One Metric to Rule them All?
Let's talk quality metrics (warning, hash nerd topic)
This post, I want to discuss a way of tracking both yield and quality of an entire batch with one statistic.
So we got yield. Let's call that Y. If you want to track your performance, that's an important thing to know. That being said, it only tells you so much. It only tells you how much you got.
For people with preferences like myself when it comes to hashish and their cannabis extracts however, how much we got is only a small part of the story that ultimately isn't that important to us at least not in comparison to the quality of what we've achieved.
Now, I'm not going to say that all hash that is not full melt hash is not worthy and that you should always press rosin out of melt that is less than five stars. Nor will I claim that melt is the end-all be all when it comes to determining quality. In the end, I'd rather have a product a little less melty but loaded with terpenes that I can now vaporize or turn into rosin or something like that, then a hashish that while high in cannabinoids, and with a high melt factor, is just lacking something in the flavor department. So even I, the head extractor at full melt extractions, will concede that melt is not everything,
But all that being said, our Y, or yield, it's just not descriptive as we would like it to be, so we need to add a little context so rather than just Y, let's call it YFM, or Yield of Full Melt. Since in the FMx method, we press any hash that is less than dabbable into rosin (I know rosin and full melt are different things when I say yield of full melt in this context, I mean yield of dabbable product)
And what's nice about this is it's a single metric that allows us to have a good idea of both the quality and the quantity of our batch at the same time.
If your batch has no full melt, and you then press it into rosin and it yields poorly for rosin, sure you might have pulled a very decent seeming 15% yield of hash off of that dry material, but when you look at the YFM, you barely pulled 6% after pressing it into rosin, maybe due to that cultivar having heads with thicker cuticles, or maybe there being a lot of plant matter whether that be from overmixing or forgetting to pre soak, substandard cannabis, what have you.
So by this measure, we can at a glance get an idea of both the quantity and the quality of our result.
And yes, I am aware of the industry standard of whole plant to rosin or hash yield to rosin. But I've been using this standard for longer than I was aware of that, maybe even longer than that's been a thing, and that standard doesn't really work for me anyway because I have no interest in pressing rosin out of anything clean enough that I can dab it. So YFM works better for me, and it's one of the main metrics in determining what is a keeper pheno.
