Vestratto Anvil First Look

There’s a really good thread going on FuckCombustion.com about the Anvil, the first post is by the Canadian retailer Planet Haze, you can check them out at PlanetHaze.com where they have an excellent write up on the device which does a great job summarizing it so I’m going to quote them here:

“The Anvil is a new vape being released by Vestratto. Completely made in North America, it is constructed of three layers. The outer and inner skins are stainless with a copper core layer sandwiched between them. It has many similarities to a DynaVap as well as many advantages.

So, that all sounds pretty cool! Here are some quotes from a post on Vestratto’s Instagram which give a good overview of what they are trying to accomplish with the Anvil:

“Someone close to me got cancer, so I bought a number of vapes because we'd heard about anti-nausea and appetite enhancement benefits during chemo. Thankfully the cancer is in the rearview, but my love of vapes thrived. The thing was, none of the units I bought did what I wanted to do. To take a DAB FROM FLOWER! I felt at the time that the vaporizer industry was missing the boat and conceding full extraction benefit to the concentrate producers. Why not get rid of the middleman and hit a vape that can strip off absolutely every bit of goodness - right from the flower - and eliminate all of the middlemen?”

“And so the design "raison d'etre" for ANVIL became to DAB FROM FLOWER. One and done! Crucial to that DAB FROM FLOWER experience is having a fresh full-flavoured extraction the first time, every time. I've pretty much come to view session vaping like that stale pot of coffee on the top of the burner at the back of a quiet diner. Just my opinion.”

“The quest for my perfect vape, not the perfect vape, but my perfect vape, became searching for the line when vapour turns into combustion and then, reliably, easily, and repeatedly staying just inside it. You'll see us talk about riding the line. That's getting to the last moment of vapour before the onset of combustion.”

Hopefully now you’ve got a good overview of the device and the general concept behind it, so let’s talk about some of the details more specifically, and the first one I want to talk about is the copper core construction.

On the metal conductivity chart I checked, where the higher the number - the better the conductivity, copper had a thermal conductivity rating of 386, while stainless steel had a rating of 80, and titanium had a rating of 21. I was really surprised to see there was so much of a difference between copper and the other metals, but it does make sense when you consider that copper is used to transmit electricity, it obviously does a good job of transmitting energy.

If you look up a kind of cookware called ‘All Clad’, it’s a high-end range which features products like frying pans and pots with copper cores. Because copper has insanely high thermal conductivity (it’s second only to pure silver) it does a crazy good job at evenly distributing heat. Applying this same concept to the Anvil’s design means that you have three layer construction. You have an outer layer of durable stainless steel, inside that you have the highly conductive copper core, and on the other side of that is more stainless steel. So the copper is enclosed with stainless steel, apart from the three exposed copper rings on the outside.

The copper cored three layer construction has a few benefits, but the primary one is that when you’re using the Anvil you do not need to rotate it. Because copper is such a good conductor, you simply hold your torch in one place, and the copper core will distribute the heat throughout the device evenly, so it negates the need to rotate it while heating.

The next cool design detail of the Anvil is called the thermal battery, this battery is a 1.5x thicker section of copper, and it acts exactly as the name would suggest, as a heat reservoir that enhances the device operation.

Thanks to the high conductivity of copper, instead of heat rapidly leaking out of the device when the torch is removed or cooling where the airflow is concentrated, the thermal battery stores thermal energy gathered while heating and then redistributes that heat throughout the device once you stop heating. This maintains a more consistent temperature in your herb chamber throughout your hit, because as heat is pulled from the chamber while you inhale, it is replaced with the extra heat stored in the thermal battery, but in a way that won’t overheat the chamber.

Another way to think of the thermal battery is as something of a calibrated supercharger. I’ll get into more detail about this in the ‘how to use’ section, but basically the amount of copper in it has been calibrated in such a way that when you heat it directly on the thermal battery it will get as close possible to riding the line, the point where it is still vapour and it hasn’t turned into combustion.

You don’t have to use the Anvil in that most intense method, but having the option to hit it in that way is really quite crazy. When first I tried riding the line I was heating it directly on the thermal battery and I was getting concerned because it was taking so long that I was sure that it must have combusted. So I started heating it up a little higher to make it click, and then I hit it. I got a super thick and intense hit, two of them actually, and I was positive that I had to have combusted based on the thickness, even though it definitely didn’t taste like combustion. When I de-bowled it, it wasn’t burned, but it was absolutely as vaporized as it possibly can be without being burned. This hit got me so insanely massively wrecked that when I was out to dinner afterwards, I was literally eating my salad with two knives as I was just trippin’ and I didn’t realize what I had in my hands. I was completely mangled, it was intense.

The really cool thing about the design is that it gives you a repeatable experience without having to put in a lot of effort. If you have a consistent flame size and place your flame in the same place each time you will get virtually identical hits without needing to rotate it as you heat. Just hold your lighter in place, the heat will spread throughout the device and any excess will be stored in the thermal battery.

You determine the temperature of your hit with your lighter position, but the number of flames on your lighter will have a small impact as well. If you want a nice light roast (which is good for hitting it dry), hold your lighter up higher near the upper copper band. If you want a medium roast, hold it lower, towards the bottom copper band, or even directly at the bottom of the oven. If you want to ride the line, point the lighter directly at the thermal battery and hold it there until you hear the click. With the Anvil you should stop heating as soon as you hear the click, do not go past the click, if you continue you are definitely going to run the risk of combustion.

In regards to heating times, when I heat it with a dual flame lighter low on the oven it takes about 28 seconds. Vestratto recommends as a starting point that you aim your lighter between the thermal battery and the bottom of the oven, and aim for around a 36 second time before the click, for a full flavoured but thorough extraction.

When you open the air intake wider it also affects the intensity of the vapour, as it will be adding more fresh air to the vapour.

So there you go guys, the new Anvil from Vestratto, I think this is a super exciting dry herb vape and I will be doing a full review video in the future, so keep an eye out for that. Thank you so much for reading and watching, see you again next time.

Keep it green, keep it sneaky!