Not sure, I haven’t bought any ethanol extracts. Haven’t seen many, but haven’t been looking.
I’ve made high grade ethanol extracts, it’s definitely possible. Just not easy. You can learn how here.
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^^^ This.
The cheapest way to get started would definitely be water hash or rosin presses.
As soon as you say “solvent” - shit gets expensive. (Please don’t tell the regulator that some people call water the “universal solvent.”)
Arent you guys doing ethanol? How are you going to compete with the quality hydrocarbon products or are you just producing distillates/isolates
IF your growing quality flowers do some solventless
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We are not using ethanol. We’re targeting 1000 kg of biomass per hour. We’re playing at the other end of the scale from craft.
But we do have some tricks up our sleeve for producing very high quality products.
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Yeah, nothing’s cheap with solvents Go big, go exceptional quality, or go home 
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Or grab a few rosin presses…
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Yup. Get good at it.
Run your ethanol in the bushes.
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Could also run a non volitaile, non (easily) flammable solvent. There’s a few edible oil options. But you gotta be an absolute cleanup expert too.
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Since you made quality ethanol extracts before do you think a craft ethanol lab could be viable? Really how difficult is this? I understand the keys to having a high quality ethanol extract but competing with hydrocarbons seems difficult.
Is ethanol really
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extremely knowledge and produce the best of the best
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Do huge volumes to distillate/isolate (500/lb a day?)
No inbetween…?
I’m not trying to knock the wind out of your sails.
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You need to find out if consumers will buy ethanol extracts/your craft tolling contracts are wanting it/wanting to pay for it. If you can only make a nice Brown oil, and the hydrocarbon guy up the road makes diamonds. Then the Craft grower is very likely going to go with whatever lab will make them the most sellable product.
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You need to be able to weather the next 5 years and a potentially massive market price shrink.
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you need to be able to weather 1.5 years of waiting for regulatory compliance to finish to get licensed.
With those things in mind. In my personal opinion. A mediocre ethanol extract won’t be an easy sell, nor will it command a premium price. There’s not a big long term middle ground, unless you’ve already got your clients ready to buy/pay you to toll.
It’s absolutely possible. Lots of things are. But it’ll be REALLY REALLY hard.
It sounds like $300k (MINIMUM) is a lot of money. It’ll likely be more expensive. You’ll need to have a business model that can pay that $$ back efficiently, likely within 2 years. If you look at tolling, and tolling prices, down in the States. You’ll see how much and how quickly it’s dropped. Canada won’t be immune.
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Killer live resin commands a solid price. Try that out for cheap. If you’re good at it, borrow from your cashflows/contracts and upgrade your lab to solvents while you work. Otherwise scrape up a few hundred grand, and get to reading on how to make some killer etoh stuff if that’s what you wanna do.
The biggest benefit of etoh in the current system is high allowable residual solvents. So that’s nice.
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Do you know the average liscensing wait time for ethanol or hydocarbons for a LP?
Is there a way to get up and running in a LP setting extremely fast? (Geez i cant even get Health Canada to reply on the phone) 
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Unless I miss my guess, we’re going to be about 3 months from application submission to receipt of Standard Processor license. But we’ve got our shit very much together - we’ve spent over three years getting to this point. I know a number of companies that are over twice that with little end in sight.
Security alone was a quarter-million dollars for our 16,500 sqft warehouse and took about two months to get installed. And we did that for about 1/3 of what most quotes came in at.
Without trying to sound like an asshole, if you have to ask random strangers on the internet, the answer for you is almost certainly no.
Do you have a metric fuckton of money to throw at the problem? Assuming you want to be smallish and you do it super smart and you already have a properly zoned location that isn’t on top of a school, you could probably do fast for something in the range of $1m (± $2m), where fast is 6 months or less.
The above is predicated on you having access to the people who can do that right and make it happen for you without screwing it up.
If you have basically unlimited money to throw at it, purchasing someone else’s already licensed facility would absolutely be the fastest option.
If you do not have unlimited funds, partnering with someone with a license is the fastest route.
Email only.
I once got a HC reply to a query over 9 months after I first asked it. They’re a bit better today than they were back then.
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@Lincoln20XX thank you for being the torch bearer of sanity in insane Cannabis extraction business
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the key with dealing with HC is having an already existing LP, be your ‘sister’ company… if you have the exact same paper work as an approved one… its MUCH simpler to get a license and running.
But there are LOADS of places built with no one operating in them… and licensed up. We have found three so far in alberta to work with if we want. they are truly clueless on what to do… but they built it… haha
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That’s Canada’s cannabis industry.
We don’t understand it, we don’t like it, and we don’t want it to exist. But goddamn it, we’re gonna REGULATE it, and our friends are gonna make some goddamn BANK off of this.
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I think it depends entirely on your final product. If he wants to fill carts and will be primarily manufacturing distillate, he can achieve that and more with ethanol but the output would outpace his canopy no doubt. If he wants to make shatters or diamonds and all those other products, yea a hydrocarbon system may be necessary. There isn’t any real way to compare the two systems until you work backwards from your final product. That is, if you have a final product in mind…
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Hi
I listened into a Health Canada AMA yesterday, and a couple points they stated:
“License Applications have a service standard of ~110 Days, IE time it takes for Health Canada to review, and approve a application that was submitted fully Incomplete packages, requests for more Info ect can dramatically add time”. Our processor license took 89 days after submission.
“Security clearances may take a lot longer, as they need to send out letters to each of the Police departments in the Jurisdictions you have lived in. the more you have moved, the longer it takes” (mine was applied in May2020, and approved this month, Lived in 2 countries, 4 states)
one of the Micros also had a question Re replacement of purchased products (IE replacement of 8th that was sub par) and HC response was WEIRD, they stated that, while LPs cannot sell/ship direct to customers (decision of farmgate is left up to Provence), but there may be a amazon model where retailers sell it, and producers ‘fulfill it’. I am still wrapping my head around how this would be done given the Provincial Distro Monopoly. sure would be great to sell direct to retail like in SK or MN, even better if we could sell direct to Consumers (though require a complex fulfillment team, too complex for micros I suspect).
another AMA for licensed producers is being set up next Wed thru Eventbrite. check Community Futures Central Kootenay for info
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/license-holder-micro-cannabis-ama-sesh-w-health-canada-tickets-156935940623?aff=eand
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