“This is the weapon of a true OG. Not as clumsy or random as a spliff; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”
― Obi Wan Kenobi
The blunt is the lightsaber of cannabis smoking. To master blunts is to master two herbs, cannabis and also tobacco, and therefore to have developed a fine taste for the mixing of two broad and subtle palates that overlap only in strange places. This is not to say one must be a master to enjoy the art of the blunt, only to frame for those of us who may be considering the art as a discipline for the first time.
In an age of grappling hooks and supercomputers and body armor and trick arrows on every corner, the crafting of a blunt is somehow entering into an era of obscurity, which is a shame. The principal drawback of blunt smoking is that blunts kind of take a lot of weed, and there is a fixed cost in terms of lost material associated with each session on a blunt, due to the large surface area presented for ignition. Blunts are these days typically associated with infrequent stunting, as for a party, where a large number of people can partake in a single session and gain relative economy over multi-session solo blunts. In this modern age, we find that quality cannabis is readily available in quantity and at reasonable prices, and so it is perhaps not the worst era for the art of the blunt to enter into a state of obscurity, that we refine it privately while the world forgets, for a time, to ask of it.
I do not claim to be a master, but instead a devoted practitioner with deep roots in the world of tobacco, and I wish to transmit to you my dao.
We begin, as I did, with tobacco. I will not transmit to you an exhaustive knowledge of the cultivation of the plant or the practices of curing and aging. I will say to you that there are many varieties of tobacco which are grown in many climates, each with their own palate, aroma, aging characteristics, mechanical properties, and so forth. Knowing what leaf to reach for in the process of blending it for fine tobacco products, or of selecting a wrapper and binder for a cigar (or blunt) is a factor of availability, price, product knowledge, and other merchantly concerns, unless one is raising the tobacco themselves, which is an entire art you must study elsewhere. The point is to say that the many varied tastes and aromas of tobacco are themselves largely unknown to the public, who most strongly associate it with industrial cigarette consumption, and not in both the rawer and more finely processed products. The fundaments of this dao are chiefly concerned with the repurposing of cigars, which are a filler of 100% tobacco, wrapped and bound in 100% tobacco, although as you will see, there are many cigar-like objects (CLO) which can be used in their place. Most CLOs have a tobacco filler, and deviate in that the wrapper is not tobacco.
Here's the real pisser about blunts - it's getting hard to find decent wrappers these days. The OGs know what Backwoods used to be like back in the day, and the last couple of years has seen them really go downhill. In my experience, the OG Backwoods were the absolute top choice for a reliable, available, pretty decent blunt wrapper. Over the last couple of years though, they have become a hard pass, literally worse than nothing because all five of them sumbitches in that little foil packet are going to be packed way too tight, way too stiff, and nowhere near as moist as they used to be, and when you get to trying to either dick out or unravel them sons of bitches, you will lose every single one to some bullshit, get mad, and put a lot of bad mood energy into the weed.
Thus I have introduced the two major methods of bluntmaking, dicking out and unravelling. I will also formally define a blunt, which is a filler of 100% cannabis bound and/or wrapped in 100% tobacco. The use of a CLO to produce a blunt results in a blunt-like object (BLO), which is not necessarily inferior to a true blunt but is distinct. A swordsman is yet formidable armed with only a broomstick.
Before delving into the methods and ways, I will offer a few observations about blunts in general, which should inform your approach to the dao.
Blunts are best made well in advance of smoking, particularly those made with the second method (unravelling), and should be kept in a humidity controlled container as with a true cigar. Give the finished blunt time to rest and allow the filler and wrapper to come to a uniform humidity to ensure an even burn.
Blunts are best smoked leisurely. The additional labor and expense of their preparation as compared to consumption via pipe, joint, or vaporizer are wasted on quick hits or light buzzes.
Blunts should be smoked slowly, the object being to keep the blunt as cool as possible in order to preserve the flavor, aroma, and active compounds in the herbs.
If you pass a blunt around, you should be prepared for the uninitiated to smoke it hot, fast, and wet-lipped. Do not begrudge. A gift is a gift, to be used and disposed as the recipient pleases. By placing a finely crafted blunt in the hands of an urchin, you are allowing them a glimpse into an experience that may forever lie beyond their personal grasp.
