Magical Butter Machine vs. LEVO: Which Makes Better Extracts?

Published Dec 02, 2023

by Sirius Fourside

Table of Contents

Intro: Why Extracts Are So Great (And Why You Should Make Them)

Humans have been growing and consuming cannabis for thousands of years and it doesn’t look like we’ll be slowing down anytime soon. In fact, ever since humans discovered weed, we’ve been looking for new ways to enhance the growth of plants as well as the feelings their buds create.

Cut to the year 2023, and humans have a firm grasp on how to grow weed and what to do with it afterward. Enter the Cannabis Extract!

Cannabis extracts are a way for you to take your wonderful cannabis and extract the good stuff, so you’re left with a different, but typically more powerful version of your weed. Cannabis extracts can come in many forms, such as hash oil, tinctures, cannabis butter (aka cannabutter), or even gummies. Cannabis extracts give you a way to experience the effects of cannabis without having to smoke or vape and they also tend to feel much more potent than smoking or vaping since you can ingest so much psychoactive material at once.

Not only are cannabis extracts stronger, fun, and easier on your lungs, but they give you a good way to get rid of older weed that you haven’t smoked or given away. I know that might sound like a crazy concept to some, but once you start growing regularly, it becomes a normal fact of grower-life that you often have way more weed than you can deal with. Extracts give you a way to condense some of that older weed into a tiny space while also giving it a new life as a stronger add-on to your normal smoking/vaping material.

A long time ago, cannabis extracts (like hashish) were made by hand, which introduced a slew of problems, as you can imagine. Luckily, we live in the future and these days, you can get a machine to do 99% of the work for you. All you need to do is provide the materials and a little bit of patience.

Today, we’re going to show you two machines that are well-known for their ability to process cannabis and make amazing extracts. But we’re not just going to look at them, we’re also going to show you how they work, compare them, and decide which machine is the best between the two. Let’s do this!

 

 

What is The Magical Butter Machine (aka MBM)?

The Magical Butter Machine is one of the original cannabis extraction-making devices and it’s pretty much ruled the space since it arrived. In short, you add decarbed weed and a medium (like oil, butter or alcohol) and let it loose. Within 1-3 hours, you’ll be left with a potent, beautiful, cannabis-laden mixture that just needs to be strained. Once your mixture is strained and cooled, you can ingest it, but be careful about dosing!

One of the biggest strengths of the Magical Butter Machine lies in its simplicity. The MBM is only comprised of two parts (three parts if you count the cord), so there aren’t many parts to break or accidentally lose. The MBM you’ll see in this article is the original one I purchased back in December of 2017. You heard right, the Magical Butter Machine you see in this article will be celebrating its sixth birthday by the time you read this and it still works as well as the day I bought it. +6 points in my book…

How it Works: You put your cannabis and a medium (like butter or oil) into this device. You pick a couple of simple settings via buttons on the lid, and it chops, heats, and swirls your bud until you have a nearly finished product. You’ll still need to filter the end result, so check out my easy and cheap mason jar technique below.

The Magical Butter Machine forced me to use this filter.

 

What is the LEVO?

The LEVO is a newer and more advanced take on the Magical Butter Machine. While it doesn’t make any extracts that the MBM can’t make, it transforms the whole process of making extracts into something that feels a lot more sleek and polished. One thing that sets the LEVO apart from the competition is its sleek look, and the fact that it dispenses a finished product that doesn’t need to be strained. It also has another massive benefit: it will dry AND decarb your weed for you! That kind of makes the LEVO a one-stop shop when it comes to making edibles. The LEVO actually has one more thing that sets it apart, but I didn’t find this out until I tested it head-to-head against the Magical Butter Machine.

Make sure to read the whole article to see the impressive last-second surprise the LEVO pulled off!

