Our recent batches of BHO crude started to grow “rocks” and sugar up after about a week in storage. We were pulling some samples to show potential buyers and @HoosierHill and I noticed that the top 2 inches or so of our buckets was almost a completely solid puck. We broke it up and took some of the chunks out to examine and they almost definitely are some kind of crystalline structure. See pictures:
A while back there was a post regarding CBDa potentially being able to crash out into a crystals in crude, but there was just the one post and I haven’t really seen anyone else talk about it
Our crude has only gone straight from the extraction unit to the vac oven with no heat or vacuum applied, so I’m fairly confident there hasn’t been any decarbing. @AppalachianExtractor did you end up getting test results back or confirm what your crystals were?
For info, this was a fast room temp extraction with butane using “decent” potency hemp (~11-12% CBD) with a VERY good terpene profile. It sat for about a week at 50-60F in the vac oven with no pressure/vacuum applied.
Ive actually still got some of that crashed out stuff from the post that I’ll have with me in vegas. If you’re at the meet up I’d gladly share and love to talk.
Ive been much more successful in crashing out crystals with color remediation although Ive yet to grow crystals of any real size. This video is of a slab that went into the oven water clear and within 24 hours had chunked up like ive never seen before. There is deff some fun yet to be had with quality high cbd cannabis extracts.
Damn that’s awesome @AppalachianExtractor! Did you ever end up getting tests back to confirm that it’s majority CBD-A? That’s our biggest question right now and I think we’re going to send in some samples too just to confirm. With your info and the results of our own little experiment last night, I think we’re going to jump down this rabbit-hole and see if we can make a repeatable process for making these crystals.
Yesterday one of the guys put some of the crude into a small mason jar with some additional butane to see if the THCA Crystals Jar tek would do anything. He left it in the freezer overnight and when we got here this morning, the crude had definitely separated into 2 distinct layers.
We’re going to do some color remediation on a small batch and see if we can get some slabs like you posted. It’d be pretty cool to “accidentally” discover CBD-A terp sauce haha.
ive crashed CBDa from cryo EtOH extracts, still improving my methods and getting the purity levels up, takes quite a bit of work. I havent seen CBDa form structured crystals yet, i have been precipitating it out as a fine powder, but im sure with the proper ReX solvent system, pressure and temps, you could get it to form some defined structure.
that image is of a simple brine wash, I was seeing if there were any water soluble contaminates, there was something in the aqueous phase, it improved the CBDa’s coloration ever so slightly, im still trying to get it uber white like CBD or CBGA, its a tricky one.
Any thought to doing color remediation first to get water clear like @AppalachianExtractor and THEN doing the brine wash?
I’ve read lots about brine washes and LLE but never performed them myself, so I apologize if I’m missing some step that makes this not viable/possible.
In case anyone was still interested, we got the crystals tested and they tested at roughly 85% CBDa. There is definitely something worth checking out here.
The best I’ve seen is around the same price as THCA + terp sauce, but that’s in rec states. From the few people I’ve talked to, CBDa sauce is still kind of a novelty along with other craft hemp concentrates. We did end up managing to isolate some 95+% CBDa crystals out of sugared up crude but it was an incredibly wasteful process and I don’t think very viable until the demand for CBDa comes up.
CRC has improved it quite a bit, also scrubing the mother liqour has helped as well.
