The Perfect Curing Process
Urban Wellness is passionate about producing the most aromatic, beautiful, and potent hand crafted medicine for the patients of New Mexico. In less than 5 minutes from being harvested with a mindful sense of gratitude, the mature flowers are evenly spaced and hung on stainless steel hangers. The hangers themselves are evenly spaced to allow for adequate air flow throughout the drying room. Finding and maintaining the environmental parameters for the perfect medical cure is a crucial part of this process just as it is in the grow rooms. Repeatedly achieving this goal is dependent on maintaining a sterile drying space and successfully incorporating environmental controls for humidity and temperature regulation.
Curing cannabis for medical purposes in New Mexico is a bit different than it is when curing for other medical and recreational markets. This is because the allowable limits of certain microbes is much lower for New Mexico medical cannabis than it is in other markets. For instance cannabis produced and sold in New Mexico has to be below 1,000 cfu’s or “colony forming units” per gram, for example in Colorado medical cannabis can contain up to 10,000 cfu’s per gram. Traditionally it has been thought that drying the cannabis down as slowly as possible in a cool and dark environment is best. However microbial spores need moisture to become active and form colonies of yeast and mold. We have found that in order to consistently meet these very strict standards that the moisture levels need to be brought down to between 9-10% of the flowers total weight, within a very specific window of time. This method has proven to be fast enough to meet all NM-MCP testing requirements but not so fast that the product is harsh when vaped or smoked.
The next step aims to preserve the terpene content for maximum flavor and scent. The dried buds are placed into nearly air tight cure buckets and the buckets are opened or burped every day for 10-20mins per day. This continues until the product has been given a final manicure and passed testing. Once the test results are in the BioTrackTHC seed to sale system the product is packaged into vacuum sealed bags. At this point the perfectly cured flowers are ready for sale at one of Urban Wellness’s inviting dispensaries.
These systems consistently yield high potency, high terpene, smooth smoking cannabis that has been tested and found to be safe for the medical cannabis patients of New Mexico. Urban Wellness, its post harvest manger Tony Martinez, and the entire post harvest processing team appreciate the patients that support them and they will continue to refine their systems in order to further perfect the scientific art of curing cannabis.