How it Works: Take a deep breath… First you put the rubber mat into the weed-holder. Then you grind up a bunch of cannabis (coarsely) and put it into the weed-holder. You then put the lid on ol’ holder and put that into the reservoir. You “Activate” (decarb) your weed – via a fancy menu on the front – for about 2 hours. Next, you put a magnetic stirrer and your medium (butter, oil) into the reservoir and let it run for 5 hours. When it’s done, it dispenses weed-oil like a coffee maker. The road is long, but glorious at the end.

The LEVO, almost aggressively shiny

How To Use the MBM or LEVO

Both devices come with their own respective sets of directions and recipes. We advise that you look up their most current instructions/recipes and follow those. However, if enough people are interested in a detailed walkthrough of operating either of these devices, let us know and we’ll do a full write-up

 

How We Tested the Machines

We tried to keep this test as simple as possible while still being useful. We ran the tests on MCT oil because it seems to be healthy, but you could use coconut oil, sunflower oil, or (non-extra virgin) olive oil. MCT oil will give us a huge benefit over testing butter or alcohol: ease in judging the final product. It’s much easier to make visual judgments when it comes to oil because it’s translucent, unlike butter, which could hide imperfections when it solidifies. It’s also easier to test the effects of MCT oil than alcohol because the intoxicating effects of alcohol can make it a bit harder to tell what effect the extract is having. Also, the LEVO can’t process alcohol (?!), so that was never really an option.

Both sets of extracts were made using the same strain of (absolutely ancient) weed from the same (seriously, prehistoric) harvest of Peyote Critical by Barney’s Farm. We tested some of the Peyote Critical first and it was strong enough to put a dinosaur to sleep. So we know there’s good potency going in.

The Magical Butter Machine doesn’t decarb weed itself, so I did that separately, but the comparison should still be pretty close.

Note: Decarbing (short for decarboxylation) is the act of lightly cooking your weed to activate the contained psychoactive ingredients. Eating weed will only have an effect if you decarb it first! See this page for more info on decarbing: How to Decarb Your Weed for Edibles. Don’t worry; it’s really easy.

Once some of the weed was decarbed for the MBM, I put some of the same weed (not decarbed) into the LEVO and let it run. The LEVO will decarb the weed in addition to making extracts, so Mr. Fancy Pants doesn’t need me to decarb anything on its behalf.

 

Our Test Results:

After we thoroughly tested the machines (and the products they make), we were able to do a side-by-side comparison and note where each machine outperforms the other. Without further ado, here are our findings!

Difficulty

To be completely honest, I went into this section thinking there would be an obvious winner in terms of ease of use (the LEVO)…and I was wrong! The LEVO requires mostly front-loaded work, meaning you do most of the work in the beginning so that it’s easier at the end. However, the work needed to operate the Magical Butter Machine is mixed. Unlike the LEVO, you need to decarb your weed first. Additionally, you’ll need to strain the weed from your extracts in the end while the LEVO does this part for you. On paper, it sounds like MBM already lost this one.

Despite those differences, the Magical Butter machine ends up winning in the difficulty department as it’s easier to use in pretty much every regard. It requires less preparation to get started than the LEVO, but it also requires far less cleanup when you’re done due to the MBM only having 2 parts that need cleaning. Although you need to decarb the weed for the MBM, doing it myself it felt like less work than having the LEVO decarb for me since I had to “coarsely grind” and pack the weed into a small container for the LEVO (pic above) while the MBM requires no grinding at all. Apparently, roughly grinding a half ounce of weed and prepping it makes it feel like more work than decarbing weed in any of the old-fashioned ways..

The LEVO does a cool trick where it saves you from having to strain the extract, and that definitely added to it’s high-quality feel. But there are cheap, fast, easy tricks you can do to compensate for the MBM’s lack of a strainer.

For example, just remove the lid from a mason jar and put some cheesecloth over the opening. Then press a little divot into the cheesecloth and put the screw-top back on. There ya go, instant filter.

