Piatella. It is meant to be the rock star level hashish. Apparently. To be fair I've never actually had any - only read about it.

Currently mycoconauts (who I've not ordered from before) have a Lemon Skunk Piatella at $58 gram. Follow the link to check it out.

So why has this apparently magic hash captured my imagination?

I've made basic hash several times now. I've had good results and I've had poor results plus everything in between. A couple are written up as topics on my profile here. While I'm not actually the most massive hash smoking fan, and certainly not an expert, I am utterly fascinated with the process.

Depending upon what your starting materials are, the process you use, how carefully you run it, will result in wildly different qualities of hash.

At one end of the scale you get the light and calming daytime smoke for someone who is meant to be doing something else but felt a break was needed. At the other end you have the full space cowboy high grade smoke for someone who'll be doing little else that evening but grinning at people and being confused by the complexity of opening sweet wrappers.

There are lots of interesting hash making techniques from traditional hand rolled to the modern static method and the even newer plasma static process that can create a static sift in an automated way. That's worth seeing - some clever sciency folk figured out that the nice tasty trichome heads that get you wasted and the rest of the plant were oppositely charged and thus could be separated at speed using lots of static electricity to draw them apart. The application of human genius at its finest. But back to ice water hash and the piatella.

The piatella, from what I can tell, starts life with an expert ice water separation. This will be using high quality materials and taking a large amount of care to separate the heads only and not any plant materials. This will create a full melt hash base.

Following on from this the next key part is to make sure the product doesn't oxidise. This is why regular hash is usually darker - oxidisation - from exposure to air and heat. Freeze drying must be used to limit that while making sure all the water is successfully removed.

With a regular hash you'd likely heat and press the hash in some way to get the trichomes reacting for a long term storage once it was dry. With Piatella, to keep it from oxidising, it's vacuum wrapped and cold cured for months. As the terpines naturally try to leach out but cannot escape the vacuum pack they react inwards instead. And that's apparently where the light colour and fudgy consistency come from. This process takes months of planning, processing, love and care, hence the artisan price tag, but is meant to preserve the fresh taste and high quality of the product. It's essentially a solventless 'natural' extract.

It's this last part that I'm particularly fascinated by. Like any human innovation I look at, I'm always perplexed to think about how someone stepped it through in their brain as a process.

Anyway, I spotted this Piatella available and as it's pretty rare I thought I'd flag it up to everyone on LB. I'm pretty tempted myself so may jump on board the piatella train after payday as a treat.

I must admit I find it a little hard to justify the price particularly while the LA Barz hash is a smidgen cheaper but as it's so rare I might just dip in for a taste of something I've only read about. They say to never meet your heros - so will this be the like the moment I discovered a rock star I'd admired for many years was actually a wee bit of dick?

Have you had the Piatella? Would you consider it? Is it a disappointing washed up rock star? Or is it the full Rolling Stone? Let me know your thoughts below...

As always, thanks for reading, I hope it was of interest and if not I hope it was entertaining at least. I'll see you in the next topic.