Smoking weed is way cool, and all, but as your cannabis consumption advances from beginner status to more advanced, sooner or later you are gonna wanna take off the training wheels and try the granddaddy of concentrates – smoking hash! We’ve shown you how to make hash butter for supercharged medibles, now we are gonna show you how to toke down on some old-school, supercharged hashish!

At this juncture, we should caution you that if you are a newbie to smoking hash, then you might want to take it slow; hash is very concentrated meaning you might cough way more than you would with weed, but also THC levels in marijuana have a potency of 10-20 percent. Meanwhile, THC levels in hashish can range from 20 percent to 60 percent – you will get really, really high, maybe get dizzy and disoriented if you smoke too much too fast! Just be chill, and take it slowly, but as you build up a little tolerance, then smoking hash just might have you singing along with the Weezer song, ‘You've got your problems… I've got my hash pipe’!

Follow along with our simple guide on how to smoke hash so you get the full enjoyment out of your hash sess.

Background on Hash Using:

So, before we tell you how to smoke it, we should probably let the less-nuanced cannasseur know exactly what hash is. Smoking hash originated in ancient Northern India, was first mentioned in a pamphlet published in Cairo, Egypt in 1123 CE. It has been popular for centuries in North Africa and throughout the Middle East, before spreading to Europe, and later, the Americas. In Arabic, hashish means ‘grass’, so that’s where the name originates. Hashish, or hash for short, is made from the “kief,” or the resin, of cannabis plants, dried and pressed into “cakes,” or bricks, which can then be smoked in pipes, vaporized or mixed with other smokables. Hash is generally yellow, brownish, sometimes reddish, and can be soft and crumbly, pliable, or stiff and brittle. Hash can also be used in many cooking recipes when you make it into hash butter. Sometimes hash is refined further into hash oil, a honey-like gooey substance, meaning you can dab hash.

Making hash is pretty straightforward; for example, when you handle large amounts of cannabis buds and trim while harvesting, cannabinoid-rich trichomes will stick to your hands, eventually forming a gooey layer of sticky brown resin.  You can then rub your hands together to roll out small balls of hash, which you then press together with other small balls of sap to make bigger blobs of hash so you can later smoke hash! Easy peasy.

The various methods of making hash generally involve removing marijuana kief using a sieve, like in your grinder, or possibly whirling them around in something like a blender, and then gathering them together to use a combination of heat and pressure to condense the dusty cannabis kief into crumbly cakes or further compressing them into resiny bricks or disks of hash. One popular methodology of making hash is bubble hash, a Canadian system that uses ice, water and multiple levels of screens to remove the resin gland heads from cannabis plant material, and to further remove any impurities from the hashish leaving an extremely pure resin or hash. Hash can also be refined using alcohol as a solvent into hash oil. There are a number of ways to go from kief to hash, but that is a blog for another time, perhaps. Now you have a little backstory on the hash using adventure that you are about to go on!

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Here is a quick explainer vid about what hash is, covering some of the same info we presented above:

How to Smoke Hash:

Okay, now that you know what it is and have purchased, made your own, or somehow procured (hopefully legally) your own hash it is high time to enjoy yourself some! ‘How to smoke hash?’, you ask, ‘Many are the ways!’, we answer.  Here are just some:

1) The Pipe – Pipes are trusted and true for your other smokables; you can smoke a ball of hash in a pipe by itself or with something else.  We, personally, like to make a little bed of weed in our glass or metal pipes and then put a ball of concentrate - and since hash is a concentrate this would work - light it up and smoke away.  Your concentrates or hash may actually continue to burn or smolder after you initially light them and will be much harsher than your usual smoke (pretty lung-bustery) but you get a very hefty high. Again, hash is not for mere amateurs, but the hash pipe is venerated in story and song for a reason!

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2) Joints, Blunts or Spliffs – This method works solo or mixed with some other smokable, with the same warnings as using a pipe: the smoke will be harsher and the high higher than you may be used to – so going slow is recommended!