I will now proceed with the methods.
The first method - dicking out. The object is to remove the filler of a premade cigar or cigar-like object (wield a broomstick if you must) while leaving the binder and/or wrapper intact. The classic choice is a Swisher, or their cousin the Swisher Sweets. They are constructed in such a way that the filler can be easily removed with a paperclip, tweezers, or other handy or improvised object. Working slowly and with patience, they can be hollowed out to whatever depth is desired for the quantity of cannabis, and then the cannabis can be carefully packed back in place of the removed material. (Note that one may wish to include a quantity of the removed tobacco filler mixed with the cannabis, which results in a BLO of the same nature as a spliff, which itself is a cannabis and tobacco filled cigarette, distinct from a joint). I have found that dicking out is not very well known in many cannabis cultures. I have smoked out with brothers who had more crumbs in their shirt pockets and lawn chair cupholders than I smoke in a month, who were struck silent at their first sight of the method. I was told, "White people do crazy shit but it's alright sometimes. That shit look a lot more hygienic than licking all over the shell."
If you wish to pursue the method, I would recommend picking up an assortment of tweezers. Assortments of stainless steel laboratory tweezers can be found very inexpensively in many places, such as Harbor Freight/Princess Auto, or the equivalent discount tool chain in your part of the world. Alternatively, raid the makeup bag and look for some extra long fine tip ones.
When examining the cigar/CLO to be dicked out, look for any obvious construction errors, such as rips, tears, loose seams, pinholes, and so forth. With experience you will be able to make repairs or compensate, but being able to do so comes naturally from the result of trial and error and the accompanying experience handling and thinking. Use defective cigars to practice dicking out, but don't bother packing them if you get that far. A defective finished blunt is worse than no blunt at all, because if you try to smoke it, you will waste some weed trying and still have to tear it apart to remake it anyway.
If the extraction is a success, and you are confident you have not damaged the wrapper in the process, now you must grind and pack the cannabis. Blunts are very difficult to make well with dry weed. They are best performed with very dank cannabis, as freshly cured as you can procure, and ground to a chunky but consistent texture to ensure the right evenness and density of pack. With experience you may find that it is worthwhile to shred the cannabis by hand from the nug and be very conservative about removing any pieces that could potentially poke through a thin wrapper. Again, given the labor and additional expense involved in blunt construction and smoking, some weed is best left for consumption by other methods. A shitty finished blunt is worse than no blunt at all, because if you succeed in smoking it, you'll have missed out on what it could have been.
Your first several blunts will be defective and/or shitty. Don't sweat it, just smoke 'em. Don't take them to a party or, really, even show anybody at all if you don't want to. You're going to learn so much without even being to articulate it by rolling and smoking those first shitty defective products, and you should use the time spent smoking them to meditate on the subject with a clear or clearing mind. Don't even sweat it, the destination comes by walking. If you can persevere to the first time you get a pretty decent one, you'll be so glad you did.
It is not weed but Tobacco that makes a blunt.
-Thomas Hobbes
My advice regarding products to dick out are thus: Go to the trouble of finding something that really is 100% tobacco, and until you have reasonable experience, do not fuck around with the flavored stuff - make it a point to get natural tobacco. The proliferation and branding of products in this category have multiplied exponentially in a short amount of time, and market distribution is extremely varied and uneven. Since OG Backwoods shit the bed, I can't think of any specific product that I could recommend that would even cover a statistically advantageous region of my own homeland, let alone yours. You'll just have to walk to a head shop, highly nicotinated convenience store, or tobacco specialty store and hope the clerks have good product knowledge, or that there's somewhere with racks you can browse and scrutinize a bunch of packages for so long that eventually you feel self conscious and buy one you're not really sure about but might be the right thing, and when they ask if you found everything OK you'll go "Jesus, I guess."
This is to say, this is all part of those first shitty defective blunts.
Eventually you're going to notice that there are some limited number of construction styles scattered across several brands, many of them likely made on the same specialized machines and even by the same factory. Some of the most common types are what I will call toilet paper tubes, real cigars, and backwoods, which are technically a type of real cigar but with unique characteristics.
