While attending the Revelry Buyers Club Event in Hudson a couple months ago, I stumbled upon a very interesting pipe. Inside the carefully polished aluminum shell there appeared to be a thimble shaped insert containing ceramic balls. These balls as it turn out form the basis of the pipe… A very unique one that has a “limited” life span. What does that mean? It means that you change out the bowl every fifteen or do uses to remove all the tar. Again, what does it do? The interior of the bowl, shielded by a screen, contains tiny ceramic balls. They trap the tar and let the terpenes draw through. Would you drink wine out of a dirty glass, or rum? Or anything for that matter? And what about your usual pipe or joint? What filters out that gunk that collects on the front of your teeth? Nothing!
Until this pipe found a path to my hands. And my teeth.. and my lungs.
What an invention! The Clean Buzz Pipe has my vote!
And if you reorder, there is a nice discount. After a couple times, the pipe is virtually free!
I love it!
Warren Bobrow: Please tell me about yourself. Where are you from? Now?
Mark McWilliams: I grew up in New Hampshire skiing on “boiler plate”, and after high school, went to Northeastern University and MIT to study Mechanical Engineering and entrepreneurship. I worked in aerospace for a decade in San Diego and worked on some very cool defense technologies that became mainstream in the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s. Then I found an opportunity to co/found a medical device design firm, followed by three more medical device companies pursuing different products and technologies. Two doubles, a base hit and a strike-out.
WB: What brought you to the cannabis industry?
MM: Knee pain. I began with the treatments available in the ‘90’s and then started taking Vioxx until the COX2 inhibitors were implicated in organ complications and had to stop taking them. What was the remaining option? Opioid’s?? No way.
Those were the early days of medical marijuana, and I thought it was a regulatory gimmick at first, but after I tried it and my pain became much more manageable, I became a believer. That said, I could feel the tar in my lungs and did not like it at all. I tried a bong but that did nothing to remove the tar. The last straw for me was cleaning the pipe which clogged quickly and required frequent cleaning. What a nasty mess! Then vaping came along and I got very excited about that development but soon was disappointed because it lacked the potency I needed for my pain.
Those experiences got me thinking about the problem/opportunity of removing tar from the flower smoke but allowing the desirable terpenes, where flavor and medicinal components are, to pass through to the user without potency degradation.
Filters using various media present an obvious option for tar removal, but they also remove terpenes from the smoke stream, so that technology as a class would not work well in a medicinal use-case were it is desired to selectively trap tars and pass terpenes. Moreover, filters are placed after the combustion chamber and so do not prevent the pipe from getting covered with tar up to the filter, so you’re still cleaning a nasty pipe.
A new technology approach was required and frankly, that took some time to figure out. When the solution came into mind after a couple years of noodling, it seemed obvious, so I had a hunch I was onto something. A few prototypes later, the concept was proven, and an entirely new smoking technology was invented where tar is trapped in a small disposable liner and terpenes pass right through, and pipe cleaning became as simple as popping out a used bowl liner and putting a new liner in place.
WB: Tell me about your company? What do you do that makes you better than your competition?
MM: CleanBuzz is the only flower smoking technology I’m aware of that removes tar from flower smoke and passes desirable terpenes, while also keeping your pipe or bong clean. Clean lungs and clean pipe or bong. Once I had a viable solution, I formed the company to begin test marketing the product and prove the technology met user needs as it had mine.
WB: Why Cannabis? Is this your first foray with the plant? Who designed your marvelous pipe? What about the bowl makes it special? How did you think of this?
MM: I think my long-winded answer above, answers these questions? What makes it special (actually work to remove tar but pass terpenes) is the configuration of the liner in the bowl, the chamber under the screen and the small beads in that chamber. The beads are well separated from each other, so do not act as a filter of the smoke. Instead, the hot smoke passes over the beads which have lots of pores that create an enormous surface area and the tar condenses on the surface but the terpenes remain in the smoke and pass through to the user. Very simple but very effective. It is the differential condensation of the smoke constituents on the beads that does the separation, not a filtration process. This is why you get full potency of the flower, but no tar.
WB: Does your disposable bowl work with temple ball hash?
MM: I don’t know why it would not work for any smoke producing material that has not been rendered in some way.
WB: Do you recommend grinding the flower first before using the bowl?
MM: Yes. I put one gram of ground flower through each liner and collect 200-250mg of tar in each one. Too small of a grind will clog the screen though.
WB: What are your six and twelve month goals?
MM: Break even?
WB: What is your passion?
MM: OMG: passions
Skiing. I skied every season for 55 years until my knees got so bad I couldn’t. One knee replacement done and one to go, then I’ll get out again.
Entrepreneurship: I’ve co-founded 4 companies and invested in and helped over a dozen entrepreneurs advance their technology or product to market. It’s very rewarding to see these products impact lives in positive ways.
Trail Riding: I love the outdoors in SoCal and now that ebikes have become prevalent I can get out to most of the places I want. I’ve done 60 miles of single track this weekend ????
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Photo Credits: Courtesy Mark McWilliams