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3) Vape pens – These work for other concentrates and even leaf, they will work just as well for hash. Same thing with larger vapes or any other marijuana smoking, dabbing or vaping rig, they all work just as well with hash concentrate as with weed – just moreso insofar as the high is concerned.

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4) Hookah – Basically, a pipe with a hose or hoses attached to it, your hash goes in the top of the middle section, then you smoke through the tips of the hoses; it’s Middle Eastern, and has been used for smoking hash and other smokables for centuries. They’re usually rather ornate, sometimes there are multiple hoses so more than one person can smoke at a time, but they can be a bother to keep clean. Certainly, an option for you to consider when smoking your hash.

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5) The Straw – This one is so simple: take a straw or a ball point pen with the ink cartridge removed and suck your smoke through it.  Just take a small ball of hash and put it on the end of a straightened paper clip or a spoon; then use your lighter to get the hash ball smoking, and pull in the hash smoke through the tube. The ‘knife method’ is a variation on the ‘straw method’ in which, instead of direct flame, you heat up a couple of knives until they are red hot, and then place the hash ball between the two blades, drawing in the smoky vapor produced when the hash or hash oil starts to smolder and vaporize. Hot knives prolong the burning of the resin versus open flame, and produce vapor moreso than smoke, so you may cough less.

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6) Bottle Hits – Basically you use a blunt or a spliff and cut a hole in the bottom of an empty, capped plastic pop bottle just big enough to stick your rolled herb through, then you put a bit of hash resin on the end of the joint and light it.  After that you stick it through the hole, let the bottle fill up with smoke, then remove your joint, take the top off, put your hand over the hole in the bottom and inhale hash smoke through the narrow end.

7) Hash Globe – Basically a premade version of the ‘bottle hits’ method, this is a globe with a cork bottom and a glass top. All you have to do is take a chunk of hashish and stick it to the top of a needle, which then goes into the cork bottom of the globe. The pinned hash is ignited and covered with the glass globe top as it begins to smolder and you let the smoke build up, then when it’s full of smoke, and you’re ready to take a hit, you just lift up the glass top and inhale.

Here is a vid of a couple of guys demonstrating a couple of hash smoking methods - including the bottle method with a variation on hot knives for creating hash vapor to pull through the narrow end of the bottle:

Summary remarks on How to Smoke Hash:

And so we have hashed together a number of ways for you to enjoy the concentrated hashish you have purchased or made, and methods for smoking or vaping your hash solids or oils. Hashish has been a Middle Eastern favorite for centuries, exotic and mysterious to most Americans until fairly recently as its acceptance is slowly catching up with its fame. Hash has spread worldwide as a widely used form of marijuana concentrate.

It is fairly easy to make some hash from kief, you just need a sieve of some kind to sort the kief from pot plants, then you press and heat the kief together until it forms crumbly brownish yellow dough, or press it further to turn it into a reddish-brown wax. You can buy hash at a dispensary for about the same cost as other concentrates, about $30 for half a gram; you can also make your own hash from your own home grow or from collecting the kief from your stash and allowing it to accumulate, pressing it into hash yourself.

Once you have procured your goods then there are a number of ways to either smoke hash or dab hash, from just popping it into a hash pipe or some other kind of standard smoking and/or dabbing paraphernalia. You can also use a hash globe to trap the smoke from burning hash beneath it and then lifting the cover and just breathing it in.

However you decide to smoke - there's really now one way we can tell you for how to smoke hash, you’ll end up with one hell of a high. Hash has been popular for centuries because it is powerfully potent, not for beginners necessarily, but experienced smokers really enjoy the up to 60% THC concentrated rush they get from hash. You don’t have to take our word for it, smoke some yourself and see what hash does for you!

(Hash, weed and a joint, image source: Legaliza Brasil 4i20 on Instagram)

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Written by Megan Medeiros (BA)

Megan Medeiros has a bachelor’s degree in English and is currently working on a master’s in English at James Madison University. She's the owner and operator of Medeiros Writing, and has been working as a cannabis writer for the past three years, mostly following the legal climate of marijuana, especially in areas like California, Colorado, Oregon, Canada, and other legal areas.

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