Toilet paper tubes have a wrapper made of tobacco paper. That is to say, they are 100% tobacco, but the leaf has been mechanically processed into a kind of paper and then rolled by machine. They are what one might say are "legally cigars". These can be excellent candidates for the beginner, because their uniform nature removes many variables, and the filler, while it might be whole leaf tobacco, is very finely cut, and very uniformly packed, making it more like digging than pulling out. The quality of the tobacco flavor in the wrapper is minimal, consistent, and identifiable, but the wide availability and ease of construction make them valid candidates for any number of reasons. If you just want to roll that way, there are a ton of toilet paper tubes out there that qualify as CLOs that are perfectly fine, even ideal mechanically and come in every flavor. Quality, flavor, and essence vary greatly, typically towards the "it's like eating a car air freshener" experience, but there are some pretty decent CLOs out there for when you don't want to be such a fucking hipster.
Real cigars are bunched tobacco wrapped with a single, hand-rolled leaf in the traditional way. Quality of construction and leaf varies wildly. The smoking of real cigars is itself an extremely deep topic. When you get the hang of toilet paper tubes and want to make the next step, go to a well-reputed tobacconist/cigar store and ask for a bargain stick. Note that you needn't care if it's so-called "short filler", as long as it's on the lighter side flavor wise. You don't want a gigantic 60-gauge monster, something in the 40-50 gauge is great. If you find a cigar store that has jars of what are called "seconds", they are oftentimes very nice cigars that have been sold by the manufacturer as unlabeled seconds due to purely cosmetic concerns, such as wrapper color or texture. These are ideal for your purposes, and are signs of a shop that has good sources and looks out for their clientele.
The challenge with real cigars is in the removal of the original filler. Real cigars, even if the filler is what is called "short", are made of much larger individual pieces of leaf as compared to toilet paper tubes, and they are also in the case of "long filler", bunched and pressed longitudinally to the large axis of the cigar, so extracting them is a question of carefully pulling out one leaf at a time, gradually loosening the filler without damaging the binder and wrapper - the two outer leaves which were rolled in place around the bunches.
Inspect the cigar as closely as is possible before purchasing. Look for the bulges or stiff spots in the filler, which are likely to tear the delicate binder and wrapper as you pull out those leaves. Be sure that the cigar has been kept at a good humidity for a sufficient time that it is not too dry. Sometimes the bargain sticks get kept in a regular closet until it's time to restock the humidor, and when a wrapper gets too dry, it can split or crack either on the shelf or under the forces of blunt construction.
If you haven't yet picked up a tweezer assortment, the time to do so is before you ruin $50 in $5 cigars by stabbing through them with a paperclip or pipe tool or whatever you've been using to dick out toilet paper tubes.
You should start with lighter cigars because lighter colored cigars are also typically (but not always) milder in terms of the tobacco palate. If you pursue the method and the art, you can branch out to the dao of cigars as far as fits your purposes. No two masters have identical swords. For the purposes of bluntsmithing, if you ruin a real cigar in the process of constructing a blunt, study and dissect the remains of the cigar to gain an understanding of how they are made. This will enhance your ability to select appropriate sticks for bluntsmithing, and your ability to dick them out. Further, the insight gained is a vital preparation for the second method of this dao.
The last style is what I call the backwoods style, small "b" like kleenex because I'm not capitalizing a name I no longer respect. These are machine-made using a single piece of whole tobacco leaf, but they're rolled in a way that is extremely difficult to do by hand - they have glued edges on both sides of the strip, which is wrapped at a diagonal to the long axis of the filler and has very minimal overlap. The amount of leaf used has been so economized and the machinery so specialized that they achieve toilet paper tube levels of consistency with a whole tobacco leaf. OG Backwoods was the king of ready-made blunts, but due to market pressures and demands about which I can only make informed guesses (Backwoods is the only company in the world that has the machines to make them this way), the products currently being sold under the Backwoods brand seem most like what would at one time have been factory rejects (not seconds) that are now being used to fill the least profitable packaging, while the firsts and seconds are being produced under contract to other brands. Unfortunately these "big brand" backwoods are inevitably extremely flavored and extremely overpriced (often in the same price tier as a bargain hand rolled real cigar), and I therefore know little about which brands are best, finding them to be unsuitable for my purposes. I will note that if you experiment with backwoods and, upon opening the package, find the odor/flavor to be too strong, understand that all or the majority of the flavor additives are in the wrapper itself and will transfer thusly to the potential blunt.
