Cold Start Dabs: How to Jump on the Trend

Without a doubt, concentrates are the cutting edge of cannabis consumption, and one of the most exciting things in the globosphere at the moment is cold start dabs.

Gone are the 20th century days of sliding a knife through the stovetop to smoke bubble hash; we’ve moved on at a blistering pace. One might even argue we’ve moved from the hot knife to the cold start dab faster than we got to the moon. First came the skillets of the late 2000s — yikes. Then we moved on to glass domes with quartz nails that actually looked like nails. Then came a time of titanium nail wars with Highly Educated and a few others leading the pack. And finally, we reached the age of the quartz banger a few years back and then the directional carb cap followed not long after.

This past fall, the newest way to consume using a banger and directional cap took off: the cold start dab.

How To Take a Cold Start Dab

The concept is fairly simple. In the traditional method of taking a hot dab, dabbers heat up a quartz banger using a torch, waiting a fixed amount of time to get the preferred temperature, flavor and vapor consistency after throwing the glob in. But in the case of the cold start dab, the concentrate is already in the banger with the directional carb cap on top. From there, you can use the very tip of the torch flame to get the concentrate bubbling. And that’s it!

All you have to do is place the concentrate in the banger, heat it up, rip it and spin around your carp cap. Then, on to the cleaning stage with the Q-tip and your ritual is complete.

So how did this cold start dab trend come to prevalence? It’s safe to say the wind really hit the sails of the cold start dab phenomenon at the Boston Freedom Rally last September. While at the rally, NowThis made a video with New England-based Pot Journalist Robert “Bobby Nuggz” Divincenzo on the topic, where he offered a quick 3 minute tutorial on the process. The video premiered on the web a few days later and has since been viewed over 1.8 million times on NowThis’s Facebook page.

The Man Behind the Trend

We reached out to Divincenzo to get his take on how it all took off.

“Basically for me, it started in my old apartment,” Divincenzo told Cannabis Now. “My buddy gifted me a Joe Halen flat top banger back in April, about a year ago.”

He used the new banger for a few weeks, keeping to the traditional method.

“One time, I put the dab in there cold and heated it up with the cap on there,” said Divincenzo. “It started bubbling. I watched it vaporize and then I hit it. I got such a great rip. I sat there and thought to myself, ‘What the hell did I just do?’”

Divincenzo has been dabbing for nine years. All those years, he used the same heat and time method everyone else was using. The new trick blew his mind. Not long after, he discovered other people had also picked up on the technique. So in that regard, he says it’s better to think of the NowThis video as 0 A.D. as opposed to the moment something was “invented.”

“Other people were doing the same thing because they had similar style nails,” said Divincenzo. “So there was a small percentage of the community doing it. I posted a status a year ago about reverse dabbing. A couple other people from the glass community who dab heavily informed me people were starting to call it ‘cold start tech.’”

Divincenzo estimated there were about 50 to 100 people doing it at the time.

“I ditched the terminology ‘reverse dabbing’ pretty much right when NowThis Weed did that video with me. Cold start seemed like it was way better sounding.”

We asked Divincenzo what it was like helping other people discover the technique.

“That’s what I was trying to do,” he said. “I didn’t invent it, I self-discovered it. So I wanted everyone to know this is our thing now. We call it ‘cold start tech.’ I knew it was going to revolutionize the game, but I didn’t realize how much of an impact that little video they did with me would have.”

Divincenzo says it is an exciting honor to see things take off over the last six months for the concept.

“A lot of our community is based off of trends, it’s another trend. And I think it’s an important one that’s here to stay… until we find something else,” said Divincenzo with a laugh. “But I don’t think we will.”

Divincenzo believes the flavor is on par with more traditional dabbing techniques, but he’s never done a side-by-side comparison since he’s hasn’t felt the need to go back.

TELL US, have you tried a cold start dab?