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When I received a Rosinbomb Rocket hard press to review, I’ll admit I couldn’t contain my excitement. I’d become weary of solvent-laden concentrates recently, growing more aware of the gripping hold they had on me, and the ever-increasing tolerance my body had built up to ensure I was buying more and more overpriced grams of golden butane-whatever each week.
Do you guys know about flower rosin? It’s a pretty awesome innovation in cannabis consumption. If you’ve ever wondered why people on the Youtube were squishing their weed between the plates of a hair straightener with all their might, usually breaking it and angering the owner of said straightener greatly, this pure and potent form of concentrate is the reason.
Rosin is the sticky and translucent oil that is produced when flower is pressed, transforming the crystally trichomes that cover the buds in beautiful frost into a versatile compound that can be dabbed or consumed via your mouthal region.
The Rosinbomb Rocket blazes a trail that has been uncharted to this point, offering a consumer-friendly hard press that brings industrial functionality for a regular person’s price point. The coffeemaker-sized press crushes your cannabis with up to 1,500 psi, and two heated steel plates that can turn up to five grams of flower at a time into exquisite rosin.
Photography by Gina Coleman
I never put that much flower in the press at a time, though, as I experienced far better yields with about a gram or two. As far as best practices, I started experimenting with the Rocket from the jump, first pressing at roughly 210 degrees Fahrenheit, or 98.9 degrees Celsius, in 30 second intervals with decent results. But it wasn’t until I turned the temperature down to 190 degrees Fahrenheit, or 87.8 degrees Celsius, and left the flower under pressure for about 90 seconds that I experienced my best yields. Wax production depends greatly on the strain used. But generally speaking, the lower temp and longer press showed tremendous yield, between 30 and 40 percent — meaning for every gram of flower placed in the press, I was seeing about one-third of a gram in concentrate, more than enough for some serious dabs.
People have been pressing essential oils from flowers, such as lavender and eucalyptus, for quite some time, diffusing them to create calming aromas. But the rosin craze is just starting to hit its stride in the cannabis community.
The problem with hard-pressing wax from your flower is that the equipment available up until this point has been largely on polar opposites of the spectrum, with cheap hair straighteners producing less-than-mediocre yields and industrial pneumatic presses setting you back thousands of dollars, rendering the extraction method not cost effective at all. You can buy flower rosin for retail, but it’s sold at a premium — usually upwards of $80 per gram.
One underrated perk of pressing your own rosin is the ability to play chemist and create your own hybrids, mixing up a fruit salad of different strains to achieve whatever desired effect you’re in search of.
The Marijuana.com team even tried mixing in some lavender and other assorted aromatic blends to bring new essences to our rosin experience. It was magical, like dabbing in a Yankee Candle store before getting an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. The pretzel has nothing to do with the rosin; I just couldn’t envision dabbing in a mall without getting one.
Included with the Rocket was a cylindrical tool used to form your broken-up bud into a disc shape before pressing. This was extremely helpful, as it kept the flower contained without having to use a filter bag that would have cut into the yield slightly. As stated before, using one or two grams per press was optimal because using more than that yielded diminishing returns, as the oil must travel from the center to the outside of the disc as its pressed. You want to create the path of least resistance for the oil to escape the grasps of the plant matter.
Photography by Gina Coleman
As far as build quality, the Rosinbomb Rocket feels like it was designed by NASA for interplanetary smoke sessions, with all the stainless steel and composite pieces fitting together perfectly. Both the temperature control and the press itself are operated by simple two-button systems, ensuring that everyone from novices to connoisseurs can extract concentrates with ease. The plates heat up rather quickly, giving you just enough time to shred up your source material before squishing it to wax oblivion.
In a perfect world, the digital temperature readout on the front of the Rocket would double as a timer while pressing, but we all have cell phones, so I won’t get greedy. One gripe I have with the Rocket is that there is no power switch, so you must plug and unplug it to turn on and off. But I quickly forgot about either of these deficiencies as soon as I delved into the delicious dabs the Rocket produces.
