Decarb smoke?

I was decarbing and only had a 2000ml beaker with about 80ml of crube. At the end of the bubbling I started to get smoke. Is this normal to get alittle bit of smoke during decarb? Or did I just junk the batch? (I’d say about 3-5 mins tops of seeing smoke). Thought it was fog at first. :persevere::persevere:

What temp was the crude? Are you sure it was smoke and not terp steam? Cover it for a minute and check the condensation on the lid, if it’s sooty you are indeed burning something. If it’s clear it’s just terp steam.
You might want to consider stirring more vigorously if you are burning stuff, or maybe you need to clean the crude more to remove the stuff that’s burning

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Batch is for sure not junk, if you did burn something will likely stay in heavies, or just add s bit of color to the light fraction. Nothing to get to upset over

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Thank you, unfortunately i was all done with the decarb before i could test anything. Smells good still, a bit dark. But im okay with it. Thank you for the response. :slight_smile: I was worried

got a stir-bar in there? It is most likely fine, you just vaped some of it lol!

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A little while back we ended up having some crude that smoked up a lot more than usual while we were decarbing. The only real information I have regarding that batch is that the biomass was a 20 to 1 CBD strain. All the decarbing from that batch looked like that, and we weren’t really sure why. The material ended up passing all required testing, so figuring out what it was that caused it never became that high of a priority, but I think we have seen a similar occurrence in our shop.

Some vapors will often be seen coming out of the pot, regardless. Even if it’s only releasing a little visible vapor, it can still look like a lot if you are decarbing a very large batch at once. I generally assume it’s water vapor (as we extract at room temp for crude so picking up water is a real possibility), terpenes, or other compounds which would volatilize around or below decarbing temp.

As others said, if you are going too hot or not stirring enough, there is the possibility that you might be burning it. If you are burning it though, (my associate told me this, I have managed to avoid this personally though) then you might notice it actually forming bit of a hard cake at the bottom, much like if you burn a pot of chili on the stove if you don’t stir it enough and it burns a little and starts to stick to the bottom. That is a very good indicator of when you have really crossed the line with high temps.

That said, degrading THC into CBN is something we haven’t really seen happen by accident in our lab. From what we can tell, THCA decarboxylates into THC more easily than THC degrades into CBN.

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