Thanks Master Wu for the response. I still don't know the comparison of THC to THC A in actual numbers. It might depend on the strain and how it's grown. I'll spend some time researching that this week to see, since I was gone over the weekend.

I can't test the pre-bake idea because I don't actually use marijuana these days, but maybe a friend could do a comparison. You said it makes a difference, but did you make two batches exactly the same way? And are you sure it wasn't just a different stash? Sometimes even the same bag of weed will have different potencies in different buds, or depending on how close you are to the tip.

Yeah, originally when I put up the web page, I didn't think the alcohol was a huge safety issue using the water, but somebody told me that 3 to 4 people die every year making green dragon. Alcohol does boil at a lower temperature than water, so an accidental boil-over will throw a lot of alcohol vapor into the kitchen, so the ventilation is important. I took down the web page down last summer and put it back up recently with some changes. The microwave is just plain stupid (I can't believe I tried that), but there are a few people here and there on the Internet talking about using a microwave to do it.