Have you ever loaded a bowl of beautiful, sparkling flower, put the flame to the green, inhaled, and coughed out a cloud of metallic, fertilizer-flavored smoke? An incomplete flush is an unfortunate waste of flower. There are many different techniques to ensure a good flush, but wouldn’t it be nice to know if your flush is finished before finding out the hard way?
For those that work with the same product every day, it can come as a surprise when others don’t recognize something so familiar. As a result, people don’t always label their products correctly. We receive samples here at the lab on a regular basis that are not fully labeled, so we’ve become quite good at identifying the different product types – and even we still get it wrong from time to time!
On May 31, the WSLCB finally released their latest ruleset for QA sampling. As always, we here at Confidence have waded through the codes to bring you a summary of the changes and how they will impact you. Bear in mind that these rules are not going into effect until August 31, but it is always best to be prepared.
Slowly but surely, as cannabis becomes legal again in states across the US and in countries across the world, scientists are beginning to delve back into researching cannabis. Research grants are becoming more available as interest grows in the biomedical benefits of the plant, and accordingly more research papers are being published and peer-reviewed.
The chart below depicts the THC Total values for all flower samples submitted to Confidence Analytics and reported to the WSLCB’s seed-to-sale traceability system to date. As you can see, it’s pretty steady at 18% average, but there’s always a slight dip in the late fall season. Typically, the central 50% of the distribution is between 15 and 20%.
You may have seen us re-tweeting some obtuse and verifiably wrong information from a relatively new twitter account, Stoners Against Terps. Today being the day that it is, we can reveal that we are the instigators of that account. Our intent was to have some fun while bringing awareness to one of the most important and underrated components of cannabis: terpenes.
In Washington State, the pesticides that may be applied to cannabis crops are limited to those approved by the WSLCB and the WSDA. The repository for data on these pesticides is the PICOL database. The PICOL database is a one stop shop to find out what active ingredients, brand names, and more, are ingredients in the various pesticides available.
A few months ago, we embarked on a development path with a new instrument that ultimately did not live up to our expectations. As a result, we had to suspend terpenes and residual solvents test offerings to our customers. Learning from the experience, we spent our time working to redefine the standard of quality of these tests for the benefit of our industry.
The new US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, said at his confirmation hearing that if the nation didn’t want him to enforce federal laws on marijuana, then those laws needed to change in congress.
Confidence Analytics is pleased to announce that after months of method development we are now in full production with our brand new, state-of-the-art Gas Chromatograph with Mass Spectrometry (GCMS). This instrument now empowers us to offer the very best in scent and flavor analysis, with high sensitivity and selectivity to over 45 terpenes and esters commonly found in cannabis, as well as in-depth residual analysis of over 20 solvents and solvent impurities.