Hi, I’m developing a recipe (pectin gummy) that calls for an ethanol tincture. I have BHO (72% THC) as my stock and would like to ask the community for advice on dilution factor in 100% ethanol. The lower the better as this product will ultimately be tested (5000ppm). On paper I’ll be close this limit before accounting for evaporation. Additional details. Dosing happens with 3-5 minutes to go at a temperature of 105’C. In production, batch size is 15,000g cooked in a 8-gal kettle. Thank you.
You can definitely get away with diluting BHO:ethanol 1:1 if it is decarboxylated and you are patient with dissolution. Heat it to 50 C or so, swirl to mix regularly, top up any ethanol that evaporated in the process. However it will be thick and harder to homogenize throughout your gummy recipe, so I’d go 3x or 4x dilution.
4g ethanol into 15000g would get you to 267 ppm, 16g of ethanol into 15000g is 1067 ppm. So even at your most diluted without evaporation you’re in the clear (unless you’re using more than 4g of oil batch)
I’m using decarbed oil. Also, my math was a bit off. Production run will be 15,000g, a “single” run is 1500g which matches the dilution examples. I actually ran a single run today, used 16g of ethanol in a final product weight of 1900g = 0.84% = 8400ppm. I’ll send this off to get tested a report back.
*Not sure if you happen to know, but I added the tincture at a temperature of 104’C. The alcohol appeared to boil off as soon as it hit the top of the mix which probably doesn’t bode well for even distribution. Would it make sense to add the tincture earlier in the process at a lower temp?
If OP can’t find that info then they’ll have up their search game or do their own FAFO (R&D).
Most of it boils off? Which means you can dilute further (use more).
Remind us of the boiling point of ethanol? What makes you think it’s gonna stick around for 5min at 30C above its boiling point? (Try it. Get them tested!)
IMO you’re over thinking it. Try, evaluate, iterate, solved!
Hi everyone, thanks again for all the feedback. After doing some more reading here, it looks like most gummy recipes call for adding straight oil. Starting next week I will run (3) single-batches with the following dosing scheme:
Alcohol tincture: 5X dilution in ethanol added at the beginning (~50’C).
Straight oil: pre-mixed/pre-warmed and added at the beginning (~50’C)
Oil Tincture: 5x dilution in MCT (edit) pre-mixed/pre-warmed and added at the beginning (~50’C)
I will send out for potency (and solvent for #1) and report back. Cheers!
I ended up diluting my oil in a 4x ethanol tincture. I dosed at 50’C. Straight oil would probably work as well. The dilution in MCT did not work very well. We’re making a two-layer pate-de-fruit and the layers didn’t adhere appropriately.
For the ethanol tincture run, the pate was a little soft. We had to further optimize by increasing pectin from 0.5% to 1.25% and cooked two degrees longer (105’C → 107’C) which gave us a 73% brix. Still a little low but final product ended up spot-on. Sent this in for testing.
