I know that CBD hemp in general is an easier distillation process than THC, and I have a volume of room temp extracted crude that I have been asked to distill- I have had great results from distillation of cryo hemp that I extracted myself and am wondering what issues I might have if I were to just put unwinterized green stuff in my short path.
It depends on what kind of filtration it had before you go to into distillation. There could be all kinds of stuff to muck up your gear (sugars, fats, waxes, gums, etc). It may require cleaning between passes, and it will likely take you more passes to get what you want out of it than you do with your cryo-extracted crude. If it’s super gnarly, you could always winterize it and pass it through your standard post-extraction SOP.
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Yeah, depending on how you extracted you can get massive fouling, you need to filter, and probably also liquid liquid separate to degum.
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LLE seems like a better route than the sheer amount if filtration needed for this- do you have a preferred method?
Depends on budget, time constraints, volume, etc. If you already have pentane solvent recovery systems then could use it. Heptane boils at higher temp so is not always recoverable in pentane or ethanol designed systems. I recommend at least the first wash be with brine, you can play with that, add degum stuff, etc. Then rinse with more water out brine until it comes off clear.
Keep any emulsion that comes off between water and organic layer, let it sit and separate. Some people throw it away with aqueous layer but that’s a waste
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Dissolve in methanol 5:1, add citric acid plus 10% water and freeze. Filter over aluminum oxide. While filtering, fill sep funnel with heptane (4 liters to every 1 liter of crude). Toss filtered methanol/crude mixture in with the methanol and mix. Dilute methanol to 40% with salt water and mix. Pour off aqueous layer and rinse twice more with just salt water. Add baking soda, pour off aqueous layer again and rinse 3-4 more times with salt water checking Ph to get back to neutral. Pour off final aqueous layer and run heptane crude mixture through a CRC column containing B80 on bottom, then thin layer of silica, then another thin layer of B80, then a thin layer of hardwood AC, then activated alumina on top. Saturate the powders with fresh heptane before running the crude. Rinse column with fresh heptane afterward as well. Roto, decarb under vac to 150c and distill.
I just did this and had great results on some room temp methanol crude. Only difference was I used 2 cups of magsil between the silica and second B80 layer and I’m pretty sure that’s what fucked my yield. But what I did pull out was some of the best looking crude I’ve made. Just distilled it a few hours ago with a fantastic color. No tests on it yet, I’ll be crystallizing it later this week.
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I’m amazed but also I think there are a few typos there, you add the filtered methanol crude to the heptane yes? not methanol.
Ahh, yes. To the heptane. Sorry, I was exhausted last night when I wrote that.
I pulled most of the green during the winterization (they stayed with the fats) and a ton of brown, red, and more green in the LLE. Also plenty of terps and volatiles, ad you’re able to smell pretty strongly in the first few washes. My heads fraction was a joke between this and the decarb under vac using my roto pump. While my solution was still pretty dark after LLE, it cleared up like I’ve never seen after running it through the powders. The difference between using powders after LLE and without LLE is night and day.
Something I forgot to mention, those salt water rinses are reportedly faster with 5% methanol by volume in the water. I haven’t personally tried it, but from I’ve heard others mention it might be worth a shot if you’re trying to speed things up.
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