Your Guide to Concentrate Vaporizers

Concentrate vaporizers are a real breakthrough for dab users. Across the board, vaporizers are engineered to be way more user-friendly. And vaporization itself requires far lower temperatures than combustion in order to release the same active ingredients.

This gives you the same powerful hits as smoking but with a much lighter feel on the lungs, and a lower risk of developing chronic bronchitis.

True to their naming conventions, portable concentrate vaporizers fit right inside your pocket, while desktop concentrate vaporizers are larger, more elaborate setups.

The heat is usually supplied by an internal electronic heater, eliminating the need to use an open flame. However, if you prefer the ritual of a torch, there are battery-free concentrate vaporizers that rely on an external heat source.

Intense Hits.  Concentrates provide a more intense experience than dry herbs: the plant material is reduced down significantly to create a high potency of your active ingredient. As a result, you can get much stronger hits with rapid onset and powerful effects. In fact, medicinal users find vaping concentrates the best way to get immediate pain relief.

Convenient.  Concentrate vaporizers are quick and easy to use, taking away the intimidation factor of using a dab rig and torch. And you don’t have to worry about repeatedly loading or manipulating the sticky stuff every time you want a hit. Just load it up once and forget about refills until you’ve vaped through your whole chamber.

Discrete.  Even where concentrates are fully legalized, not everyone wants to advertise the fact they’re taking a hit. If you’re used to smoking, not only will you find concentrate vaporizers much easier on the lungs, they also produce way less of the giveaway smell. And portable vaporizers can be taken anywhere, with many being pocket-sized.

Cost Effective.  As opposed to smoking, vaping makes your material go much further because it eliminates the need for combustion. This is true of concentrates and dry herbs. So it’s much more cost effective in the long term once you’ve invested in a solid vaporizer device. We’ve listed our favorite brands below.

Internal Heating. Thanks to legalization, there’s a lot more innovation going on in the world of concentrate vaporizers. You now have the choice of using a device with a battery for internal heating, or you can keep it old school and use a torch. Pick the setup that’s engineered to suit your style of dabbing.

Dabs categorize a whole range of concentrates, including kief, hash, rosin, live resin, shatter, crumble, honeycomb, budder/badder, tinctures and oils. All these options can be overwhelming to beginners, so let’s look at three main categories to use with your concentrate vaporizer.

Wax.  Wax is the cheapest and most accessible type of concentrate, making it a good entry path for beginners. On the downside, it is the softest type of concentrate and can be pretty sticky, which makes it harder to manipulate without the right dab tools. Depending on the extraction process, the spectrum of wax concentrates range from crumbly to honey-like in texture, and includes sub-types like crumble, budder/badder wax, and honeycomb.

Oil.  Used widely in CBD and edibles, oil concentrates are extracted using carbon dioxide instead of butane, giving them a thick and runny consistency. Oil is richer in flavorful terpenes and often used in vape pen cartridges, creating a convenient hit with a unique taste that differs from wax or shatter concentrates. You can make your own oil concentrate using alcohol to dissolve the resin, leaving you with syrupy residue. However, it is difficult to make your own oil without the proper space and equipment.

Shatter.  This is the strongest hit you’re going to get from a concentrate. As the name suggests, it has a hard, glassy texture, resembling a honey-colored shard. The butane extraction process gives shatter its high potency, with as much as 80% purity, so start your shatter hits small. Due to its texture, shatter can be harder to dose, but it’s usually easier to handle than wax by simply breaking it up and popping it into your chamber.

Exhaustive user testing has helped us identify the best concentrate vaporizers in 2020. There are detailed overviews of the winners below. To see them in action, check out Sneaky Pete’s video reviews over at his YouTube Channel.

The ELEV8R has an ingenious design which produces huge hits of pure vapor. Made by 7th Floor Vapes, this is one of the coolest and most enjoyable vaporizers we’ve used in a long time. The design is completely stripped down, almost all glass, to deliver 100% convection heating. Unusually in the vape world, it performs well with both dry herb and concentrate, which is a major selling point.

The ELEV8R is easy to use compared with other torch-based vaporizers. Heat the upper section for 10-60 seconds (depending on your type of torch) and then inhale.

The vapor quality is top shelf when you use it correctly: pure and lively, with zero coloration since the whole device is glass. The full convection and ramp-up heating give you the best of any strain, making it ideal for medical patients. Both dry herb and concentrates go a long way with the ELEV8R vaporizer.

Maintenance is also dead simple due to the all-glass design. We like to keep it super clean to see the vapor flow through. Just be very mindful of the glass tip which becomes extremely hot after use. You seriously don’t want to put the wrong end in your mouth. Once you gain familiarity with the ELEV8R and muscle memory kicks in, you won’t have to worry so much about making this mistake.

Overall, we can’t emphasize enough how enjoyable it is to use the ELEV8R. Discovering this piece was like discovering the Sticky Brick for the first time. It’s easy to stir up with a shake between each puff, and it gets high marks for efficiency. And, coolest of all, the all-glass design means you can watch the vapor from the moment of creation. It’s like a science experiment gone very, very right.

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