A Connoisseur’s Guide to Drying and Curing Cannabis

The drying and curing phase is more important than most growers think. I’ve seen experienced growers cultivate amazing runs of quality flower, only to ruin it in the drying and curing process. Sure, many growers are consciously aware of the importance of drying and curing, but few actually understand the mechanisms they’re implementing. Knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing is far more beneficial than simply following a routine.

The truth is, a lot of stoners will be perfectly happy with badly dried and cured flower, but sit around a table of guys who are truly passionate about growing and you’ll find that your processes may still have room for improvement. After all, we never stop learning as growers.

There is also no single “correct” way to dry and cure cannabis. The goal is to control the rate at which moisture leaves the flower, while protecting the compounds that give it its aroma, flavour and effects. How you achieve that can depend on your environment, the structure of the plant, the size of the flowers and even the cultivar itself.

Fix Your Environment First

Without good environmental control, drying can be significantly impacted, and there’s no coming back from a bad drying process. The goal here is simple: preserve as much of the flower’s quality as possible while removing enough moisture to make it stable for storage.

Cannabis flowers contain a very large amount of water when freshly harvested, so drying is essentially a controlled process of removing that water without removing everything else you care about at the same time. Temperature, humidity, airflow and time all influence this process.

Temperature control is extremely important for the ideal dry. In winter months, you can sometimes get away with using just a dehumidifier, but in summer, ambient heat can make it much harder to achieve a slow and controlled dry. Higher temperatures can also accelerate the loss or degradation of volatile compounds and other components of the flower.

This is why I personally prefer a drying period of around 10 to 15 days when conditions allow it. I don’t consider that a magic number, though. Some flowers will dry faster and some slower, depending on their structure and the conditions around them. Research on cannabis drying has also shown substantial differences between drying methods and drying rates, so there is no universal number that every harvest needs to hit.

Humidity is equally influential. I recommend around 50% to 60% RH for drying, while avoiding spikes above 65% where possible. Higher humidity doesn’t literally “lock” the flower at a particular moisture level, but it can slow moisture loss considerably. If the flower and the surrounding air reach a moisture equilibrium before enough water has been removed, you can end up with flower that remains soft and difficult to properly dry.

This is also where mould becomes a concern. You’re trying to remove enough moisture to make the flower stable, while avoiding an environment where microbial growth becomes a problem. Water activity is ultimately more useful than simply looking at RH or the famous “stem snap”, but most home growers don’t have access to a water activity meter, so environmental control and paying attention to the flower are still your best tools.

If you feel like your flower is drying too quickly, increasing the humidity slightly can slow the process down. Conversely, if things are taking too long, dropping the humidity toward the lower end of the 50s can encourage more moisture removal. The important thing is making gradual changes rather than swinging the environment around wildly.

The problem is that full climate control doesn’t come cheap. Sure, a dehumidifier should be in every grower’s drying room regardless, but air conditioners are more expensive and have higher running costs, so it’s often a difficult commitment for hobby growers.

If you find yourself in that predicament, just do what you can. If temperatures go up, increasing the humidity slightly can help slow the drying process, although it obviously can’t undo any quality loss that has already occurred because of excessive heat.

Balancing Venting For The Best Airflow

Airflow is essential during drying. The last thing you want is a high-humidity room with stagnant air sitting around your flowers. That doesn’t mean blasting the plants with a fan, though.

A gentle, continuous exchange of air is generally preferable to having an oscillating fan blowing directly over the flowers. Direct airflow can increase the rate of evaporation at the exposed surface and can cause different parts of the room to dry at different rates.

This is why I like the idea of drying in a grow tent with extraction running at a low speed. You’re continuously replacing the air without aggressively stripping moisture from the flowers.

The important distinction here is air movement versus direct airflow. You want the room’s air to move and refresh, but you don’t necessarily want wind blowing directly across the buds.

A Kind Of Dark Room Isn’t Enough. Seal The Plants From All Light!

It took me way too long to learn this, but when you dry cannabis, it shouldn’t be done in a mostly dark room. It should be done in a completely dark room or tent.

The reason is interesting.

Light can contribute to the degradation of cannabinoids and other compounds in cannabis. THC degradation is influenced by both light and temperature, and studies have demonstrated significant cannabinoid degradation under prolonged light exposure.

It’s therefore not really worth taking the chance. If you have spent months growing a plant and carefully preserving its chemistry, there is very little reason to leave it sitting under lights during the most important part of the post-harvest process.

You don’t need to obsess over opening the tent for a minute or two to check something, but as a general rule, dark means dark.

Don’t Use The Stem Snap As Your Only Indicator

One of the most common pieces of drying advice is to wait until the smaller stems snap rather than bend. It’s not terrible advice, but it’s also not a particularly scientific way of determining whether your flower is ready.

Different plants have different stem thicknesses, and the moisture content of a stem doesn’t necessarily tell you exactly what is happening inside the flower attached to it.

The real goal is to get the flower to an appropriate moisture level, not to make a stem perform a particular trick.

You should be paying attention to the flower itself. How does the outside feel? Does the interior still feel noticeably wet? How does the flower behave after being handled? Does it feel dry on the outside but soft and damp inside?

The stem snap can be one useful indicator, but it shouldn’t be the only one.

Don’t Jar Flower With Excess Leaf Material

I’m not a huge fan of putting heavily trimmed flower into a jar with lots of leftover leaf material and stems.

I used to think there was some complicated explanation involving nitrogen breaking down and having to go somewhere, but the reality is more complicated than that.

