Easy Beginner’s Guide to Cannabis Decarboxylation

Are you sitting here scratching your head, wondering what in the heck decarboxylation even is? Before you start cooking, baking, or extracting, it’s important to activate our precious cannabinoids like THC and CBD. Here, I will teach you everything you need to know about where, when, why, and how to decarb your cannabis to create delicious edible recipes and more.

Why You Will Love This Guide

A member of my Well With Cannabis Community recently asked me, “What exactly is decarboxylation, and why do we need to do it, anyway?”

Decarboxylation is the first step you need to take before infusing cannabis into oil, butter, tinctures, edibles, topicals, and more.

If you were to eat raw or dried cannabis, you would not likely feel any intoxicating effects of THC. 

This is because cannabis does not contain high amounts of cannabinoids like THC; instead, it contains cannabinoid acids like THCA.

Cannabinoid acids have their own health benefits but are not intoxicating, meaning they won’t get you high. 

To get the activated, psychoactive compounds we want, like THC, decarboxylation must occur.

Decarboxylation can easily be done in your kitchen at home by baking the dried cannabis in the oven at a low temperature for a certain period of time.

This guide will show you how you can decarb at home in your oven and explore the science behind the process; plus, I’ll share my expert tips and tricks so you will feel confident trying the process on your own.

Why You Need to Decarb

If you’re new to cannabis or new to edibles, you may be frantically going down a rabbit hole searching all things decarbing.

What is this? Why do I need to do it? And why didn’t I know this sooner?

You probably did and just didn’t know it!

If you’ve ever smoked cannabis, the heat from the lighter touching the material decarbs for you, and then you inhale. The same is true when you push the button on a vape pen.

So eating dried or raw cannabis flower that has never been decarbed will provide little to no intoxicating effect or high. 

This can be good or bad, depending on your desired experience!

By definition, decarboxylation is a chemical reaction that removes a carboxyl group and releases carbon dioxide. 

Raw cannabis contains tetrahydrocannabinolic acid, or THCA for short. 

This non-intoxicating substance can be converted into the intoxicating substance tetrahydrocannabinol, as you know it Δ9-THC, through the decarboxylation process¹.  

This process can also convert cannabidiolic acid, or CBDA, into cannabidiol or CBD, though both forms remain non-intoxicating.

While THCA and CBDA have their own potential health benefits, most people prefer to use the process of decarboxylation to enjoy active THC and CBD.

While there is a general understanding of the science behind the decarboxylation process, truthfully, it is all just one big experiment in a home kitchen. 

Ultimately, they all get you to the same place – decarbed cannabis flower with the psychoactive effects you desire.

How to Decarb at Home

Decarboxylation occurs when cannabis is exposed to heat, light, cofactors, or solvents. 

The easiest way to decarb in your at-home kitchen environment is with heat, like an oven or an Instant Pot.

The goal is to heat the material at a low temperature to allow decarboxylation to occur without destroying the other beneficial compounds like terpenes or flavonoids. 

This becomes difficult because each cannabinoid decarboxylates on its own specific temperature/time scale.

THCA begins to decarboxylate at approximately 220°F after around 30-45 minutes of exposure, with full decarboxylation typically taking longer to occur². 

If you are working with CBD flowers, know that CBDA requires more time to achieve decarboxylation than traditional THC-dominant flowers. 

Each individual terpene may have its own therapeutic health benefits but also carries its own sensitivity to heat.

Also, know that the type and strain of cannabis you are using will impact your final results.

This is why you will want to consider the best temperature and cooking time for each strain before starting.

Experiment With Different Temperatures

Feel free to experiment with other recommendations to see what you like best; there are many ways to reach the final destination. 

If you want to decarb weed at higher temperatures, know you will need less time to achieve decarb.

Just be wary of extreme temperatures or methods that may introduce high temperatures, like broiling, microwaves, or grills. 

While heat is needed to decarboxylate, extreme temperatures can destroy many important compounds that contribute to positive health outcomes³. 

Lab Tests

I didn’t have access to lab testing when I wrote this post nearly four years ago.

I simply went with “what everyone recommended,” and that was to bake at 240°F for 40 minutes.

Thankfully, times have changed, and I can run lab tests and gather real-world data.

While this test is just a single test subject to all of the different variables of an at-home kitchen, these results were exciting.

The first lab test shows the cannabinoid makeup of the flower before decarboxylation; this is our control and how we know where we’re starting.

The second test shows how the cannabinoid makeup changed after the decarb process.

You can see that the first test had 1.34% THC and 18.75% THCA, and the second test had 17.12% THC and 0.40% THCA.

While not 100%, these tests show nearly perfect conversion.

This helps me sleep at night, knowing that the recommendation to decarb at 240°F for 40 minutes is effective and accurate.

Before Decarb

After Decarb

What If I Don’t Decarb?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard: “Back in the day, we didn’t do that decarb thing. We just left it in the crockpot for 24 hours, and it was plenty strong!” 

And that is totally true, and I bet the butter was super strong – and green and grassy.

