideal relative humidity levels damage cannabis. Therefore, the best way to answer our query, “How to properly store weed,” is to solve for these factors. It boils down to four key factors: environment, light, temperature, and humidity.
Fortunately, these factors are pretty simple to address:
Environment
Don’t leave your cannabis out in the open. Containers with an airtight seal work best.
Light
Store in a dark place. If you’re using a multi-layered Boveda Fresh Bag, you’ve successfully blocked the sun. (If you use a glass jar, just be sure to keep it in a dark corner of the home, like a closet, drawer or cupboard).
Temperature
Heat can be controlled easily enough by finding a cool corner of the home. Most experts agree that the sweet spot is 21 degrees Celsius/70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Humidity
The fourth factor to address is where Boveda really shines: humidity for cannabis. If the relative humidity in your container is too low, you risk losing those terpene-rich trichomes and overall potency. If the RH is too high, you encounter mold on weed, which is unsafe and unhealthy. You need to dial in that humidity to a precise RH between 58% and 62%.
And here’s where we get to proudly plug our 2-way humidity control packs. Boveda is the industry gold standard, trusted by cannabis hobbyists, journalists, and growers. The two-way “reverse osmosis” technology draws moisture from the surrounding environment if the humidity is too high, and adds moisture if the humidity is too low. Either way, the end result is the same—sticky, fluffy bud every time.
Now that you know the best way to store weed, we hope you’ll join Boveda for our worldwide mission. Let no one smoke dusty, flavorless cannabis again. Once you learn how to properly store weed with Boveda, there’s no going back.
