I am approaching middle age, though I suppose that all depends on how long I end up living for. In any case, I have been smoking and ingesting cannabis since my early teenage years and thoroughly enjoy roasting big spliffs and also smoking Sherlock-style pipes and making faces like a British intellectual.
That’s not an excerpt from a dating profile. Rather I am sharing such personal info to provide some context for the quick discussion I’m about to have with you, dear reader, about dabbing. Because when it comes to heating concentrates at extremely high temperatures, people basically fall into one of two camps: They have either barely heard of dabbing and would be totally horrified to learn that young people often include blowtorches in their paraphernalia pouches these days, or they hit the pipe for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and have a flat-brimmed hat with their stoner handle airbrushed on the crown.
And then there are a few of us in the middle minority, who definitely love to dab but just can’t fit the sessions into our daily routine. In my case, the whole torch element completely freaks the hell out of my partner, and so for the short time I spent using a traditional rig, I was made to descend a dark staircase and pull tubes in the uncomfortable confines of my basement. I already felt like a casual meth addict lighting my shatter with a flame-thrower on my living room coffee table, and my excommunication to a cellar in the dead of winter stopped my fascination with wax in its tracks. After I cracked the female joint receptor with my banger (look it up, you’ll need to learn the lingo eventually), I quietly retired from the game.
As these things go, though, I wound up being gifted a few grams of wax and shatter. Lacing blunts with heavy doses always seems like a complete waste, and so I headed to my latest vape shop with eyes on some kind of an affordable—as well as compact, if at all possible—solution. The answer to my prayers in every way came from Yocan. Makers of what seems like a new cutting edge vaporization device every week, the Chinese company is gaining a major foothold in the US head shop market. Considering that models it produces diligently do every last thing that products that cost literally six times more can do, it’s no surprise that they are becoming increasingly ubiquitous.
Of the many Yocan choices in the $29.99 to $59.99 range, I went for the Evolve Plus XL in pink for $49.99. It seems like a freakishly odd vibrator-type item until you pull all the parts off and put them back together again. First, there’s a magnetic hood that serves as the nipple-esque mouthpiece and a barrier between your lips and high temps. Lift that off and you will find coils, which are housed in a disposable cylindrical metal container with a top that screws off (this critical part and its lid are roughly the same shape and size of one of those metal keychain pill containers often sold on counters at chain drug stores).
The rest is safe and even relatively clean compared to a regular rig and the necessary open flame. You simply use whatever dabber tool or scalpel to scoop out no more than about half an average pinkie nail’s worth of your concentrate, drop it on or in between the four adjacent coils, then screw the top back on followed by the magnetic hat, hold down the button, and let ’er rip. It’s that insanely easy. I have even been wearing my piece as a convenient necklace, or really more like a medallion. According to one friend, it’s the coolest accessory since Matthew McConaughey’s belt buckle bowl in Dazed and Confused.
I know what you’re thinking, and no, Yocan didn’t pay us to write nice things about them. This is DigBoston, not High Times. With that said, here’s the company’s own radical description of one of the coil styles you can purchase:
Four times the rods plus four times the coils mean four times the fun. Enjoy big clouds that’s similarly big on flavor. The Yocan Evolve Plus XL Coils is everything but discreet. It was made for occasions where being stealthy is the last thing you want to be. Simply put that the Yocan Evolve Plus XL Coils was made for the loudest and proudest vape enthusiast—the kind who wants to blot out the scene with visible and heavy clouds of vapor. This daunting feat is made possible because of the quad coil technology in every Yocan Evolve Plus XL Coils.
Is there anything not so great about these Yocan toys? Honestly, not that I see. There are some consumables—specifically the coil can—that have to be replaced every few weeks or so, depending on how much you indulge. You’ll also want to avoid keeping wax or anything that melts in the built-in storage container in the scorching hot weather, as it will leak out all over your shit. But that’s of course the case with virtually anything you’re dealing with on the dab-tastic frontier. The bottom line is that Yocan has developed a line of cheap and easy-to-use dab devices, and you should get your sticky paws on one as soon as possible.
Citizen Strain/Grain is an amalgamation of a bunch of us who, in addition to the hard and oftentimes depressing journalism we report for the Dig, also enjoy sampling and writing about the various beers, spirits, and cannabis products that vendors from near and far send our way. If you want us to check out your product, please contact us at info@digboston.com.
