Dabney: An early bet on craft in Minnesota’s fledgling cannabis market

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Drive up Hwy. 8 into Lindstrom and you’ll find a small team doing something quietly radical for Minnesota cannabis.

Concentrate Labs, which operates the Roots & Resin Farm, has chosen flavor, purity and Minnesota craft over shortcuts. It’s growing and harvesting flower designed not just to smoke but to become solventless rosin, a concentrate which can be dabbed or heated up so that its vapor can be inhaled.

Instead of the flower itself, the real action with rosin is in the trichomes — the tiny, glassy glands frosting each bud. Rosin is simply those trichome heads collected as ice-water hash (made by washing the trichomes off flowers into ice water) that is then pressed with careful heat and pressure. No hydrocarbons, no ethanol, no post-processing chemistry. Just the plant, water, temperature and time.

This year, Concentrate Labs co-founders Preston Torres and Max Young joined the first wave of nontribal cultivators approved to plant and harvest cannabis for the adult-use market. Their Lindstrom site was highlighted as an early entrant and, notably, one oriented toward rosin rather than commodity flower. It’s a craft decision and a bet on quality.

I recently visited during harvest. What stood out wasn’t just the tidy rows of plants; it was the discipline. Rosin rewards patience. You cut at peak ripeness and “fresh-freeze” flowers to lock in the most delicate aromatics. Later, frozen buds are washed gently in ice water to knock loose trichome heads where cannabinoids and terpenes live and settle like gold dust in a prospector’s pan. The loose hash is freeze dried, sifted and pressed between heated plates into rosin that looks like dollops of soft honey or cold-cure butter, depending on technique and temperature.

For the moment there are few cannabis offerings in Minnesota, but the state will quickly be awash in options — dried flower, pre-rolls, vape cartridges, edibles, tinctures and concentrates. Minnesota’s new customers are about to face a wall of terms that sound similar but act very differently once you consume them. And “live resin” (a hydrocarbon extract made from fresh-frozen flower) versus “live rosin” (a solventless press made from fresh-frozen hash) may be the most confusing pair of all — same “live,” but very different processes and results.

Rosin is a specific kind of concentrate — “solventless” — that often preserves the plant’s native volatile compounds better than many other methods. Instead of dissolving cannabinoids with chemical solvents and rebuilding flavor later, rosin captures the plant’s profile as-is. Done right, it’s vivid, almost vineyard-like: You taste the cultivated variety, the harvest window, even the washing technique.

As a dab, solventless rosin hits fast and hard, with flavor that tracks to the living plant. And the aroma can be electric. Rosin’s superpower is honesty — the jar smells like the plant did in the field. Built into a cartridge correctly, you can carry that field-forward profile discreetly. You’ll pay more because yields are lower and labor higher, but you can taste where the money went.

(However you dab, think tiny —rice-grain small— and keep temperatures moderate to protect terpenes and your throat. The effects land fast and can be intense which is why a newcomer should treat a dab like hot sauce — dab, don’t drench.)

What Concentrate Labs adds to this conversation is proof that Minnesota can do craft at a high level in a young market. Its harvest rooms feel like a winery at crush — cold storage humming, trim teams steady, hash makers watching temperatures and textures the way pastry chefs watch sugar. It farms for rosin quality. Rather than scale first and figure out taste later, it’s anchoring its brand to solventless craft, seasonal harvests and the belief that Minnesotans can tell — and reward — the difference.

The early supply chain is tight, and retailers are hungry for local products. Scarcity will tempt some to chase volume and the cheapest inputs. But our state can hold two ideas at once: scale and craft. As larger operators work toward consistent distribution, outfits like Concentrate Labs show that a farm-to-rosin model can coexist — and even lead — on quality.

The Lindstrom harvest is more than a business milestone. It’s an early vote for a Minnesota cannabis culture that values ingredients, technique and transparency. Whether your lane is flower, a rosin pen or a five-milligram rosin gummy after dinner, you should be able to buy products that taste like a place and reflect the care of the people who made them.

Minnesota already knows how to support small producers who obsess over inputs and process. We did it with beer and cider, with cheese and coffee, with bread and chocolate. We celebrate people who farm with intention, roast small, weld their own equipment, learn the hard way and then teach.

Solventless rosin sits comfortably in that lineage. It invites the consumer to care about the field, the freeze, the wash, the press — the chain that turns sunlight into a jar that smells like a late-September evening.