I’m a certified organic ethanol extractor and I don’t have the money or space to extract anywhere close to -20 to do a spin type extraction at scale so I extract at room temp. I recently got a membrane system to try and deal with this but it still doesn’t quite do a good enough job to put into a wiped film as I am still dialing it in. This puts me in a tight spot for a few reasons because I’m getting more business, but I will very soon be swamped and I don’t want to let people down.
Being certified organic puts me in a tight spot because I can’t do the standard heptane water wash to methanol LLE to fix this problem because both of those disqualify me from organic status the second, they touch my product. I can only use organic ethanol, which is miscible with almost everything. My first thought was limonene, but it is soluble with ethanol.
Then I had a thought: long chain triglycerides are insoluble with 95% ethanol at room temperature.
I decided to try something very odd, use vegetable oil instead of heptane and ethanol instead of methanol.
So I tried it. First I tried to see if these two things would form separate layers; I anticipated that I’d have to wash some ethanol soluble out of the oil at the very least, so I started with 20g of oil and 20g of ethanol. Sure enough separate layers, but emulsified once I shook it, so I stuck it in the freezer to see what would happen. Sure enough the oil solidified and the ethanol floated on top. I boiled off all the remaining ethanol and there was a slight oily residue left, which is to be expected, but I put it on my scale which has a 10mg LOQ and got a big fat 0. So this means I don’t even need to wash this oil, which is really nice. Now for the real deal.
Dissolved 12g of 60% extract into 36g of walmart vegetable oil and basically fucked my crude with a non-volatile impurity (hopefully we’ll fix this. Then did a regular brine wash with warm water. I had to heat gun it a bit to break the emulsion, but it worked like a treat. Did a few of those until oil layer clouded minimally, then washed with a more water to remove any salt.
Drained off the bottom water layer and dumped in 25mL of 95% ethanol. I gently swirled it but minimal color came over so I shook it violently and got a very fine emulsion, so I said fuck and stuck it in my freezer set to -26C. When I came back in 30 min I was left with 2 layers, a dark brown ethanol layer and a solid green layer on the bottom. This made me really happy and I repeated the process 3 more times and I yielded the same thing.
After boiling down the solvent, I was left with 7g of concentrate which had a very thick sappy consistency the same as THC (I did this with THC so I could go by viscosity because CBD can be confused for wax easily).
I have to say, I cannot believe this works. Dewaxing with triglycerides… diametrically opposed to what we aim for. I know this isn’t necessarily new ground, especially for a lot of the seasoned people on here like myself would just use heptane and methanol and go from there, but for the hobbyists and home extractors/chemists who aren’t comfortable using methanol or heptane this is actually really cool because its a cheap and available way to do a high grade job of washing dewaxing, and removing chlorophyll.
I’m now going to scale this and run a proper 5L distillation run and see how it looks and report back.