Understanding the differences in cannabis oil

Cannabis oil is not one thing. Three of them turn up regularly on our shelves — distillate, honey oil and black oil — and they’re made by different processes, which is why they look, pour and taste so differently.

Knowing which is which is mostly a matter of knowing how each was made.

Distillate

Distillate is the most refined of the three. The plant material is heated and the cannabinoids separated out by distillation, leaving a clear, pale oil with very little else in it.

Because distillation strips nearly everything that isn’t a cannabinoid, it strips the terpenes too — the compounds that give cannabis its smell. That’s why distillate is close to flavourless, and why terpenes are often added back afterwards, which also thins it out. On its own it’s stiff and tacky.

Its neutrality is the point. It goes into edibles, topicals and vape cartridges without bringing a strong taste of its own to the party.

Honey oil

Honey oil, sometimes called BHO, is made by washing the resin off the plant with a solvent — usually butane — then purging the solvent away. What’s left is a golden, viscous oil about the consistency of honey.

Where distillate is stripped, honey oil keeps the terpenes that were in the plant it came from. It tastes and smells like its source material.

A darker, redder version is often called cherry oil. That colour comes down to the starting material and the method; it isn’t a grade.

Some producers use ethanol, acetone or isopropanol instead of butane, with only brief contact between solvent and plant. That tends to give a lighter oil, which may then be chilled to drop out fats and lipids, filtered, and purged.

A word on how it’s made. Butane extraction is genuinely dangerous to do — butane is extremely flammable — and a poorly purged product can carry traces of solvent. This is not a thing to attempt at home. It is a completely fair question to ask about anything you buy, and anybody worth buying from will answer it.

Black oil

Black oil is the least refined of the three and the oldest. Dark, thick, and made with far less purification, so more of the plant comes along with the resin — chlorophyll, plant waxes and the rest. That’s where the colour and the heavier taste come from.

Which to ask for

Depends on what you’re doing with it and what you want it to taste like, which is exactly the sort of thing worth asking at the counter. Bring the question in — we’d much rather talk it through than have you guess off a label.

All three are in our own product lineup: distillate on its own or with terpenes added back, honey brown oil and black oil. If it’s hash you’re weighing up instead, we wrote about the varieties and how to tell them apart too.