Whether you opt for smoking flower or dabbing, there are numerous things you can do to improve the performance of your glass and maximize the flavors and effects of whatever you decide to smoke. Below you’ll find five great ways to get the most out of your terps with both bongs and dab rigs.
5 ways to maximize terp flavors with a bong
To get the best flavors out of your bong, there are a few things you can do. While hitting a bong is a little more low-tech than hitting a dab rig, these 5 tips below can help you get the most out of your experience.
1. Opt for a bong with plenty of percs and water chambers
When it comes to bongs, bigger is better. The more surface area you have in your bong, the more filtration and diffusion you have to remove some of that yucky plant material and leave you with clean, fresh hits. To smoke flower through a bong, you need to light it on fire. That smoke will come out super hot and full of resins and tars that you’ll want to filter out if you want to improve flavors. With that in mind, make sure your bong is large. While a single water chamber is acceptable, the more water chambers you have, the cooler and smoother your smoke will be. You can also opt for percolators which bubble the smoke to filter it through the water, leaving you with fresh clean hits. The more the merrier!
The Stack water pipe comes with 4 percolators for maximum filtration — 2 matrix percs and 2 disc percs
2. Change the water after every use
One way to ensure a clean, fresh and flavorful hit in between deep cleanings is to swap out your bong water. With every use you’ll have a few scoobs floating around, which can grow bacteria and make your water smell bad. Switching the water out after each bowl keeps your glass cleaner for longer and makes it more likely to have an enjoyable hit every time. You can also add a few drops of lemon juice to your water to help inhibit bacterial growth and keep your water smelling fresh with each hit.
3. Keep your glass clean
You should take care to clean your bong deeply with rubbing alcohol and salt or Formula 420 any time you start to see resin build up. A clean bong is a happy bong. By ensuring there’s no resin buildup, your water stays fresher for longer. More importantly though, it prevents resin from clogging your bong or its percolators, which makes it easier for you to cool and filter smoke and preserve those terps.
4. Grind your flower consistently
A little known fact in the flower world is that how coarsely you grind your weed matters. Some grinders turn weed into powder, which gets sucked straight through the bowl and into the bong. Powdered weed also burns way too quickly, charring those terpenes and preventing you from getting a good hit or a good cherry rolling when you’re seshing with friends. If you don’t have a gauze, you want to take a larger piece of bud and put it in the bottom, and then layer medium-ground bud to the top of the bowl. If you want it to burn forever, sprinkle a little kief on top for added potency and flavor.
Grinding your weed consistently, within grinding it too finely, allows you to get most flavor out of your hits.
5. Use a filter
If you’re working with older weed that crumbles into dust anyway, a filter will work wonders. You can use glass filters at the bottom of your bowl slide to keep some of that dry plant material in the bowl without letting it get sucked into the bong itself. That makes for a less wasteful hit and keeps your glass clean and fresh for longer.
5 ways to maximize terp flavors with a dab rig
There’s so much innovation in dab tech and it’s constantly evolving. However, these simple tips and tools can help you get the most flavorful experience possible when you go to hit your rig.
1. Opt for smaller rigs with no more than two percolators
Unlike bongs, you want to choose something much smaller for a dab rig if you want to get the best flavors out of it. Dabs are concentrated and vaporized, so there’s no direct combustion involved. While you do need at least one water chamber for diffusion and cooling, you’ll want to minimize the amount of percolators in the rig. Rigs taste best when they’re simple. You don’t need a ton of high tech percolators — in fact, they might actually filter out the majority of your terps leaving you with a flavorless hit. One water chamber and no more than two percs in a rig up to 10” tall is a good rule of thumb if you’re trying to achieve maximum flavor.
Using a smaller dab rig means less flavor is lost while hitting your dab.
2. Keep your glass clean
Keeping your glass clean is just as important for dab rigs as it is for flower bongs. You should aim to change your water after every use, and feel free to add a few drops of lemon juice in it for extra flavor and reduced bacterial growth if you don’t change it less often. You should aim to deep clean your rig regularly, but especially if you’re seeing resin buildup. Using rubbing alcohol and salt will help you get off the nasty resin. You can also use something like Formula 710, which helps remove resin and improve freshness. A clean rig means better hits and flavors from your dabs.
3. Use a quartz nail
Using quartz for your dabbing surface offers the cleanest dabbing experience. Unlike other materials like titanium, quartz doesn’t have any weird flavor to it. When you dab from a quartz surface, all you’re tasting is your concentrates.
Using a quartz nail means you taste your concentrates and nothing else.
4. Use the right accessories
Unlike hitting a bong, you have a lot of control over your experience when you dab. Innovation in the dab department has been nonstop, so you have a lot of different tools at your disposal to make sure you get a good dab with the best possible flavors. Quartz inserts help keep your banger and rig cleaner and also provide extra surface area for your dabs, ensuring you can take bigger hits. Terp pearls and carb caps designed to spin them help keep your dabs rolling while also amplifying flavor and reducing waste. eNails and laser thermometers can help you ensure you’re always hitting dabs at the best temperatures to preserve the terpenes.
5. Take low temp dabs
When it comes to getting the most flavor out of your dabs, temperature is everything. A lot of terpenes get boiled away at high temperatures, so its important to master the art of the low temp dab. Low temp dabs help protect your nail, but more importantly they also ensure that most of the terpenes in your concentrates survive the vaporization process. To achieve a low temp dab, aim for temperatures between 500 and 650°F. You can use an enail or a laser thermometer to achieve them. You can also try cold starting your dab, which involves placing the dab into the banger and hitting it with a torch until it begins to vaporize. From there you just hit it like normal and almost never overdo it.
