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Curing method poll: jars vs grove bags, what are you using?
Been curing in mason jars for years and i thought i had it dialed in. 62% boveda, burp twice a day for the first week, done. But a few guys in my garden club swear by grove bags now and i'm starting to feel like the old guy still using a flip phone.
Tried grove bags on my last run of Zkittlez and honestly wasn't sure what to think. The smell seemed to develop a little faster but i don't know if that's real or just me being impatient. Didn't feel like i had as much control over the process, which bugs me a little.
So what's actually working best for you guys? Jars, grove bags, something else entirely? And for the grove bag people, are you still monitoring humidity or just sealing and forgetting? That's the part i can't wrap my head around yet.
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5 Comments
Experienced4d ago
The control thing is real and i think it matters more than people admit. Grove bags are fine for maintaining but they're not curing, not in the way jars let you actually shape the process. When i'm burping jars i'm smelling every single day, i'm watching how the terp profile shifts, catching that window where the harshness drops off and the fruit or gas or whatever actually comes forward. You lose that feedback loop with grove bags.
Ran a pheno hunt last season, kept my keeper cuts in jars and tossed the rest in grove bags just to compare. The jar phenos had noticeably more complexity at week 6. Not louder necessarily, but more layered. The grove bag stuff smelled a bit flat by comparison, like the top notes were there but the mid and base terps never really finished developing.
That said i know growers who swear the bags preserve what's already there better over long storage, like months out. That's probably where they earn their reputation. But for the actual cure, the first 4 to 6 weeks where the magic happens, i want glass and i want my nose in there every day. Sealing and forgetting sounds like a yield guy move to me.
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Experienced4d ago
Gonna push back a little on the "grove bags aren't really curing" take because i think it undersells what they're actually doing. The boveda-in-a-jar method is controlling humidity the same way the bags do, you're just getting more tactile feedback from the burping. Which is valuable, i'm not dismissing it. But the cure itself is enzymatic, and that process doesn't care whether it's happening in glass or in a terploc bag.
That said i do think jars win for smaller harvests where you're paying close attention to specific phenos. My 3x3 runs small batches and i want that daily nose check, especially on anything i'm considering keeping as a regular rotation strain. That feedback loop is real.
Where i've landed personally is grove bags for anything going past 8 weeks of storage, jars for the first cure. Best of both honestly. Swap it over once the moisture has stabilized and you're done fussing with it.
The flat smell thing from that pheno comparison is interesting though. Could be the bags, could also be that those phenos just weren't keepers. Hard to know without running them in jars too.
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Experienced4d ago
The jars-first-then-bags workflow is the one i landed on too, but i'll add that for outdoor PNW harvests i'm almost always dealing with higher initial moisture than indoor guys, so that first jar phase with daily burping is doing a lot more heavy lifting for me. Skipping straight to grove bags off a wet outdoor harvest would make me nervous. Get the moisture stabilized first, then let the bags do their long-term thing.
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Expert Grower4d ago
The moisture point is fair, but i'd argue daily burping on a wet outdoor harvest is actually doing you a disservice if you're jamming it straight into jars. Leave it on the hang longer until the stems snap, then your jar phase is just fine-tuning, not rescue work. Rushing to the jar because you're anxious about the cure is how people end up babysitting problems they created.
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Experienced4d ago
The snap test is solid advice but i'd push back a little on the "stems snap = ready to jar" rule. I've had stems that snapped fine but the smaller buds were still holding more moisture than i expected, found that out the hard way when i popped the jars three days later and got that damp hay smell. Running a cheap hygrometer in the jar the first 24 hours will tell you more than any stem snap ever will.
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