Step aside, ice water hash, the pendulum is swinging toward extracts purified by the power of electricity in the mid-2020s.
Hash connoisseurs and the mainstream that follows them have made a type of kief purified by static electricity all the rage.
Coming out of the hash contests of Spain, so-called static dry sift promises a hit that’s the soul of the plant, unadulterated by even water as a solvent.
You can make a version of it at home during trimming, and the big hash labs on the international medical stage are deploying static filtration machines costing up to $250,000. The final product can sell for more than the price of gold per gram ($126/gram).
David Polley, founder of the award-winning Preferred (formerly Preferred Gardens) in California, told me in Los Angeles this October, “All the guys want my trim to make static. It’s huge in Europe right now. It’s going crazy.”
Dan Egan, founder of Happy Dreams Genetics, just sent a crop of Humboldt County, CA, outdoor to static processing.
“For the people who love fresh frozen live rosin, the next step after is full melt static,” Egan said. “This just seems like the 2025 new way that’s really catching on among the top hashmakers in Europe and few in California as well.”
“It’s ascendant,” said iconic Canadian growing figure Breeder Steve. “Nobody had been pushing high-end sifting tech.”
“2025 has been our strongest year to date,” said a spokesperson for leading brand Static Room in Los Angeles, winner of seven medals this year.
Old techniques meet new tech
Making “hash” or cannabis extract from sifting dried flower buds on a screen goes back millennia in places like Pakistan and Morocco.
Scientists and naturalists have also known about the mysterious force of static electricity for millennia. Every kid has rubbed a balloon on their head and made their hair stand up.
So you can imagine that along the way, some hashmakers figured out that a static charge had the power to separate the good stuff that gets you high—the external plant glands (aka trichome heads)—from the stuff that doesn’t.
The web is full of experts commenting that they’ve been making static dry sift for decades, and there’s nothing new here. Sam the Skunkman is said to have promoted it in 1988 after noticing the principle of it in Africa.
But static is surging at the forefront of global hash culture under legalization and industrialization. The techniques are spreading algorithmically on social networks, new devices can create static sift hash at scale, licensed dispensaries are stocking it for the first time, and consumer awareness is flickering to life.
Go to one of the leading hash contests, The Ego Clash, in the most important city for it, Barcelona, Spain, and sit at the top table—you’ll find static sift full-melt.
“The head table is all static,” said Egan.
According to one expert, the No. 1 solventless product in New York’s legal market in 2024 was a static sift temple ball called “Full Moon Hash,” made by the company Hudson.
Dry sift and static basics
Have you ever used a magnet to pull the iron filings out of some sand when you were a kid? That same principle of attraction can refine kief.
Static dry sift takes common kief to a whole new level. You can think of kief like crude oil, while static dry sift is like refined rocket fuel.
We hope you paid attention in middle school science, because this hash purification technique exploits two principles:
- Rubbing anything generates a static charge with a positive and a negative end.
- Trichome heads are an acidic oil attracted to one charge. The stalks and leaf matter are attracted to the other.
Since opposites attract, you can use a positive and negative static charge to separate the heads from the debris.
Wait, what’s dry sift? Liberating trichomes
Dry sift hash sounds like what it is. You chop and dry your flower buds. You sift those dried buds through a big screen—250-micron stainless steel mesh—to remove most of the leaf. Then you sift again through a lower 74-micron mesh screen to filter out fine particulates.
Boom, you just made dry sift.
According to a 2025 Journal of Cannabis Research paper, “The result is a powder colloquially known as kief or hash. It contains glandular and other types of trichomes, pistils, trichome stalks, pollen, dirt, and fine particles of plant material with particle size distribution from 74 to 220 microns.”
There’s one key fact: Dry sifting works best in places that are cool (~55°F) and low humidity, like the mountains of Pakistan and Morocco in winter. Or Canada, Colorado, and the California high desert. When it’s hot and humid, dry sifting doesn’t work as well because the waxy, oily trichomes get sticky and can melt. Moisture in the air also gums up the process.
Time to electrostatically process those trichomes: Heads vs tails
Static sifting can be as easy as swishing your kief around in a plastic bucket. The plastic has a static charge, and the leaf will stick to the sides while the heads collect in the bottom, Breeder Steve said.
This down-and-dirty method also works with a popular TrimBin trimming tray that has a screen in the bottom to filter kief.
Don’t scrape to collect the kief that’s filtered into the bottom bin after trimming, Breeder Steve said. Gently knock the bin’s side while tilting the bin to a corner. The trash will stick to the plastic sides using static attraction, while the pure trichome heads will roll to the corner. Collect the heads and boom—you just made some down and dirty static dry sift.
