What Is Proper Cannabis Curing?

After spending months growing quality crops, you want to ensure your efforts satisfy consumers.  Done correctly, curing protects secondary metabolites and maintains a water activity between 0.55 and 0.65. This process also prevents mold formation, extending shelf life and safeguarding the hard work invested during cultivation.  While curing is often described as a combination of science and art, CEA HVACD designs, controls, airflow systems, and racking refinements are the basis for SOPs that achieve predictable results. Without proper care during cultivation, harvest, and curing, flowers can become damaged and potentially require remediation. Here are just a few ways improper curing can affect final products:

• Loss of potency: Excessive exposure to light and heat can erode cannabinoids, thus reducing the overall potency of your product. 

• Harsh inhalation: Smoking dried-out (low moisture content) cannabis is like inhaling a spoonful of cinnamon – incredibly irritating for your throat and lungs. 

• Undesirable flavor: Drying too fast prevents enzymes from working and can trap chlorophyll in the final product creating underwhelming or offensive flavor. 

• Risk of mold: Too much moisture inside the curing space creates an ideal habitat for mold and nasty bacteria that render your product unsuitable for consumption.

How to Cure Cannabis to Ensure Quality

Most cannabis cultivation facilities hope to sell products immediately after packaging. However, as markets get more competitive, accounting for longer shelf life in storage is essential. Think of curing this way — many of us have consumed expertly cured year-old (or older) cannabis that still had a fantastic smoke. So how do you make sure you protect your brand and provide consistent quality through the curing process? Following tried-and-true practices can save you from making costly mistakes.  Below we’ll delve into nine tips for cannabis storage that ensure quality, potent, and fresh buds every time.

1. Optimize Even Spacing for Airflow

Proper airflow is essential for curing cannabis. Pipp Horticulture’s purpose-built racks and hangers allow for evenly spaced plants, ensuring air circulates freely between branches and buds. This reduces the risk of mold and allows for uniform drying, which preserves terpenes and cannabinoids.

2. Simplify the Process of Loading a Crop

Curing large batches can be cumbersome, but rolling racks and hangers designed for easy loading streamline the process. Minimizing handling saves labor time and reduces potential damage to products, all while ensuring consistent results.

3. Control Trim & Packaging Space Conditions 

Curing isn’t just about what happens in the drying room. Controlling the temperature, humidity, and air quality in your trim and packaging space is just as important. To maintain the proper moisture content of the final product, completing the trim and packaging process quickly in a controlled environment is essential.

4. Monitor Air Quality & Environment in Transport Hallways

Transporting cannabis from drying to trimming rooms often disrupts the controlled environment. Investing in solutions that help monitor and control air quality and humidity in transport areas prevents conditions that could degrade product integrity or add unwanted pests and pathogen pressures.

5. Understand Supply & Return Configuration for HVAC

The efficiency of your curing process hinges on your HVAC setup and your ability to cycle the room. Improper airflow delivery and management, lack of control, and “dead zones” can disrupt timelines, and create an inconsistent final product. Integrating HVAC configurations with Pipp’s racking designs and supplementing airflow in curing is simple with the VAS 2.0 system. This ensures you can effectively move air through the curing product where you hang whole plants or break them down.

6. Limit Touches to Protect Product Integrity

Trichomes can be damaged each time cannabis is handled, consequently decreasing potency and affecting final quality. Effecting harvesting, loading, transporting, and hanging are critical elements that require repeatable results. Understanding how to use the tools that streamline transitions, like purpose-built hangers for the harvest-to-hanger transition in the flower room, rolling racks to transport hangers to the room, and a racking system that provides easy hanging. These tools reduce the need for unnecessary handling, movement, and product damage, ensuring the flowers remain in peak condition throughout curing.

7. Dial in Environmental Controls With EC Fans

EC fans provide precision air circulation control and can be a valuable tool in the curing process to maintain product temperature. When utilized correctly, these fans allow the post-harvest team to fine-tune airflow speed across the drying flowers to provide consistent conditions and ensure an even drying process with predictable results.

8. Maintain a Consistent Drying & Curing Timeline

Achieving the perfect balance between drying too fast and too slow is key to a successful cure. Airflow control is a critical component of managing water migration from the plant to the surrounding environment. In unison with the HVACD system, airflow management can speed up or slow down the dehydrating process to meet your goals. In addition, controlled air movement creates predictable and manageable timelines and workloads for the processing team.

9. Know Your Genetics 

One of the most beautiful elements of cannabis is its diversity, flavors, smells, effects, and sizes. From buds that range in size from nickles to softballs, this poses a challenge to uniform curing. Understanding the wet weight and density of your load-in can inform temperature and humidity setpoints and timelines relative to the performance of your HVACD system.

Get Started Growing Cannabis Today!

Learning to properly cure is essential to success. Implementing the proper racking, hanging system, HVACD, airflow, and SOPs will reduce risk and pave the path to long-term success. Pipp Horticulture is the leading provider of innovative vertical farming solutions for cannabis cultivation facilities. We’re here to help you optimize your process so you can harvest and cure seamlessly, save on labor costs, and improve your overall operation. With our guidance, you can build and operate a curing space that will pass the test of time and have a continued positive impact on your business.