The second step to this method is packing. Packing is a deceptively simple concept, and a major stumbling block for some. The grind of the cannabis is extremely important, as is evenly and smoothly packing the dicked out shell, the shell being the term for what remains of the cigar after removing the tobacco filler. It is best to have a tamper that is close to the same size as the opening in the shell, but as large as is available is best. The lid of a Bic-style ball point pen (attached to the pen) is an excellent improvised tool. Pipe tampers with a round end are available for as little as a dollar in places which offer for sale various tobacco and cannabis paraphernalia.
Packing a blunt is similar in many ways to packing a pipe with a large bowl, whether tobacco or cannabis. Shallower and smaller bowls do well with a cigarette-type grind and a relatively dense pack, but blunts smoke like a cigar, and should therefore be thought of as such. Tobacco pipe smokers have an advantage here, as packing a blunt uses the same exact principles as packing a pipe, if often slightly deeper than is usual.
One method for packing is the "two to one" method, which is beloved of pipe smokers. Fill the shell full with even sprinkles, and then gently compress the column of cannabis to half its size. Sprinkle it full again, and compress the new cannabis to half its size - in other words, to 3/4 the depth of the shell. Then sprinkle it full, compress to half the size, and so forth until you have filled the shell to your satisfaction. Do not use too much force on additional layers - you will tend to over-compress the first layers by pushing too hard on later layers.
Another method is the "bit by bit" method, which is to sprinkle a bit, then tidy it up with the tamper, then sprinkle, then tidy, and so forth. This requires a ginger touch, again with regards to over-compacting earlier layers, but it can be more consistent for the beginner. After you sprinkle a bit, simply concentrate on tamping it down just enough to ensure there aren't any large air pockets. This will allow you to get a feel for the grind and develop a sense for the process, which will naturally progress into the ability to perform the "two to one" method reliably and with rapidity. In order to learn about the grind, grind it as you go a few pinches in advance so that each successive blunt will allow you to experiment and refine the grind.
This represents the core information about dicking out.
Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things. As if it were a straight road mapped out on the ground... These things cannot be explained in detail. From one thing, know ten thousand things. When you attain the Way of Blunts there will not be one thing you cannot see. You must study hard.
- Miyamoti Musashi
I will now move on to the second method of bluntsmithing, which is unravelling.
Attempting unravelling is best done after much experience dicking out real cigars. The essence of the method is to unroll the cigar and to re-roll it as a blunt. This method has two branches - cutting and unrolling. The branches coterminate with the step of rolling.
The cutting method is less elegant than unrolling and has certain limitations. However, it is well suited to cigars or CLOs that otherwise would not be able to be reliably unrolled for reasons which will be apparent to you as you gain experience evaluating shells. The cutting method requires a cigar that has sufficient adhesive to re-seal itself along its length. This is often in the form of the extremely sugary flavor additives added to a CLO, but there are traditional brands of real cigars, such as Phillies, that are well suited to cutting. Consider acquiring (online if you must but inquire at your local cigar shop) a small bottle of "cigar wrapper glue", which is simply gum tragacanth and is used in the manufacture of even the finest hand-rolled cigars. This way, you can use cigars and CLOs which may not be inherently sticky when moistened.
All one needs to do is to split the cigar cleanly along its length, along as straight and even a line as is possible. A real cigar in good condition can be easily split with a clean, new razorblade. Most CLOs and real cigars in a drier or more fragile condition can be carefully split with the thumbnails, cupping the cigar in your fingers as you work down the length. Remove the filler material, and insert the cannabis evenly along the length. Experience packing dicked-out blunts will have developed your feel for how much cannabis is necessary. Instead of packing it in one end, you will be compressing it by rolling it in the shell, and then gluing down the shell where it overlaps, traditionally by remoistening the overlapping edges with saliva, or more hygienically and reliably with gum tragacanth. This process benefits from much practice as well as a natural dexterity or the willingness to practice even more. It is not an unreasonable expense to purchase a few practice pieces, to be split, emptied, then packed. If you damage the shell or produce a product below your standards, try again with the next one. Always save the last one to dick out and pack with the classroom-used cannabis, so you have something with which to meditate when you're done.
