I smoked for a few years in my twenties and recently got my MM card. I am familiar with dry leaf and cartridges but after that I'm lost but I'm curious.
What is live resin sugar, shatter ,"sauce", wax, resin badder/budder and how do you go about smoking these (if you can)?
Thanks in Advance
First things first, it's bud or flower, you don't want any of the leafs except the tiny ones full of resin that come out in between flowers.
If you cut this this small leafs that's the sugar trim
As it has been said, all the products you mentioned are concentrates.
Concentrates are products obtained by extracting the resin glands from the cannabis plant using solvents, heat and pressure, or sieving.
The solvents used are almost always hydrocarbons such as butane, methanol or ethanol. AFAIK Butane is the most popular as it evaporates quicker being that it is a gas at ambient temp and normal pressure.
To quickly and completely evaporate the solvent, a heated box is kept at low pressure using a vacuum compressor.
If the freshly cut plant is frozen immediately and extraction is performed, You get live resin, called that way as this method preserves the fresh smell of the cannabis plant when it is alive.
If the buds are dried and cured You get the other types of concentrates, that have a weaker smell (less terpenes) that also smells a bit more like hash due to oxidation.
How the weed is treated and how the extract is treated after evaporating the solvent will determine the form it will take.
If left completely undisturbed it will crystallise into shatter, or it can be made into butter/wax by mechanical agitation, and using heat treated weed for the extraction will give sap.
Shatter holds the least terpenes and the most THC, often over 90% by weight. To get shatter it is needed to also remove all waxes and oils from the extract, this can be made directly during extraction by some machines or after through winterization (having the wax solidify in a sub zero solvent that will then be filtered)
Wax/butter is less potent because it will retain more terpenes, still strong as hell, up to 80%
Live resin is like wet/oily granules as there will be a small amount of water and a high amount of terpenes (the oily components that give cannabis its smell).
If you buy wax winterization can be easily made at home with pure alcohol and a freezer.
There is another extraction tech that uses CO2, it has mostly specific uses as you can selectively extract components from the plant, like only CBD, only THC, only terpenes.
But it can also be used to produce the same derivatives as butane, with the advantages that there is no possibility of an explosion, the CO2 can be recycled, and there is no risk of solvent or solvent impurities being present in the final product.
With heat and pressure extraction is possible to get rosin, that is similar to shatter, or budder, the whipped up version of rosin.
Beating up buds over a fine mesh sieve of around 100 microns will give kief, that is a very fine powder.
It's basically only trichomes and can be pressed into hash.
Bubble hash is obtained by way of removing trichomes from cannabis by immersing plant material into water and ice, causing trichomes to harden and be broken off easily, and then mixing for a while.
The plant material can then be discarded and the water with trichomes will be filtered with progressively finer meshes.
The finer the mesh, the least plant material will be present as obviously the mixing breaks off some small pieces of leaf and bud.
It can be sold graded by the measure of the mesh used.
Hope it is all clear enough.