“I really like the simplicity of it,” said Breeder Steve, who estimated he first made some 25 years ago after rubbing a balloon on his head and passing it over some dry sift.
Repeat static passes can boost purity from 50% trichomes to 60, 70, 80, and higher.
How the pros make static dry sift 6-star, full-melt bubble hash
Generally speaking, the more you sift, the purer the pile of hash heads becomes.
When the pile is 99% trichome heads, it’s considered “6-star,” “full-melt,” “bubble hash” because of the way it bubbles and melts when you apply heat and leaves almost no trace behind.
The pros generally make static sift with large, commercial-sized screens stacked atop one another to separate the trash from the trichome heads. They use the static on their latex-gloved hands to isolate the heads and brush them off into a collection bowl.
Or they use a latex glove blown up like a balloon and pass that over the sift pile to attract the heads and collect those.
They also use special cold, dry, clean rooms running air conditioning, dehumidifiers, and filters to create an optimal space to filter their hash.
Static at scale
Up next: making static dry sift at scale.
Egan said that as the fresh frozen live rosin segment has exploded, “Now people are starting to go, ‘Well, we’ve been running [live rosin] for a bunch of years—what’s next?’”
The answer: people in cold rooms wearing snow suits with HEPA filters, hairnets, and gloves.
“We all thought, ‘That will never go to scale.’ But now I got friends like, ‘Dude, I got like 10 flavors. I got five 5,000 kilos of static,’” said Egan.
In March 2025, the first research paper on static dry sift at scale appeared in the Journal of Cannabis Research, “Electrostatic separator of cannabis trichomes: an innovative approach to extraction.”
The 9-year-old Miami, FL, company Sambo Creeck appears to be the first to market with a tabletop unit—the Plasmastatic V1 in 2023—to separate heads from tails.
Sambo Creeck CEO Charles MacGowan said 20 labs across the world use his devices, which start at $35,000.
One person can make about 1 kilo of static sift per day, MacGowan said. That same person with a Plasmastatic device can make 8 kilos per day.
What’s it like to dab static sift?
You can dab pure dry sift just like rosin in a quartz banger or slurper. You can sprinkle it on flower or in a joint. Or you can press the sift into rosin, or bake it into edibles.
Breeder Steve said, “The flavor is unadulterated and unstripped. You can get such a clean representation of the plant. There’s absolutely no solvent involved.”
Happy Dreams Dan said that buds dried out into cured flowers have a “more authentic nose that connoisseurs prefer.”
Los Angeles’ Static Room spokesperson says sift should be dabbed at low temperatures or gently sprinkled over clean flower.
“It melts slowly and evenly, revealing full-spectrum flavors in tasty layers,” they state. “Our product offers vibrant flavor, a crying melt, and a crystal-clear high.”
“The high is typically lucid, uplifting, and balanced, leaving you feeling elevated rather than heavy,” Static Room tells High Times.
Shopping for static dry sift? It’s still a rarity on licensed dispensary menus, sometimes found in Colorado or Canada, where the climate is right to make it. You’re most likely to encounter traditional market stores online and in the wild.
The frontier of static dry sift
The next frontier includes specific strains that make the shape and type of trichome optimal for dry sifting and static. Typical indica hash plants tend to excel. Egan’s strain Grapellicious fits the bill. Up next: finding sativa strains that work with static tech.
“I am on the hunt for the static sativa, which has been very hard to get to,” Egan said.
In static, they want specifically the larger heads (120 micron) on long stalks.
Devices
Sambo Creeck will debut a $1,000 plasmastatic unit for homegrowers at MJBizCon in December in Las Vegas, and host classes on static dry sift applications. Research is going into making plasmastatic devices bigger, as well as smaller, and boosting purity from 98% past 99%.
Artisan sifters still have the edge, MacGowan said.
“We can’t do what they do.”
“There is so much to learn,” he said. “You have no idea.”
Products
As the price of flower plummets, biomass becomes a cheaper input for making value-added products, including dry sift. It’s a new profit center for producers.
“It’s another step where you can recoup some money for the crop,” Egan said.
That means prices should come down and be within reach for mere mortals.
And the next hash craze?
“I believe the best way to extract hasn’t even been formulated yet,” said Egan.
Best video tutorials for home making dry sift and static sift
Tribolelectrostatic Separation of Trichome Heads
Bubbleman’s World: Puff Wednesday Static Sift Edition
Manual Electrostatic Separation of Trichomes
Jolly Roger: What is Static Dry Sift?