The second branch of the unravelling method is unrolling. Unrolling is the limitless pinnacle of blunt construction and when one has had their fill, the next steps are toward working from whole leaf - bluntsmithing from scratch. If that is the path you are meant to take, you will find it on your own. Whole leaf tobacco of many sorts is widely available by mail in the United States, as unprocessed tobacco is considered, legally, an agricultural product and not a regulated tobacco product. You may also seek "fronto" or "grabba" from better-stocked head shops. This is the extent of the guidance I will offer regarding scratch bluntsmithing.
Unrolling is best done with quality hand-rolled cigars. Unrolling can also be pursued with backwoods, with some limitations. Unrolling is exactly what it sounds to be, which carefully reversing the construction method of a traditional cigar, setting aside the filler, re-moistening the wrapper and/or binder, and beginning again with the raw materials. By this point, you should have acquired an understanding of the composition of cigars, and how they are made. There are critical specifics to bluntsmithing that necessitate different considerations. Firstly, as with dicking out, the cannabis filler is of a very different texture than the bundled tobacco used in cigars. Secondly, the leaf has already been cut, though less severely than with a backwoods.
There are two methods to roll a blunt from a cigar wrapper. One is the "pinch and twist", the other is the cannabis bundle, which is most similar to the construction of a cigar. To "pinch and twist", one slowly twists the wrapper up around the filler, going one fraction of a twist at a time and then sprinkling/tamping, then a fraction of a twist to advance the cavity, then fill, then twist, then fill. It is important to maintain the tension in the wrapper and advance slowly. This can (and in order to construct a blunt solo, must) be done with one hand, leaving the other free to sprinkle and tamp. Experiment with a strip of paper and some pencil shavings, sawdust, or excavated CLO filler material in order to figure out what works best for your hands and eyes.
Before rolling, the wrapper should be lightly moistened with plain water and allowed to sit for fifteen or twenty minutes. This rehydrates the leaf to restore the natural flexibility and elasticity of the cured tobacco.
The cannabis bundle requires significant extra preparation, and benefits from but does not require the use of an inexpensive but difficult to source tool. Before applying the wrapper, the cannabis is rolled to the correct density, then bound (preferably with the binder material acquired when unrolling).
Rolling the cannabis is very similar to rolling a cigarette. In fact, extra long cigarette rollers can be found with some looking in head shops or tobacconists. The diameter is typically limited, but that is not necessarily a limitation. Whether you roll the cannabis by hand by pinching it in a sheet of paper and rolling it back and forth, or you make as many long, thinner "snakes" from the cigarette rolling machine as you want and then bunch them together, you want a uniform, evenly packed column of cannabis that is just larger in diameter than your desired finished size.
As a binder, cigarette papers can do in a pinch - use the widest 100% hemp papers you can source, as in this manner you are producing a true blunt, and not a BLO. Simply glue together (using the factory-applied adhesive strip as well as judicious gum tragacanth) as many as you need to match the length of the blunt, and roll it the same way you would roll a giant cigarette.
Binder leaf serves the same purpose, and should be lightly moistened in the same way as the wrapper. Binding is typically done perpendicular to the cigar, which makes it easier to get an even roll, and then wrapping is done at an angle to the cigar, self-tensioning so that only a small dab of glue is required at the end to close it. After the cannabis is bound, let the glue dry thoroughly (a few minutes) and then carefully make any adjustments necessary to the bound bundle. This may include tearing it open and starting over.
Do not immediately smoke a finished blunt. Give it a minimum of ten minutes to dry and set. Longer is better. Those seeking the pinnacle would do well to study the presses and molds used in the making of fine cigars.
This concludes the transmission of the methods and ways. I tell you now that this dao is not self-contained. Mastery of this dao requires that you engage in that study which you will require to fill in the gaps between this transmission and your experience. The way of this dao is one of eternal trial and effort. The joy of this dao does not come from mastery, but rather the pursuit.
Last but not least, Redman like to say peace
To all the blunt rollers from the Tri-State to the Middle East.
And gimme a blunt when I kick the bucket,
Devil or no devil, when high, I am the wrong one to be fucked with.
- Redman