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Storz & Bickel is the OG manufacturer of cannabis vapes, and the company has introduced its first brand new product since 2014. The dry herb vape called Venti builds on the immense success of Mighty and offers significant new features including the best. The airflow of any portable vaporizer.
Like the Mighty before it, the Venti is a large, portable dry herb vaporizer. This is not a separate device. The bottom half of the unit houses the battery and temperature controls. A brand new convection and conduction heating unit sits in the middle, and steam flows through an adjustable airflow chamber at the top of the device. S&B says this case offers users more precise customization than previous units. The heat up time is said to be the fastest of any S&B device, capable of reaching 190°C in 20 seconds.
Venti addresses some of the long-standing criticisms of the Mighty. The new model has a flat bottom, which allows it to stand upright, making filling the device more manageable. The narrow but tall design makes it more pocketable than the Mighty. Some shortcomings still exist, including the lack of a removable battery and an all-plastic airway.
I asked Jürgen Bickel, co-founder and managing director of S&B, what first-time Venti users will find surprising.
“Ah, I’d say time to warm up,” he said. “You don’t expect it. You’re waiting and waiting, and then you see that it’s already [at temp], The second reaction is that people like to play with air flow. [When you first use the device]Users think they always want full airflow, but sometimes, when [the herb] If it gets a little dry or a little high temperature or a little harsh, you can reduce the air flow. It feels good to play around.”
Image Credit: Storz and Bikel
The new design allows the device to allow twice the amount of airflow compared to S&B’s Crafty and Mighty. The two older devices can pass 10 liters of water per minute, while the Venti’s design allows 20 litres/minute. S&B’s massive desktop vaporizer, the Volcano, offers an airflow of 30 litres/minute.
Considering the high air flow rate, the Venti’s adjustable air flow mechanism is a welcome feature.
Air flow is what differentiates S&B devices. Using other vapes feels like sucking a thick milkshake through a straw. I own and use a Mighty and a Volcano almost daily. They both offer best-in-class airflow and in practice, that sometimes means a lot of vapor. Or, if you’re sharing a session with a friend, they may want a different experience, and the Venti offers a dial for quick adjustments.
Bickel told me battery life is on par with a Mighty, but users may experience less life depending on usage. “Because of the faster heatup time, you reheat it more often,” he said. “You can do shorter sessions than Mighty. you can warm up [a Venty] Two or three times a session, and that’s where the battery can go down.”
Two 18650 Li-in batteries power the device and can handle up to 16 amps of power supply – which is why the device heats up so quickly.
The Venti now tops Storz & Bickel’s portable lineup, priced at $448 USD. It’s not replacing the Mighty, which is still available for $398.
The company started in 2002 and was sold to Canopy Growth in 2018 during the early formation of Canadian cannabis companies. Since then, Storrs & Bickel released minor updates to existing products, adding USB-C charging to its portable line and different colors to the Volcano. But essentially, S&B rested on their laurels and took the time to develop their next product because no other dry herb vaporizer company offered a better product than Mighty (trust me, I tried them all. ).
Jürgen Bickel talked to me about the slow product development, pointing to Canopy Growth and almost thanking S&B’s parent company, saying it was nice to have enough time to develop the product. Product development began in 2016, although most of the work came from S&B’s 10-member engineering department within the past three years.
Bickel acknowledged that the device may be larger and more expensive than initially expected. Still, he says Venti shows the company is staying true to its core values.
“That’s what we do and it’s what we’re good at,” Bickel said. He added, “If you look at the market, no one in Germany is doing tooling. No one in the world is just vaporizing and taking seven years of development time unless we say, ‘ Okay, now it’s ready for customers. Now we can go to market.”
The Venti conforms to UL 8139 certification, a strict standard that sets guidelines regarding the electrical systems of electronic cigarettes. This follows the Mighty+ certification in 2021 when it became the first dry herb vaporizer to earn a UL approval rating. For S&B, UL certification is important. The company has long distinguished itself from its competitors with certification from the TUV certifying two of its vapes, the Mighty and Volcano, as medical devices. UL Node certifies that a device’s components comply with the testing agency’s safety standards covering electrical, heating, battery and charging systems.
It seems he is surprised by the dry herb vaporizer’s lack of UL 8139 certification. “It would be nice if consumers asked, ‘Hey, what’s your safety standard, or what have you done?’ On the one hand, we are almost the only ones that comply, and it would be nice if others took their devices to the same level so that the entire industry could provide the same protection to customers, and then make the devices a little more comparable. “
