One Man’s Attempt At Making Cannabutter

Making Cannabis-Infused Butter

Armed with premium, ground, High Level Health flower and salted butter your dude Herb Hightower is going to walk you through my attempt at making cannabis-infused butter or cannabutter. Herb hit the kitchen hard this week, heard Chef, and knocked out some cannabutter for the first time and what do you know it actually worked. 

You’ll notice how the title isn’t “THE Guide To Making Cannabis-Infused Butter” it’s more of an attempt at how to make cannabutter. You can make cannabutter many, many different ways and this is not a step-by-step instruction manual it’s just a stroll through my attempt at this and a laugh at someone’s first try making a cannabis-infused product. 

We’ve been reviewing High Level Health flower since the first part of the year, all posts can be found in the news section of this website, and since we’ve done a lot of reviews, we’ve collected a good amount of amazing pot. So, what do you do with a bunch of different strains of quality flower, you make cannabutter of course!  

After busting about thirty Google searches, it seemed like the easiest way to infuse butter with cannabis was the crockpot method. Again, there are many different ways and most involve a decarb process which basically brings out the THC. Cannabis flower needs to be heated to get you stoned hence why smoking it is so popular.   

Since I didn’t want to mess with decarbing marijuana in the oven and stinking up the house, I decided to take the crockpot in the garage and set up shop. I had accumulated ten different strains that equaled one ounce of marijuana that I ground using a hand grinder. That’s the first thing I’d change if I tried this again since all the trichomes covered my grinder like I had dunked it in honey or some sugary, sticky mixture. It was just too much pot for a hand grinder. I had read about using a magic bullet or coffee grinder during my Googling but I chose the hand grinder, mark that as my first mistake. 

Next, I picked up a pound of butter which was, as usual, divided up into four quarter-pound sticks. It sounded like some prefer unsalted butter but I used salted and it worked just fine and probably makes the edibles taste better. With this crock-pot cannabutter, you are essentially putting the four sticks of butter and the ounce of ground cannabis into one mason jar and submerging, carefully, in a warm water crockpot bath for eight hours keeping the temperature around 185-degrees. 

My second mistake was the mason jar. I chose a standard small mouth mason jar and that came back to haunt me later when I went to get the cooled butter out of the mason jar as it was hard as heck to dig the final product out. Next time I’d definitely use a wide-mouthed mason jar for the extraction. 

The temperature is the most important part of the process. I kept the temperature around that 185-degree point the whole time by using an electric thermometer submerged in the crockpot. Too hot and you destroy the cannabinoids too cool and you didn’t decarb and extract the THC. Ultimately, what you are doing is slowly transferring the THC from the marijuana and adhering it to the fatty butter. The crockpot I used has a warm, low, and high setting so I rotated between warm and low every hour or so to keep it at 185-degrees.

After the eight hours were up I removed the mason jar from the crockpot, again carefully because it’d be a total bummer to break the mason jar and lose everything. At this point, once the jar is cool enough to touch, you want to pour the cannabis and butter mixture from one mason jar to another through cheesecloth. I’ll be honest this is the first time in my life I’ve ever used cheesecloth but it’s basically used as a strainer that you can squeeze once you have a ton of spent flower and butter ran through it. This part was easily the messiest part and my third mistake of the attempt. Once I had strained the butter into the clean mason jar I was left with a swampy handful of flower and butter that I should have probably squeezed the cheesecloth to get every last drop out of the cannabis. Instead, I rushed through it because I had places to be and ended up just throwing it in the trash, which stunk up the alley, probably should have sealed that ganja in a baggie. I’m sure I left some quality butter in the cheesecloth and it still haunts my dreams to this day. 

Next, I put the clean mason jar in the fridge and waited as the dairy solids rose to the top and the cannabutter dropped to the bottom of the jar, it took about an hour to cool and separate. As I said above, this step was more difficult than it needed to be since I was trying to scoop the solids off the top of the cannabutter through a much smaller opening than it should have been, next time wide mouth mason jars for sure. Probably the one thing I did right was let the cannabutter warm a little on the counter before I did the separation and that also helped get the cannabutter out of the jar and molded into an empty butter tub. The butter tub was nice but if you wanted to upgrade your storage you can buy some cheap butter molds online and have your cannabutter look more like a stick of butter which even has premeasured lines on the butter stick mold. 

Baking Edibles With Cannabutter

Man, it has been fun dabbling with making my own edibles and mixing cannabis into whatever food and drinks I’m having. Spread a little on toast, slice some off into coffee, cookies, brownies and the ounce goes a long way in butter just go slow on the amount of butter you add to your food. Either way, it was a successful attempt but the whole time I was making it I wondered if it would even get me stoned. Every edible fan should infuse their butter at least once, it’s like a farmer who raises vegetables from seed vs. buying a half-grown plant from a big box store, much more rewarding. 

Links to Herb’s other food-inspired strain blogs – Snickerdoodle Fail, Black Cherry Pie Punch, Papaya Punch, Blue Skunk, Mimosa, Wedding Cake, Blue Dream.

Chef For A Day,

Herb Hightower