URL: https://postharvestreport.com/field-notes/wet-trim-vs-dry-trim
We built our business on wet trimming, then the market taught us otherwise. Why 98% of our customers now dry trim, and how to wet trim well if you still must.
Field Note · 2026
By Jay Evans, CEO, Keirton Inc., May 1, 2026 · 9–11 min read
It surprises me we're still having this debate. In mature markets it was settled years ago.
This is still one of the most common questions I hear in emerging cannabis markets: should I trim wet or dry? It surprises me that we're still having the debate, because in mature cannabis markets I think it was largely settled years ago.
I know the wet-trim side of the argument very well. From roughly 2000 to 2013, I heavily wet trimmed cannabis. We developed machines specifically to harvest and trim cannabis wet. For a long time, that was simply how commercial cannabis was processed.
And at the time, it made a lot of sense. Dry-room space was valuable. Every square foot of dry room was space that could have been used for cultivation, so dry rooms were often undersized. Wet trimming made that easy. Plants came down, you trimmed them, put the flower on drying racks and stacked those racks almost to the ceiling.
Turnaround mattered too. For much of that period, cannabis production was illegal almost everywhere. Getting a crop harvested, processed, dried and out of the building quickly had real value. Wet trim, rack dry, six or seven days. Done.
As legal markets came online, that started to matter less. Quality started to matter more. People who had always hang-dried and dry trimmed already knew their flower generally had a better nose, better color and, particularly to experienced cannabis consumers, better flavor.
The problem was there weren't really any good machines for dry trimming. Then a couple of machines came out focused specifically on trimming dry flower, and they became popular very quickly. That put us in a bad position. We had spent years building equipment around wet trimming, and the market was clearly moving the other way.
Dry trimming wasn't better at everything. One of its biggest weaknesses was flower fragility. Wet trimming with a good machine could produce a flower-to-trim ratio that was relatively close to hand trimming. Dry trimming machines could be much less forgiving.
If you overtrimmed the flower, yield dropped. If you expected the machine to replace all of the hand labor, yield dropped. This is where a lot of people got automated trimming wrong: they bought a trimming machine and expected it to do all the work.
The better operators figured out that the machine should do a quick pass, maybe eliminating 50% to 75% of the work, and people should finish the flower. The process around dry trimming became incredibly important, sometimes more important than the machine itself. Room environment, moisture content, how the flower was handled, how aggressively the machine was run and what happened afterward were 50% of the success.
Eventually, we figured out how to make our existing wet-trimming machines trim dry flower successfully. Today, at least 98% of our customers dry trim.
1. Wet trichomes are sticky. Anything that touches fresh cannabis starts collecting resin. Even nitrile gloves eventually pick up enough resin that the resin itself becomes glue, and you start smearing resin across the surface of the flower. The same thing happens inside a trimming machine. We've never seen this translate into a meaningful potency difference in lab testing, but you can damage appearance and surface trichomes without changing the THC percentage.
2. Wet flower bruises. Freshly harvested cannabis is soft and hydrated. Handle it aggressively and it darkens, the same way cut lettuce wilts. Once flower has been properly dried, its physical properties are completely different and it handles better when cut.
3. You create the wet-trim smell. Cutting fresh green plant tissue produces green leaf volatiles such as (Z)-3-hexenol, or leaf alcohol, and related compounds like hexenal, the same compounds behind the smell of a freshly mowed lawn. Wet trimming makes thousands of cuts through living, hydrated tissue. That grassy note sits on top of the natural smell of the flower and degrades the nose. It dissipates considerably through drying and curing, but side by side I can almost always tell the difference.
4. Now you have to dry it on racks. Wet-trimmed flower sits against a screen while it dries and takes the shape of whatever it's sitting on. Flat spots are created. Rotating the flower helps, but somebody has to keep touching and turning a very delicate product. Hang drying avoids most of it.
One producer rolled 100 joints of wet-trimmed flower and 100 of dry-trimmed flower and ran a blind consumer preference test. The wet-trim flower won, so the conclusion looked obvious. Except that wasn't really what the data said.
Consumers who weren't experienced with cannabis flavor and aroma often preferred the wet-trimmed flower: milder, earthier, easier to understand. The connoisseurs went the other way. The survey simply had far more inexperienced consumers than experienced ones. It was like giving novice wine drinkers box wine and a $100 bottle.
I saw versions of this play out at multiple well-funded companies, and those tests kept wet trimming alive at some of them for years. Eventually they switched anyway. I've been inside hundreds of cannabis facilities and produced cannabis myself for more than 25 years. I have never seen wet-trimmed cannabis look, smell and taste better than the same cannabis properly dried, dry trimmed and cured.
There are reasons to do it: not enough dry-room space, maximum flower recovery mattering more than maximum quality, expensive labor, or a market that isn't demanding better yet.
If you're going to do it, temperature matters a lot. Cold resin isn't as sticky. Above roughly 18°C fresh flower can be extremely tacky. Below about 16°C you start noticing a difference. Below 10°C the difference becomes dramatic. Around 6°C, flower becomes remarkably resistant to sticking. You don't need a laboratory to see it, look at the trimmer's gloves.
There is a limit. Don't freeze fresh flower. Freeze the water inside the cells and it expands, cell walls rupture, and the thawed result resembles thawed frozen broccoli. The goal is cold enough to reduce tackiness, not frozen. And machines don't care if the room is 6°C, but people do. Human comfort quickly becomes the limiting factor.
Another trick is to water the plants shortly before harvest, ideally within roughly six hours. The leaves become more rigid and extended, and easier to trim than limp leaves sitting tight against the flower. The catches: your dry room has to remove more water, and every pot in the room just got heavier right before somebody has to move it.
For most commercial producers, the answer is dry. There is still an economic argument for wet trimming in a captive market with limited licences, limited competition and strong control over pricing, where you can automate aggressively, save labor and maintain very high flower recovery. That can be a perfectly rational decision.
The problem is that the advantage usually has an expiration date. Eventually somebody of equal stature starts producing better flower. They hang dry it properly. They trim it dry. Their flower has better color, a better nose and better bag appeal. Consumers notice. Buyers notice. Retailers notice.
We built our business around wet trimming and had every commercial incentive to believe it was better. Then the market taught us otherwise. We changed the machines and the process. Today, at least 98% of our customers dry trim. Wet trimming still has a place when speed, space, labor or maximum recovery matter more than finished flower quality. But if you're trying to produce the best flower you can in a competitive market: dry it first, then trim it.