Was visiting a new drying facility in S Oregon and stumbled upon something super interesting.
The process went like this:
Throw all wet plant material into a series of 3 industrial meat grinders. As the material is extruded, make consecutively smaller cuts (1/2", 1/4", 1/8")
Take the 1/8" sliced pellets and add them to an industrial homogenizer with enough water to make a slurry
Two options from here
3a. Take slurry from step 2 and feed it into a screw press, the water that’s squeezed out will be full of plant sugars
The remaining plant material and water can be sent to 3b separately.
3b. Take slurry from step 2 and dry it, either on an IR refractance window dryer (only option for the sugar water) or dry on a steam heated drum dryer
The dry flake was then put into a French press with hot water, steeped, then filtered and served as hemp tea.
Now, when I arrived at this facility, first thing in the door guy said “Here try my hemp tea”
Turns out, it was actually pretty damn good. Plus, they had some tested and sure as shit, there was CBD in it. My theory is that the homogenization combined with the grinding must have formed a natural micelle with the CBD trapped in plant lipids/hemp lecithin?
Anyways, the whole thing was super interesting. I doubt the viability of the process for standard solvent extraction, which was his original plan. But after discovering the tea and the sugar, he has decided to pivot towarda those novel products.
That’s probably what happened. Many “water soluble” processes involve melting fats or sugars and dumping your cannabinoid in. You mix well and check your particle size on DLS.
I spent some time messing with 5 different emulsifiers and found some that have high loading, some produce clear emulsions, some are bitter as heck, and some are expensive (q-naturale).
Properly made Kava or ‘awa is today commonly Ground with a Hammermill, and other option is the generally water insoluble kavalactones are able to be solubilized to a certain extent or rather suspended with powerful blenders of the commercial sort, with well frozen fresh roots ground several minutes in warm water. It’s obviously very shelf unstable but for the first couple of days a good shake and the drink is fantastic.
I could probably find a paper with all the chemical constituents in the root, but I’m almost positive there’s an emulsifying compound already there, I have also used the same technique with a sonicator for kava and it definitely made it seem more potent.
