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The potent smell of cannabis comes from a unique combination of chemicals, many of which present in the resin excreted from the growing plant or extracted from a harvested plant. This resin is extremely hydrophobic, and can coat everything it comes into contact with— as many farmers and processors in goop-coated coveralls can tell you. It can also be hard as hell to scrape off all of the paraphernalia you use to smoke it.
It’s pretty gross to allow the brownish, rather stinky resin residue left over from smoking or dabbing in your bongs, pipes, mouthpieces, or dab rigs, and it’s all too easy to get the sticky part of the sticky icky on surfaces too—which is why your canna tools, no matter their application, need to be cleaned regularly. So let’s make it easier with some tips.
Alcohol is your friend
Good ol’, basic rubbing alcohol is the number one weed gloop cleaner. It’s available in abundant supply, and it is safe for use on skin and most surfaces, provided you avoid sparking up until it has evaporated. Alcohol cleans so well that you can even “reclaim” that resin into something you can consume—just let the alcohol evaporate completely and you can add what your scraped off to a bowl, joint, or even food.
There’s lots of ways to use alcohol to clean, from quick soaks to extra long dips in a stew of (almost) pure ethanol. Some brands that make specialized vapes, like the Zeus Arc GT, even come with their own branded alcohol swabs and wipes to keep your equipment spotless in between sessions, which is critical to maintaining the best flavor possible when vaping flower or concentrates.
Soaking is the best method for metal and glass tools, while wiping or swabbing works best on ceramic and silicone items. Abrasive salts can be added to an alcohol rinse to help scrub resins off the inside of a bong, but you can’t use table salt or epsom salt by themselves, as they won’t remove coated-on gunk.
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Get a specialized kit
There are plenty of brands willing to take the guesswork off your hands with gels or solutions in which to soak your gross tools until they come out looking new. While I personally favor the low-cost alternative noted above, a kit can offer convenience and speed, as alcohol can take time to break down resins and will put your tool out of commission while they are soaking.
A kit may include a solvent or alcohol-based cleaner alongside some bespoke pipe cleaners, modified Q-tips, and brushes. Others are a big bag of clay-based reusable gel. These solutions purport to clean in minutes and rinse away completely, a clear advantage over the time-consuming clean of a long soak, but loads more expensive than plain drugstore alcohol.
Clean oil with oil
Until you’ve squeezed pounds worth of plant matter into oils, butters, and concoctions, you don’t know sticky. Weed is really remarkable in that its main psychoactive components spread with ease simply by sticking to everything. For removing cannabis stains from cooking services, oil is your friend.
Filters, spatulas, and all manner of cooking tools can get crusted with cannabis resin if you’re not careful, and even when you are. One of my favorite tricks from weed baking: Use a butter wrapper to mop up every last bit of a concentrate tub— the oils in the butter break down the concentrate, and together they emulsify into a nice little infusion. Dabbing a paper towel in any cooking oil has the same effect, and is a great way to clean a nylon strainer; I used this method to clean my Ardent Gen 2 Strainer tool, which acts like a French press for herbs. Caution: never use cooking oils near any smoking or vaping tools—you might leave traces of oil behind, and burned oils are dangerous to lungs (if you already forgot the Vape Crisis of 2019).
Getting the best experience possible is the whole point of weed, no matter how you consume it. That’s really the crux of tool cleaning—resins from last week’s smoking sesh can cross over into (and contaminate) your current experience. Given the sheer number of finite differences between cannabis cultivars, it’s important to experience each one separately, without resin from yesterday’s Blue Dream muscling in on today’s Gushers.
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