Black Afghani Hash

Black Afghani Hash is pressed hash under an Afghan name. The smallest size is a single gram and the largest is 28 g, with 3.5, 7 and 14 g sizes in between. Black Afghan, in Sensi Seeds’ Hash 101 guide, is a market name for dry-sift hash from Afghanistan.

Sun, mudbrick shade and cloth

Sensi Seeds places the farmers in its Black Afghan account in Balkh, Kandahar and other provinces. They leave the harvest late and dry the cut plants under the sun, out in the fields. In the shade of their mudbrick homes, they then beat and trample the whole plants into a dry mulch. Filtered through cloth, that mulch gives a fine golden powder, which is pressed into hard bricks, a form made for transport. The first batch, Sensi Seeds adds, is considered the purest.

Garda, sieved three times and graded

UNODC’s 2009 Afghanistan cannabis survey follows the powder stage under its local name, garda. Dried plants are struck on a drum to knock the buds loose, the powder is gathered and its seeds removed, and the material is sieved through cloth on a slanted wooden frame. It is then shaken inside a cloth bag for roughly 5 minutes, and the sieving as a whole is done three times.

First garda, usually the product of that first gentle shaking and sieving, holds the largest share of resin. Second and third garda probably carry far more plant matter, and a few cases in the south add a fourth grade. Grades are not standardized from one region to the next, the survey adds. Our dry sift hash guide explains how sifted resin is graded more broadly.

A summer crop with two stem colours

UNODC describes Afghan cannabis as a summer crop, sown from April through June and harvested from October through January. Farmers in the survey named two types by stem colour: a green-stemmed plant and a pink-red-stemmed one reputed to give better resin. The survey even raises the possibility that Afghan sift and Moroccan sift are different products, given how they differ in processing, in plant varieties and in climate.

Puffs, peaks and first-timers

Health Canada’s lower-risk page puts hash, Black Afghani Hash included, in the same THC-heavy extract group as wax, shatter and kief, and anyone with little or no cannabis experience is advised to skip that group. Its suggested start for smoking is 1 or 2 puffs, and it ties that advice to products of 10% THC or less. If Black Afghani Hash is smoked, the timing Health Canada gives applies: first effects in seconds to minutes, with the peak taking as long as half an hour. A strain with an Afghan name gets a full write-up in our Afghan Habibi review.