With the unfortunate news that two of my three cannabis plants emerged as males, I decided to make a tea out of their stems, leaves and branches. So even though I will not get flowers from these, maybe I can still enjoy some of the cannabis effects through a tea. This is my first time making a cannabis tea, so I may need to go back and make another batch if I steep it too short or lack what is needed for THC to bind, more on that later.
I make the tea using cut up pieces of the leaves and rest of the plant, small enough to fit into a tea bag. I make two batches, one decarboxylated and one not. More on that later...
The hardest part was cutting my plants stem at the base.. so sad :-( But I knew this plant was not meant to be in my grow tent and needed to leave. And to make room for new sproutlings to start which may be females.
After cutting both males at the base I have lots of plant material to work with.
Amazing how much they grew in just a month and a half! They don't call it weed for nothin.
I picked out my favorite leave and gave it to @lovely.logic to hold on to. Its so pretty.
The back sides have even more texture, very strong looking leaves. It was a good specimen, sucks it turned out to be a male.
Decarboxylation:
Using the oven I turn it onto a low heat, around 220-240F (104C-115C) and place some of the cut up leaves onto a tray. Waiting around an hour they will change their chemical structure inside and making it possible to get the high from the plant. Some say just steeping the leaves is enough, but I disagree. More on that later.
I trimmed down to the stems and cooked those too.
Making the first batch with just raw cannabis leaves I weighed out around 2 grams. From what I have read the leaves and such contain around 10MG of THC per 1G of plant. So going with at least 20MG is what I would prefer. Honestly I can probably go with 50+
Using basic tea bags I place them inside. Not sure how long they will keep this way. I would suggest drying them out more as they may mold if you do not use them right away.
Closing up my bag I get ready to have some of my tea. I start heating my water on my electric stove.
Making three bags but I just use one for right now. I steep it for around 20 minutes.
Those two young plants made a lot of tea material! Lol! All of that will go in the oven.
The color of the cannabis started coming through at the five minute mark.
Once it finished steeping I took it back to the living room and enjoyed the sips on my couch. I was worried the flavor was going to be overwhelming, as my experience with edibles is the taste can be very strong. Though it was not with these leaves. Quite mild but for sure you could taste the cannabis.
I came back to the oven around an hour later and pulled out the trays, the leaves have curled up but stayed green. Not sure how long it takes to brown them but I just took them out once they curled a lot and no longer smelling strongly of plant material.
Placing them in a jar I hope they will keep for a long time.
The other jar has the stems, kept the leaves in separate jars.
So how was the tea?
Taste wise it was nice, quite mild. As for how it made me feel, nothing... I think I need to make a milk tea next time. And the reason for this is THC's affinity for fats and not water. THC binds to fat much better than water. Since I made it with only water that is what I got, a very mild tea. So using cashew milk or something fatty I plan to do this again, and try out my decarboxylated (baked) leaves. Luckily I have a huge jar of leaves to work with, so hopefully I can tune in my tea better and make it pack a punch with a little fat.