Cannabis vapes come in four extract types. Distillate is stripped down to the cannabinoid, then usually has terpenes blended back in. Live resin is hydrocarbon-extracted from flash-frozen plant. Live rosin is pressed from ice water hash using heat and pressure, no solvent. Liquid diamonds are THCA crystals melted into a terpene base.

Stand in front of our vape case for a minute and the same four words keep coming up. Distillate. Live resin. Live rosin. Liquid diamonds. Same gram, different boxes, a real spread in price between them, and nothing on the packaging that explains why.

Those four words are the extraction method. They tell you how the oil got out of the plant, and they’re the single biggest thing separating one cart from the next.

We carry 164 vape products between Geneva Street and Glenridge Avenue. Every one of them is one of those four.

Here’s how to tell them apart.

The four extracts at a glance

The short version, for anyone standing in the shop who just wants to know which is which.

Two things about those ranges. They overlap a lot more than a tidy table makes them look, and THC shifts lot to lot even within a single product. The number printed on the box in your hand beats anything written on this page.

Here’s the simple version.

Terpenes are the light, aromatic compounds. Cannabinoids like THC are the heavy ones. Heat them together and the light stuff leaves first, and not by a small margin. At 180°C, myrcene comes off more than three thousand times faster than THC does.

So running a terpene-rich cart hot doesn’t get you more out of it. It spends the expensive part early to pull the THC through faster. Cooler settings for the fresh-frozen extracts, hotter for distillate. That’s the whole rule, and the full 510 battery and voltage guide covers thread compatibility, light codes and preheat if you want the rest of it.

Distillate

Distillate is the biggest flavour range in the case and the best value on the wall.

Distillation runs the extract through heat and vacuum until almost nothing is left but the cannabinoid itself, terpenes included. What comes out is a clear, very high potency base that behaves identically batch to batch. The same method makes CBD distillate.

Then the terpenes go on, and that’s where the product name on the box comes from.

They come from one of three places.

Cannabis-derived means pulled from cannabis. Botanical means real terpenes from other plants. Synthetic means built in a lab. All three are permitted in Canada, and packaging doesn’t always tell you which you’ve got. Ask us and we’ll find out.

The blank base is the whole trick. When the starting material brings nothing of its own, a producer can compose any profile they want on top of it and land it exactly, cart after cart. That’s the range you’re looking at when you scan this shelf.

Distillate runs at 2.8 to 3.3 volts, the warmest band of the four. Less terpene content in the mix, so it takes a hotter coil comfortably.

We stock 37 distillate products. Browse them under distillate vapes, or read the longer breakdown of cultivar names on vape packaging.

Live resin

Live resin is where the terpenes stop being an ingredient and start being the plant.

Normally cannabis gets dried and cured after harvest, and terpenes begin evaporating the moment it comes down. Live resin gets in front of that by freezing the plant while it’s still fresh, holding the profile in place before it can drift. That frozen material goes through hydrocarbon extraction, usually butane or propane.

Nothing gets stripped out and rebuilt, so what you’re getting came off that specific plant. Full spectrum is the industry shorthand for extracts made this way, meaning they hold onto more of the plant’s own terpene profile than distillate does. It’s a comparison rather than an absolute. Terpene loss starts at harvest and continues through every step after it, so nothing on any shelf anywhere carries a plant’s original profile intact.

THC reads lower on these, and that’s the math of it. More of what’s in the cart is terpene content, so there’s less room for everything else.

Run it at 2.0 to 2.5 volts. Those preserved terpenes are what you paid the extra for, and they’re the first thing to go at a higher setting.

Live resin sits under live vapes.

Live rosin

Live rosin is the one we get genuinely excited about, and the process is why.

Frozen plant material goes into ice water and gets gently agitated. The cold makes the trichome heads brittle enough to snap off, and they sink, so you sieve them out through progressively finer screens. What’s left is ice water hash: a pile of the plant’s resin glands and not much else.

That hash then goes between heated plates and gets pressed. The oil that squeezes out is rosin. Heat and pressure, nothing added, no solvent at any point.

