The Best Cannabis Concentrates in Oregon
Oregon dabs have shifted from surplus-era pricing and experimental quality to a market that rewards excellent taste, easy dabability, and chemical-free production processes.
While you can still find aged B-Bud and Trim extracts for around $ 10 / gram, the tide now prefers live supplements, rosin, and collaborations between growers and extractors.
Here are some of the best dabs you can find in Oregon.
The tastiest dabs: Echo Electuary
Price point: $ 50 / gram before tax
Echo Electuary is for taste lovers. While they make budget-friendly dabbables like Shatter, their most acclaimed products are freshly frozen resin buds that keep a plant’s scent and taste at their most important point. By freezing a plant on the day of harvest, extractors capture a sensory bouquet that can otherwise fade during the drying, pruning and ripening phases. The taste on harvest day is what keeps echo in people’s lips.
Echo Electuary’s flagship releases, perhaps best known for their lot-specific one-source collaborations, are often created with whole plants from a single source that are specially grown for extraction. This sets Echo budders apart from budget products that cut costs by using Trim and B buds, which are less potent and don’t taste as good.
I recently tried Echo’s Southern Belle Live Budder in partnership with Evans Creek Farm ($ 50 / gram pre-tax) – a freshly frozen whole plant budder made from premium buds with premium extracts killing your money. In addition to the more expensive rosin-based badders, Southern Belle offers flavor performance and a muscle-softening high that challenges the feeling that you are getting what you pay for that rules much of the market.
Best gourmet concentrate: Nelson & Co. Organics
Price point: $ 60 / gram for ice water hash; $ 70 / gram for hash rosin (before tax)
Nelson & Co. Organics is a small batch indoor cultivator that specializes in classic fuels. Their ground-grown rubberized flower is worth a bucket list on its own, as is their menu of artisanal hash-based products.
With each harvest, they freeze part of their flower to be processed internally into ice water hash by @puaextractions. While you can occasionally find the pure, bare trichome heads sold as-is, in frozen dust, Nelson’s gums, caramels, and super clean melting rosins are also in demand.
Before Nelson & Co, you couldn’t find ice water hash in an Oregon pharmacy. Similarly, hash rosins made from ice water – as well as solvent-free products and rosins in general – have been rare, widely dispersed, and experimental, with inconsistent results. Nelson has recalibrated the market for solvent-free pure melt concentrates that preserve and enhance the flavor and potency of the original flower.
The team has decades of manufacturing relationships with their tribes. They spent the medicinal era perfecting strains like Chem # 4, Deathstar, and various powerful OGs, creating some of the most potent herbs and concentrates available to anyone, anywhere.
Nelson & Co. always deliver a reliable, daily changing experience. Their dabbables smear the sweat on your forehead and initiate a journey inward to the most remote corners of the brain: They are not for newcomers. And their dabs are a strong counterpoint to brands that sell one-offs and hype strains that don’t justify the price.
Best Budget Dabs: Willamette Valley Alchemy
Price point: USD 20-60 before tax
The Willamette Valley Alchemy or WVA extractor offers reliable quality at a competitive price. WVA’s menu is comprehensive with dabbables and cartridges, live and cured inputs – an approach for anyone that makes the brand easy to recommend. They work with a number of notable breeders in Oregon including Fox Hollow Flora, DogHouse Farms, Gnome Grown Organics, and Focus North.
WVA’s entry-level dabbables include BHO standards like Shatter, Pull ‘n’ Snap, and Crumble for $ 20-30 / gram. For $ 5 to $ 10 more per gram, WVA curates freshly frozen selections: Live Resin, Terpene Sauce, and Sauce over Diamonds, all of which represent the aromatic experience of a plant at its peak; like a picture of a smell.
Step up to the $ 40-plus-gram price range for great value for solvent-free concoctions, badders, and ice-water hash rosin. Or for the convenience of a spoonable, spreadable badder without the cost of freshly frozen ingredients, check out WVA’s Dried Flower Options – an ideal place for affordability and ease of use.
The same could be said for “live-dead resins,” a Frankenstein extract that combines hardened and live plant components to enhance flavor and maintain a flower-true experience.
Goldilocks examples of WVA’s value-positive value for money can be found in their Living Resins and Badders, as well as a terps-over-diamond version called “Royal Jelly”.
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Best variety-specific dab: Grandpa’s Gun Breast by Zen Extracts
Price point: $ 50 / gram before tax
If I had to choose a strain to represent the 2020-21 season, it would be Grandpa’s Gun Chest, created by Surfr Seeds. Currently, the pure-clone cross of Animal Mints and Redneck Wedding is only available in Oregon – as a flower from indoor growers Evans Creek Farm and as a dab-able live resin bath made by newbies Zen Extracts with freshly frozen plants from Surfr Select.
Whether smoked as a flower or dabbed as an extract, Grandpa’s Gun Chest offers a rare complexity of flavors. My notes describe it as “a leather wallet filled with empty water balloons” and “sweet, musky wood, like a 19th century jewelry box”. As for the taste: “Electricity flows into my tongue from a 9 volt battery” and “Lavender-lime meringue served with a rose water shooter”.
As I said: “Rare complexity of taste”. And this becomes even more evident when consumed as Zen Live Resin Badder. The delicious extract is a perfect example of their skills in identifying great people and strains that bring simmering back-channel buzz to the freshly baked business.
With feathers like Grandpa’s gun chest in the hat, we’ll likely hear more about Zen extracts in the future.
Best Concentrate Brand: Archive Oregon
Price point: USD 60-80 before tax
Archive Seed Bank grows its own seeds, maintains an exotic genetics library, sells its own flowers, and turns them into mass-friendly, icy hash rosin at its Archive Portland retail outlet.
Concentrate artist Chris Owen (@dammit__bobby_) processes the freshly frozen inputs from Archive Oregon from a single source for one of the cleanest melt concentrates in Oregon – their ultra-refined hash rosin evaporates into an almost transparent residue that is characterized by a barely noticeable yellow hue; no dark recovery or blackened carbon deposits in your banger. Instead of the usual impurities, there is a soft, floral taste and effect.
The combination of exceptional quality, exclusive, direct breeding flavors and limited availability costs a premium price: $ 80 / gram for their first tier rosins and $ 60 / gram for the second tier.
Matt Stangel
Matt Stangel is Leafly’s Oregon Product Specialist. His cannabis-related writings have appeared in The Guardian, Willamette Week, Cascadia Magazine, and elsewhere – links to which are available on Cannapinions.com.
View article by Matt Stangel
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