Winner: Magical Butter Machine (weirdly enough)

Appearance
The appearance of the resulting MCT Oil doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it’s still nice to take a look. Sometimes the overall appearance of something can be enough for you to know if you’ll like it or not.

In this case, the MCT Oil that came from the LEVO was a clear winner (no pun intended). As you can see from the pictures below, the oil from the Magical Butter Machine was much more cloudy while you can clearly see through the oil made by the LEVO. That doesn’t mean the MBM oil is worse, but when we’re judging based purely on looks, it’s hard to argue with the clarity and color of the oil made by the LEVO.

Oh, and if we’re judging the appearance of the device itself, the LEVO wins.

Winner: LEVO

Amount of Extract Yielded per oz of Cannabis
The amount of oil extracted from each method was about the same. As you can see from the pictures below, there was a small difference in the ending amount, but that was due to minor capacity differences. Note: the LEVO holds a bit less than 16oz despite its instructions.

Winner: Draw

Potency (Perceived Potency)
Finally, we get to the most important deciding factor. None of the other stuff matters if the resulting extract fails to impress you!

Before I get to it, just know that Nebula and I did extensive testing of our oil to see which one was the best. We tried it in different places at different times of day and…we couldn’t tell the difference.

Even after abstaining purely for testing purposes, the high was indistinguishable.

Winner: Draw


Pros and Cons: Magical Butter Machine

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Makes extracts quickly
  • Good, reliable hardware; my MBM is 6 years old!
  • Super-simple interface
  • Can make tinctures!
  • Tons of potent, battle-tested recipes included
  • Processes WAY faster than the LEVO

Cons:

  • You have to decarb your own weed first
  • Doesn’t strain your extract
  • The machine itself doesn’t look very cool
  • When finished, the MBM beeps like it’s ready for war

 


Pros and Cons: LEVO

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Sleek in appearance and function
  • One machine can dry, decarb and make extractions
  • No need to decarb your own weed
  • Decarb smell is weird, but very light
  • Automatically stirs your extract during processing
  • Makes super-clean looking extracts

Cons:

  • Takes a long time to process extractions
  • More cleaning involved
  • Grinding weed and packing it into a container takes much longer than expected
  • Can NOT make tinctures
  • Contains small parts you can easily lose
  • Surface is a magnet for fingerprints
  • Included recipes are weirdly vague to the point where they’re almost useless
  • Sooo slow! Making oil takes five hours versus the MBM at one hour (at similar quality)

 

Final Judgement and Conclusion:

This has been a tough shootout between two machines that are very much capable at the thing they claim to do. I think that if you spent the money on either of these two devices, you’d get your money’s worth and you’d be very happy with the results you get.

But if you have to pick only one of these two machines, there’s a clear winner in my opinion: The Magical Butter Machine

The LEVO is a great device and I don’t regret spending the money to get it, but the MBM feels…better. It’s like a good idea that’s been refined over the years until we have its current iteration. One could argue that the two devices are different enough that their strengths and weaknesses even out. I would agree with that for the most part. Where the MBM excels, the LEVO finds a way to make up for lost ground for most issues and that goes both ways. However…

  • You need an app to see the LEVO recipes and they still aren’t good.
  • The LEVO takes 5 hours to make oil compared to the MBM’s one hour.
  • Grinding the weed for the LEVO was annoying. If you do it wrong, you get weed in your extract.
  • The LEVO does NOT have the capability to make tinctures.
  • The LEVO strains your extract, but it seems like the straining mechanism might be what breaks first. (speculation)

Admittedly, these are minor gripes when you look at the big picture. These devices perform well enough that either one will likely have you smiling for a long time. But if you’re looking for the better of the two, the MBM ends up edging out the competition.

And there you have it! Our summary of the competition between two amazing extract-making machines: the Magical Butter Machine and the LEVO.

What do you think? Did we miss something? Are we just plain wrong on this one? Do you want us to make detailed instructions on using either machine? Don’t be shy! Contact us and let us know and we’ll update any information we missed.

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