Before COVID-19 made it impossible, Dan Larocque and a friend would meet up two or three times a month for “Hash Day” — a precious few hours devoted to making their own hash.

The process is a bit of a to-do. The pair combines homegrown, harvested cannabis with ice water in a portable washing machine. The mixture is eventually dumped out into a bucket with stacks of screening bags inside. Each bag is then drained, as resin heads are collected at the bottom.

From there, the precious cannabinoid-rich heads are freeze-dried, a recent development in hash-making that significantly reduces the drying time. The finished product, however, is drawn from ancient, far-flung hash-making cultures: They press the dried resin into “temple balls,” a technique they learned in a workshop taught by legendary hash connoisseur Frenchy Cannoli.

“It’s very much about the old processes, but we still use the freeze dryer and stuff like that to speed things along,” explains Larocque, a former subject matter expert at Canopy Growth who lives in the Ottawa area. “And so for the temple ball, the resin is pressed out and rolled into a ball, and you really work it so that it almost forms a harder outer layer. And that kind of seals the interior environment of the temple ball from the air around it. And then you can let it age, and it will it will take on new properties, similar to how wine or spirits would.”

Cannabis plants with a heavy coat of trichomes are well-suited for larger yields of hash. Gleti / iStock / Getty Images Plus

It’s a process that draws on old and new methods, demonstrating some of the ways that hash has evolved through the years — so much so, that whatever was being smoked two or three decades ago is likely to be quite different from what’s available now.

Long-time consumers use hash products for different reasons: the higher concentration of THC means it can be more efficient; some say the high comes with less anxiety, others prefer its flavour and aroma. It will be interesting to see if new or less-frequent consumers become loyal hash buyers, too.

Canada’s regulated cannabis stores recently added a limited number of hash products, which is a type of cannabis concentrate, to their store offerings. Hexo’s dry sift Original Stash hash, for example, is pressed from a blend of resin from unnamed cannabis cultivars.

There are also a few brands now selling kief: Canna Kief by Canna Farms was one of the first concentrates to make it to market, and it’s also a blend of types of resin. But in this case, it hasn’t been pressed — it’s simply in loose powder form, ready to be sprinkled on bowls or in joints. The company also sells bubble hash, which uses the above ice-water method on a larger scale to separate trichomes from plant matter.

Although many players have been perfecting the art for decades, it’s still early days for regulated hash in Canada. There’s still a lot to come from legacy producers and new players who are combining historical techniques with innovation, largely driven by connoisseurs in U.S. states where cannabis is legal.

Canada’s next wave of hash producers

The Hash Corporation’s Jesse Kline has a habit of collecting various samples of hash for safe-keeping — to sniff, to look at, to smoke — or to show off to Frenchy Cannoli at a workshop.

“I brought a little piece of some old Moroccan hash which I had been saving for, no joke, probably 12 or 13 years or longer,” Kline recounts on the phone from Toronto. “It got us into the conversation of terroir, and we recognize that it’s actually impossible to duplicate what’s happened in the past with cultivars, and with the flavours, aromas and terpene profiles that people grew accustomed to years and decades ago.”

While the company is devoted to “authentic, traditional hashish tastes, smells, and experiences,” Kline acknowledges that hash produced in Canada today cannot entirely replicate the products that were being used on backpacking trips through Europe, the Middle East or North Africa decades ago.

For one, cannabis grown indoors under LED lights may taste great, but it likely won’t taste or look like cannabis grown in the 1970s in Ketama, Morocco. The soil and conditions are vastly different, and so are the genetics: landrace cannabis cultivars of yore are harder to come by after years and years of breeding hybrid strains.

Hash Co. has partnered with a licensed cultivator to make solventless extracts using ice water; tumble separation; or heat and pressure — which produces rosin, another coveted extract new to the regulated market.

Wildfire Collective founder and CEO Mark Spears says there’s still plenty of room for a wider selection of cannabis concentrates in the regulated market. He suspects some of the current offerings aren’t made with premium cultivars, which is how he plans to differentiate his company’s range of solventless extracts.

“If it doesn’t have much smell or taste or seems old going in, it’s going to  retain those same characteristics coming out,” he says . “So it’s really important that the input material is very high quality.”

Both Spear and Kline agree that rosin is the cream of the crop — highly concentrated in cannabinoids, so it’s an efficient way to medicate or get high for long-time consumers. But it also retains the flavours and aromas of the cultivar it’s made from, making it extra-tasty too.

Interestingly, hash purists like Larocque says that while he’s a fan of innovation and rosin, he’s not convinced it belongs in the hash family.

“To me, hash is very much about the product being the separated trichome,” he says. “And so in my opinion, once you bring in the the heat and pressure that it takes to produce rosin, or if you turn it into some sort of other extract, you’re taking hash and making something new out of it.”

For now, he’s counting down the days until the lockdown ends, and he and his pal can have another Hash Day.