Plant material continues to contain its own moisture and a range of organic compounds after harvest. Leaves also have a very different structure from the flower itself, and keeping large amounts of unnecessary plant material packed tightly around the buds can affect how moisture redistributes within the container. The exception is in larger containers where air can more easily move across the flower.

If you’re trying to preserve the aroma and character of the flower, there isn’t much reason to leave large amounts of unnecessary plant material packed around it.

Consider A Middle Ground Between Hanger & Jar

If you’re going directly from the drying rack to the jar, you may find some nugs are dry while others are still a bit moist.

Having buckets or another temporary container to use between the drying and final jarring process allows you to fine-tune those last few hours of the dry, separating flowers according to how they are behaving rather than treating the entire harvest as though it is identical.

It’s a bit more work, but it does give you more control.

This is particularly useful when you have flowers of very different sizes. A tiny nug and a huge cola aren’t going to lose moisture at exactly the same rate, so expecting both to be ready at precisely the same time doesn’t make much sense.

Is Whole-Plant Hanging Really All That Great?

When you start growing, you see all these claims online about how good whole-plant hanging is, and it’s not without merit. In certain circumstances, a whole-plant hang is a great idea, but in other situations it doesn’t really make sense.

One of the strongest benefits of whole-plant drying is that it can slow the drying process down. A large plant has a lot of biomass and relatively little exposed surface area compared to a plant that has been chopped into smaller pieces.

So if you’re stuck without air conditioning in the summer months, it’s not a bad idea to use the plant itself as a way of slowing the drying process.

However, in a controlled environment where you’re already achieving a suitably slow dry, chopping the plant into similarly sized branches can actually make the drying process more uniform.

This is one of those areas where I think growers have confused a useful technique with an absolute rule.

Whole-plant drying isn’t inherently better. It’s simply one way of controlling the rate at which moisture leaves the plant.

If you have a controlled drying environment and can standardise the size of your branches, you may actually achieve a more predictable result by doing so.

The important thing is understanding what you’re trying to achieve rather than blindly following a particular drying method.

Wet Trim Or Dry Trim?

Trimming is another variable that affects drying, rather than simply being an aesthetic choice.

Removing leaves changes the amount of exposed surface area, which changes how quickly moisture can leave the plant. A heavily trimmed flower will therefore behave differently from a flower carrying a lot of surrounding leaf material.

This doesn’t mean that wet trimming is automatically bad or that dry trimming is automatically better. It means you should understand that how much plant material you remove is part of the drying equation.

If you’re struggling to get a particular cultivar to dry at the rate you want, changing the amount of material you leave attached may be more useful than simply changing the room’s RH.

The First Few Days In The Jar Are About Moisture Redistribution

One of the strangest things about drying is putting flower into a jar that feels dry, only to find it noticeably softer a few hours later.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the flower has somehow become wet again.

There is still moisture distributed throughout the flower, and once the flower is placed into a sealed container, that moisture can redistribute from the interior toward the drier outer surfaces.

This is one reason why the first stage of curing is really a combination of drying and moisture equalisation.

You aren’t simply putting perfectly dry flower into a jar and then waiting for it to magically become cured. You’re allowing the remaining moisture within the flower to redistribute and settle into a more stable state.

Burping Isn’t A Ritual

There’s an endless amount of curing advice online that gives you a precise burping schedule. Open the jar for 15 minutes when the full moon shines through the western window. The truth is that there isn’t one single rhythm to burping jars.

The purpose of opening the container is to manage the environment inside it. If the flower is releasing enough moisture to raise the humidity inside the container significantly, opening it allows that moisture to escape. But burping isn’t a magical part of the curing process that must be performed according to a calendar.

If the flower is appropriately dried and the humidity inside the container is stable, you may not need to open it very often.

Conversely, if you’ve jarred flower that is obviously too wet, following a rigid once-a-day burping schedule isn’t going to magically fix the problem. The flower should dictate what you do, not the calendar.

Don’t Confuse Humidity Packs With A Cure

Humidity-control packs are useful for maintaining a stable storage environment, but they aren’t a replacement for properly drying your flower.

If you put flower into a jar while it is excessively wet and then throw a humidity pack inside, you’re essentially asking the pack to correct a problem that should have been dealt with during drying.

A humidity pack can help maintain properly dried flower. It can’t turn badly dried flower into perfectly cured flower. There is also a difference between stabilising moisture and curing. The two things overlap, but they aren’t necessarily the same process.

Container Size Matters More Than You Think

The amount of flower relative to the amount of empty air inside the container affects how the environment behaves. A mostly empty large jar containing a small amount of flower is going to behave differently from a smaller jar packed appropriately with flower.

Likewise, a dense mass of large flowers will redistribute moisture differently from a handful of small loose buds. This is another reason why I don’t love rigid curing rules. There are simply too many variables involved. The container, the amount of flower, the moisture content and the structure of the flowers all interact with each other.

Different Weed Cures Differently

If you’re someone who likes to cure their flower for a while before you dig in, you may be sacrificing the best period. Different plants convert at different rates depending on their chemotype. Some strains may have more volatile compounds, while others are more stable.

I’ve found OG Kush for instance to almost always taste best in the first 2 to 3 weeks of being jarred. There are some sharp notes within the petrol/diesel/fuel realm that add amazing top end to the otherwise earthy lows that OG carries. But these high notes tend to cure out very quickly and usually by week 4 have mostly disappeared. It’s at this point that OG takes on the more creamy smoke.

So don’t be shy to try your supply throughout the cure and see at which point you feel like it’s at its best. The results will vary across most strains.