Rosin is pressed. Resin is pulled out with solvent. That one sentence is the entire difference, and it’s the question we field more than any other at the counter.

The catch is yield. Washing produces a fraction of what a hydrocarbon run does, which is why it’s the priciest of the four per gram and why the good stuff arrives in small quantities and leaves quickly. For a lot of people that makes rosin a Friday night rather than a Tuesday, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the one you buy when you want the occasion to be about the weed.

Same battery band as live resin, 2.0 to 2.5 volts, for the same reason.

The full live resin and live rosin comparison goes deeper if you want it.

Liquid diamonds

Liquid diamonds get built in two pieces and then put back together, and the result is the highest testing thing on the wall.

Crystallisation comes first. THCA is drawn out of the extract until it forms solid crystals, which is exactly where the name comes from. They look like diamonds in the jar, and that’s the point.

Those crystals then get melted back into a terpene base, usually a terpene sauce or an HTE, short for high terpene extract.

Here’s why producers build them this way. THCA crystalline on its own carries almost no terpene content. It’s a blank slate, same as distillate, but sitting far higher up the potency scale. That means the terpene layer gets chosen deliberately and set on top of a base that commonly tests in the 90s. Big numbers and a composed profile, in one cart.

Roughly 2.5 to 3.0 volts, right in the middle of the dial. Diamond oil is thicker than distillate but nowhere near rosin, so it lands between the two.

This is our biggest shelf, 47 products. Spinach, Back Forty, Super Toast, BoxHot and Wild West all run liquid diamond lines, and they move. Browse liquid diamond vapes, or read the full liquid diamond cart guide.

The extract is not the format

Extract type and hardware are two separate questions: what’s in the cart, and what the cart is built into. It’s the pair most people accidentally collapse into one, so it’s worth thirty seconds.

Same way the roast and the cup size are unrelated decisions when you order a coffee.

Distillate, live resin and liquid diamonds are all sold as 510-thread cartridges and as all-in-one cannabis vapes. Live rosin is the one exception worth knowing about. Rosin is thick and doesn’t wick well through standard cart hardware, so rosin carts are less common, and the ones that exist are often thinned with a little distillate so they’ll flow. Check the label on those.

It’s why the same liquid diamond product shows up under disposable vapes and under liquid diamond vapes on our site at once. Two different questions, one product.

BoxHot is a good one to look at for the hardware side. Their carts run 1.2g and 2g against a standard 1g, and part of the line charges over USB-C.

So pick the extract on how it’s made and what it costs. Pick the format on how you want to carry it and charge it. Two decisions, and they don’t have to line up with each other. If the format half is where you’re stuck, start with the all-in-one vape guide.

What UpHi stocks, by extract

UpHi carries 164 vape products across the two shops, spread over all four extract types. That’s the part no other page can tell you.

Ontario’s top ten sellers run distillate ahead of liquid diamonds. Ours runs the other way, and that’s deliberate. The same buying instinct that built the concentrate case, brought over to the vape wall. What it means for you is that both shelves are deep. 47 liquid diamond products and 37 distillate, so whichever way you shop you’re choosing from a real selection rather than whatever two options were left.

Two ways to work this wall. By flavour, which is mostly a question of which extract carries the profile you want. Or by budget, and there’s good weed at every price on this shelf. Tell a budtender which one you’re solving for and they’ll work the other one around it.

Worth knowing while you browse: brands like Back Forty that have previously run both distillate carts and liquid diamonds are transitioning to liquid diamonds only.

There are CBD and CBN blends in the Ontario catalogue too, built on these same four extract types.

And if you landed here comparing extracts, the concentrates selection is where all four processes show up outside a cart. Same chemistry, different format.

Stock moves between Geneva and Glenridge and turns over with whatever lands that week, so the shelf always beats the website.

Still not sure? Come in. Geneva or Glenridge, either one.

Tell a budtender what you’ve been running and what you made of it, and they’ll walk you through what’s on the shelf that day, which extracts are moving, and what the price difference between them actually gets you.

You’ll leave knowing more than when you walked in. That’s the job.