In an unassuming office building, stashed away on Market Street in North Spokane, a new company is taking root.
Sesh-Technologies Manufacturing (STM) — headquartered in Spokane, with a second location in Denver — is making its mark on the cannabis technology market, offering a commercial-grade “rosin” press that extracts cannabis concentrates simply through heat and pressure.
The resulting “rosin” is a sappy oil, secreted from flowers, hash and/or kief, that can be smoked or used in a dabbing rig. STM engineer Jason Dueweke calls it the cousin of butane hash oil (BHO) and CO2. But unlike BHO or CO2 oils, there are zero foreign substances — like butane or propane — used in the extraction process.
“You shouldn’t be using anything that you’re going to come in contact with or ingest with that,” Dueweke says.
A proper rosin pressing will be able to extract the oil from the plant at specific heat levels and weighted pressure that retains the terpene values — which give a strain its aroma and flavor.
“The rosin press has been around for awhile,” says Erik Blackerby, STM director and chief technology officer. “A lot of them are just imported from China, or they’re something that some guy built from components from a hardware store. They’re very crude; they don’t have even heat or pressure. We wanted to address the need from this market, where you could get an actual commercial-grade machine and do high-volume production and processing that is consistent.”
Dueweke says that Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Department is in the preliminary stages of using STM’s 4.0 Rosin Press as a benchmark for future processing technologies. STM prides itself on its press’ food manufacturing compliances, as well as its OSHA-level safety features. The company even offers a mobile processing service for farms.
They offer a machine called the “Pucker” that presses the flower into “pucks” (a major boon for high-volume processing on farms).
And they’re set to release the Rocket Box, a pre-roll filler that will take what’s left of the pressed plant and make up to 453 cones of 1 or .5 grams. The Rocket Box will debut at November’s MJ Biz Con in Las Vegas, the country’s largest cannabis conference.
credit:420intel.com