Decarboxylation occurs on a time-temperature scale, meaning that decarb can be achieved at different times and temperatures.

They didn’t think they were decarbing back in the day, but they were!

Leaving the material in a 160°F crockpot for 24 hours caused decarb to occur, just at a lower temperature and a longer time. 

The reason we recommend the new, quicker oven method of decarbing before infusing is multifactored; it helps ensure maximum cannabinoid activation and terpene retention. 

But ultimately, it makes your butter, oil, and other edibles taste better.

Long infusion times cause the plant material to release a lot of a green pigment called chlorophyll.

While chlorophyll is harmless, it is NOT tasteless. This is what gives homemade edibles their sometimes unpleasant taste. 

By decarbing first, quickly and then opting for a quicker 4-hour infusion, the goal is that you end up with a more potent, better-tasting end product. 

This is my favorite way to create all of my popular staple oils, including:

• Cannabutter
• Cannabis coconut oil
• Cannabis olive oil
• Cannabis MCT oil
• Full-extract cannabis oil (FECO)

Remember, without decarboxylation, you will not experience the full range of active ingredients like THC and CBD.

It’s Not Going to Be Perfect

If you ask ten members of my Well With Cannabis Community how they decarboxylate cannabis, you will likely get ten different answers. 

While variations of each method are slight, they are usually accompanied by years of experience and personal preference. 

It’s important to remember that this is not a perfect process in a controlled lab environment, nor does it need to be.

Each cannabis plant is unique and contains a full spectrum of compounds, including cannabinoids, terpenes, and more.

The ratio of compounds varies from plant to plant, and each one decarbs at a different temperature, making perfect, consistent results challenging.

On top of that, we all have different kitchen setups with different equipment available to work with. 

However, this is not to discourage you. 

While this sounds like one big science experiment going on in your kitchen, it really is as simple as putting cannabis in the oven and baking it.

Ultimately, we all arrive at the same goal, activated THC and CBD that can be used in homemade edibles, topicals, and more.

If you strongly desire to be as precise as possible, here are a few considerations to remember.

Temperature Control

Temperature fluctuations can vary greatly from oven to oven, making tight temperature control difficult. 

Many variables can impact the final temperature of the oven, and even two same-brand ovens may vary in temperature by 5-10 degrees or more.

For this reason, I recommend using an oven-safe thermometer so that you can track the temperature in the oven that you currently have. 

I also recommend limiting the number of times the oven door is opened during the cooking process, as this alters the oven temperature significantly. 

Opening the door will cause the temperature to drop and alter your time and temperature recordings’ reliability.

Different Equipment

You are not limited to using an oven for this process; other pieces of equipment, like an Instant Pot, air fryer, or decarb machine, can be used. 

Basically, anything that can hold a consistent temperature of around 240°F can be used – I’ve even seen a guy use a smoker to decarb cannabis and another using a toaster oven outside in the garage.

Different methods will have different temperature controls, so I recommend you use a thermometer as needed throughout the process. 

Small variables in the different types of cooking equipment may impact your final product, but it is a great idea to experiment with different options to find what works best for you. 

Important to note if you want to contain the smell as much as possible, using an Instant Pot or infusion machine can help. 

Estimating The Potency

Perhaps the only downside of making homemade edibles is that it is nearly impossible to determine the final potency of THC or CBD per serving.

This is a disadvantage because it is hard to accurately dose correctly, and then it becomes difficult to assess and track how each option makes you feel.

Unfortunately, without lab testing, it is nearly impossible to accurately assess the final product’s total cannabinoid concentration, like total mg of THC or mg of CBD.

This uncertainty increases the risk of underdosing or overdosing, ultimately preventing you from experiencing the desired health benefits. 

However, you can use my edibles dosage calculator to get a guesstimate of your final potency.

This calculator is the first of its kind to offer the ability to account for the natural potency loss associated with the decarboxylation process, which is calculated at 0.87%.

This means that if you started with 100mg of THCA, in a perfect scenario, you would get 87mg of THC in the end.

Thankfully, my calculator does all the math for you, and all you need to do is check the box.

How to Use Decarbed Cannabis

Once the decarbing process is over, the world is your oyster!

You can use it to make butter, oils, tinctures, topicals, and a wide range of cannabis products – you dream it, you can make it. 

Or, you don’t have to do anything at all; you can grind the weed into a fine powder and enjoy the decarbed weed as-is, similar to how other dried herbs are used. 

This powder can be sprinkled onto food, added to your favorite recipe like my cannabis ranch dressing, or put into capsules for easy consumption.

Members of my Well With Cannabis Community make their own tea, honey, or seasoning blends with their decarboxylated cannabis flower. 

Others will move forward to use the decarbed cannabis flower to make a cannabis-infused oil or cannabis-infused butter with a simple infusion process.

The infusion process is easy and can be done in different ways: with a slow cooker water bath, a precision cooker like an Instant Pot, or the sous vide method with an immersion circulator.

Once your oil infusion is made, you can make cannabis edibles or these amazing recipes.

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