Sounds like you got unlucky, picking up spores your plant couldn't defend against, and further fucking yourself by accidentally cultivating them to alpha status. Powdery mildew, botritus etc do not care if the bud is connected to the root; wild environmental swings, like instantly sealing hanging buds up in a tight nonpermeable space, will set the shit off.
Stop being a hippy, and use plastic bags. Burping jars, in reality, is facilitating slow controlled oxidation and enzyme activity requiring [minimal] fresh air exchange. As quick as you open, sniff, and close the jars, youve done the job of burping. Burping has very little to do with changing moisture levels. In and out of the jar? Leaving the lids off for hours? That's not the idea behind burping, at all.
I cant speak much about the typical terpene-oriented American garbage people are growing, except for the fact most people grow overfed unflushed pesticide laced weed, with novelty additives equivalent to that scented gasoline additive some classic car guys use, and this skews their reality of curing to an extreme. It even bleeds into organic production. Everything I state about curing applies to FA derivative weed, you know, the mythical skunks, chems, diesels, hashplants that apparently no one in America grows, besides myself (a crippled old man who has zero use for 99% of weed produced by the ignorant unevolved kids who grow today.)
Many people believe "dirt" is a genetic flavor, but it is literally the smell of unflushed uptakes from the soil. These people believe they are tasting chlorophyll, while it's the uptakes making the bud nasty. Organic uptakes will convert into flavors over time. Even this action could be considered curing, for sure. Not a myth. I've had the dirt smell of improperly harvested bud turn into candy after a month. And turn into a very specific gourmet candy flavor that painted a very specific pinkish purple glow in the mind of everyone who vaped it, after 4 months.
Their are only two groups who deny the power of the cure: Those who cure prior to chop, hang under sheets of plastic for a month before jarring and call it something other than curing, and those who have yet to experience Cannabis flavors. (They should take a trip to Spain and see what kind of hash the poor muslims are exporting from their hot, dry climates. There is no such thing as "this years hash", aside from whats locked away in a clay jar with a "do not open til 2021" note attached.)
The flavor of aged Cannabis cannot be met by any other substance on earth, nor can the high be replicated. The cure is truth. Harsh and smooth are not flavors, I really wonder how/why so many Americans actually have no concept of flavor. The majority of Americans seem not to have the ability to taste, and aren't even aware they aren't able to taste, attributing flavor to smell. They also apparently have caveman dna because the unflushed shit most Americans grow really fucks with human sinuses and doesn't give humans a strong clean high, yet it gets grown and consumed by the kiloton.
Synthetic uptakes will slowly break down into less offensive contaminants, but the actual cure is impossible with this [negative scoring] grade of [tainted] weed. These are the Brovida buds that dominate the western US,or anywhere grow shops exist, really. I no longer use the term "nutes", because people fire back with "you cant taste nitrogen". Well, when I smell your Botanicare, its the methyl salicylate I'm detecting, not the nitrogen (the undisclosed built-in pesticide used to offset the susceptibility caused by the ferts). And that human poison makes the cure impossible.
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From open room hanging, to open loose plastic, to slightly tighter plastic, finally to tied off oven bags. Jars only after the bud is completely finished drying. Look at it this way: you want to do it backwards from how your Internet-addled brain tells you: Slowly raise RH, by slowly creating a increasingly smaller, more constricted microenvironment around the moist buds, so that the bud MC and the microenvironments RH meet at equilibrium, at a smokable state (less than 20% MC.) This is the curve that almost everyone gets wrong,as they attempt to drop moisture level across the board,then cram the bud into the tiniest microenvironment, instantly. This is called "square wave" in spirit science. Like having fucking cubes for wheels,it destroys the vehicle.
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Personally, throw all your meters and number charts and gadgetry in the trash. You can grind a small piece of herb and just look how it busts up, and know if it can be jarred yet. I dont have a clue what MC I store at, closer to 10% than 20% before jarred I'm sure. Worshipping numbers and calculators really doesn't help learn the product you're producing. Save the numerics for later.
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Or:
Curing is a myth. Thats why everyone has trouble with it.
I know some fools curing resin for over a decade thinking it's going to get better, wonder where they get these ideas. Probably from some backwards nations who still grow seeded weed. Good weed is a myth. Tastes buds and getting real high are myths.
