What would you say to a microprocessor-controlled, high quality appliance that claimed it could make top quality cannabis-infused butter, edible oil, and tincture in a fraction of the time of normal methods? After you got finished rolling your eyes, you’d probably roll a joint, smoke it, and think about how great it would actually be if such a thing existed…but it would probably cost $1000 or so anyway.

What if I told you it was not only all true, but you could buy one for less than the cost of the weed you’d need to use it once? What if I said it could effectively double the strength of everything you make with it? Would you be interested then? You bet your bippy you would! So I think you’re going to like the Magical Butter Machine as much as I do!

The Magical Butter Machine was developed by a guy named Garyn Angel for a friend with Crohn’s Disease who didn’t want to smoke marijuana, but heard about the medical benefits for people with his condition. Garyn was quite determined to come up with an easier way to make cannabutter than the relatively complex grind-decarboxylate-cook-strain-separate routine that people have been using for decades. And after a lot of experiments, he came up with the Magical Butter Machine. He calls it a “Botanical Extractor” because this new version doesn’t just make cannabutter, but also oil and alcohol extractions, and it does most of the work, leaving you to spend more of your time figuring out what to cook with all this infused goodness 🙂

Garyn Angel has not only helped his friend — and arguably hundreds or thousands of other patients — but he’s also been able to give money to some of the patients forced to flee non-MMJ states simply to stay alive. He set up a charity called Cheers To Goodness that helps these “marijuana refugees“, who are often children with diseases like Leukemia or Dravet’s Syndrome. So he’s definitely a Good Guy in my book (and the GGG meme even fits his name!).

There’s a lot going on in the Magical Butter Machine. The top portion contains the microprocessor-based temperature and time controller, motor and immersion blender, overflow sensor, and heat sensor. The bottom part holds the liquid and solids and heating element, which they call Digital Fire Technology because it rapidly brings the contents up to the proper temperature — and keeps it there. You can set the temperature to 160°F/190°F/220°F or 250°F (Celsius settings are shown as well), and the timer can be set for 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours.

This review was performed on the MB2 variant of the Magical Butter Machine, which we were sent for review purposes by MagicalButter.com. The complete package consisted of the machine itself, which has a capacity of 2 to 5 cups of liquid to be processed, a silicone “Love Glove” in impossible-to-miss-on-your-counter fluorescent green, and a small 90 micron Purify filter (AKA “bubble bag”). This last was a brilliant addition to the package; although I’m quite familiar with bubble bags (which are used for extracting cold water hash), it had never occurred to me how perfect they could be in this size to filter out the plant material dregs after processing. Light years ahead of cheesecloth and coffee filters!

The Magical Butter Machine also comes with a complete owner’s manual, written in a friendly and accessible manner, and a sturdy storage box. There’s some great attention to detail here. including a handwritten correction to a minor typo in the manual, and the fact that not a single word anywhere in the material mentions cannabis. This is standard procedure for legal reasons, but the Magical Butter people are not the least bit shy about talking about “the real thing” on their website. I might add here that the whole package is shipped fairly discreetly in a mostly plain brown box. Check out my unboxing video:

As you can tell from that video, I got quite excited by the whole look and feel of the Magical Butter Machine, but as with anything that’s shipped from a warehouse for use with food, you’ll want to clean it first. I was just as excited to see that the Magical Butter Machine even had its own cleaning cycle, so the first thing I did was put it through its paces. I simply put some water and a few drops of dish detergent in it, plugged it in and hit the “Clean” button. After just a few minutes, it was done and I rinsed everything off. This only got me even more raring to go, so I decided the first thing was to try making the butter that’s the MBM’s namesake. Here’s the video showing exactly how it was done:

Test 1: Cannabutter

First let me tell you how I usually make cannabutter, which is basically one of the “old school” methods. The time-tested recipe is an ounce of cannabis leaves to a pound of butter (many commercial makers use leaves because they can get them cheaply or even freely from growers, since they have virtually no market value compared to the buds themselves). You decarboxylate the leaves in an oven for an hour, which makes your kitchen smell like Cheech and Chong came over for a pizza and pot party, and then you grind up all the leaves, throw them into a crockput with the butter, and stir every 20 minutes for 4 hours or more (some people go to 24 hours). Then you strain it out with cheesecloth or a new white T-shirt, and you’re done. In fact, you are so done after this that you swear not to do it again for another 6 months minimum, so you hope your butter will last that long! Other traditional cannabutter-making methods are even more complicated, involving double boilers or having to separate the butter from water.

The MBM changes all that. Except for butter, which I usually make a pound at a time, I’m used to making much smaller quantities of extracts, but because the Magical Butter Machine needs a minimum of 2 cups of liquid to work due to the blender design, most functions will require a decent amount of cannabis. The MBM manual generally recommends between 7 and 14 grams of what they call “botanicals” per cup of liquid, so for most people that will mean a minimum of an ounce of weed at a time. I’ve been saving a couple of ounces of buds from assorted strains for a few years left over from supervising a grow for someone, and I wanted to make sure I had enough to test all the MBM’s various functions, so I decided to use 14 grams of cannabis for each of my tests (using the 2 cup minimum).

Two cups turns out to be a pound anyway, so this would be an interesting test of using about half the usual amount of weed for a pound of butter. I’ll point out here that I generally use closer to ¾ ounce if I’m using buds rather than leaves, but these buds are also two years old, so factor that in when we get to the end!

Wait, there’s more! See Part Two for the results of all the tests

(only because this page is getting huge)!

Note: Botanical Extractor, MB2, Digital Fire Technology, Purify Filters and MagicalButter.com are trademarks of MagicalButter.com PBC.