There are a few key steps to proper vaporization. If you follow these steps you will soon be getting a perfect vapor draw from your Vapor Brothers or Vapor Doc vaporizer.
Step 1. Grind Herbs Properly
This is one of the most important and often overlooked steps for proper vaporization. Our Sweet Leaf Grinders grind your herbs to a perfect consistency every time and they are even available as a herb grinder with storage area. If you do not have an herb grinder you can use a coffee grinder, but make sure you only give it a couple quick spins, you don’t want to grind it so much that it becomes a powder and will fall through the screen. If you don’t have either of those scissors will work or even your fingers, just make sure the herbs are ground to a nice consistency with no clumps.
Step 2. Turn on the Vaporizer
Turn on your Vapor Brothers or Vapor Doc vaporizer and turn the knob all the way to the right (the higest temperature). For the Vapor Doc there is an on off switch, the vaporbrothers just gets turned on by rotating the knob.
Step 3. Load your Whip/Handpiece
The handpiece (called whip in the case of the VaporBrothers) is the glass piece with the plastic tubing and mouthpiece. The mouthpiece is the smaller of the two ends. The handpiece will have a screen about an inch or two from the end. Take some of the herbs you have ground up and place them on this screen. I suggest only using a small amount as it will provide more even vaporization. 1/8″ is plenty at one time. If you have one of the vapordoc style stirr and pack tools use the perl end to lightly pack the herbs in place. Vaporbrothers users can use a pencil eraser or something similar. Once your herbs have been loaded you are ready to vaporize.
Step 4. Vaporize!
This is really more than one step and I will go through them here. The first step is to wait for your vaporizer to get hot, in the case of units with a metal heating element the element will glow red. Whichever unit you have it should be hot enough to use within 5 minutes, 10 minutes tops. The hand piece is then held up to the end of the heating element, and you place the mouthpiece at the end of the plastic tube in your mouth. It is not neccessary to hold the handpiece parallel with the heating element, you can hold it level with the ground and thus avoid any backspill of herbs onto the heating element. The only important factor is that you can draw air over the element heating it which then in turn heats your herbs as it passes over them. This is the next step; draw hot air over the herbs, thus creating the vapor, and down the tube into your lungs. After you have taken your vapor draw you may pull the handpiece away from the unit and thus avoid keeping any heat on the herbs when you are not drawing vapor. The overall process is simple however getting the right draw is a science and each person has their own preferred method. Next I will discuss mine.
Getting the Right Vapor Draw
As I stated everyone has their own preferred method. The VaporBrothers instructions instruct you to turn the unit down slightly after it has heated up and then to take your draw. This way works well, however it’s not my favorite. My favorite way to use the vaporizer is to leave it turned up all the way, and then to take a very fast and long draw. As I continue my draw the element may cool down and then I will slow my draw. This varying of the draw speed is the key to vaporizing and what you will have to experiment with on your own.
Here are the basic rules:
Hot element: draw fast to avoid burning the herbs, as the element cools you can slow your draw.
Slow element: draw slow to create the vapor, however if you draw to slow on a hot element you will burn the herbs and create smoke.
Experiment with different temperatures and draw speeds and within a few trials you will find the one that fits you best.
How do I know when the herbs are spent?
This is one of the most frequent questions that goes along with vaporizing. It’s hard to really say as it varies with the herbs you are using but here are a few guidlines:
Color: If herbs change color from green to brown they are probably spent (if they go to black you have gone too far)
Flavor: Many herbs will develop a distinct flavor after their essential contents have been extracted. For many herbs this may resemble the flavor of burnt popcorn. It’s not really pleasant so you want to learn how to realize your herbs are spent before getting this far.
Vapor: This is actually one of the methods I find most usefull. When the herbs are becomming spent, vaporizing them at the normal temperature fails to produce any more vapor. Don’t force vapor by drawing slow on a hot element, all you are doing then is burning the material and inhaling all the stuff we were attempting to avoid inhaling by vaporizing.
I think you will find that once you give your VaporBrothers or VaporWarez/VaporDoc vaporizer a few tries you will get the hang of it very quickly. They work great and provide a great vapor draw every time for the experienced operator. Feel free to contact us with questions regarding using your vaporizer, we are happy to help everyone get the best out of their vaporizer.
