Do cannabinoids float on water ?

Let’s say I have an ethanol extract and I have not concentrated it yet. Will adding water to the extract to dilute the ethanol make the cannabinoids eventually rise to the top? So my question is, essentially do cannabinoids act in the same way/are lipids ?

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Thc is not water soluable. Some terpenes are.

So that’s a yes ? More interested in CBD, but same logic I guess.

Look up density of cannabinoids and compare to water, that will give you your answer. I believe you are correct.

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Do not do this. You’re misunderstanding - yes THC is essentially insoluble in water but ethanol and water are fully miscible. THC is very soluble in an ethanol/water mixture. You cannot separate this way and you will ruin your entire batch.

I’m more interested in CBD but I guess it does not matter. Does it not depend on the water/alcohol ration? If you do this with regular cooking oil for example, at one point, the cooking oil will float to the top. If you dilute the ethanol to say 1% alcohol, would the cannabinoids not separate?

Yes, if you do this with cooking oil and water, the cooking oil will float to the top, but that does not mean it always works that way.

If you dilute the ethanol, with water, its true that the cannabinoids could eventually precipitate, but it would crash out of solution in a cloudy, useless way that is not clean or easy to separate. It’s possible, but certainly not in a way you could easily partition in a separator funnel or anything for reasonable production. Your product would also be contaminated with water, because separations are rarely “binary” as you may think.

Have you ever seen or heard of ouzo or raki or sambuca? As they contain ethanol soluble anisette oil, dilution with water makes them turn white because droplets of the oil precipitate out of solution. That is basically what would happen.

Adding water to a cannabinoid saturated ethanol solution would force some of the cannabinoids out of solution, and they would float on the top or stick to the sides of your container. As mentioned above, the ouzo effect would make your mixture cloudy. I dont think that you would ever be able to get all the cannabinoids out of solution using this method, im sure there would be a limit to the percentage of cannabinoids that would come out of solution. Not worth it in my opinion.

-60 or -70 celcius eto extraction… then doing a LLE(or not), evap …then disolve in minimun aumont of alcohol and add water to the cloudy point and cool down slowly in a period of time to -70 c(days) maybe can precipitate and filter then reX in pentane

The technical term for what you are asking about it’s louching. For a while iirc people on this site used loucher as what I think was an insult

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Louching not is when you add water and all the oil stick everyware and then extract with a non polar solvent?(LLE)?
Can doit with out lounch…evap all disolve in a non polar and do water washs in diferent PH…and then evap re disolve in alcohol add water to the cloudy point befor the oil crash out of the solution and slow precipitate with cold is louching too?

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If you louch until past the cloud point, the cannabinoids should be separable by centrifugation

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what @MagisterChemist said.

But this would be an extremely messy process if I had to guess

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I’m surprised @cyclopath hasn’t hopped in here yet. He’s my favorite loucher. He’s probably louching it not being here. If he’s not careful, he could louche the opportunity to be helpful.

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Was not meant as in insult…but I can see it being misinterpreted that way.

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Pretty sure I’ve tried that and not been impressed with the results…it seems like it should work.

Given I can’t pull up anything beyond that, I suspect I was not impressed enough with my implementation to file it as a hard fail.

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I was never sure. Seemed a funny insult

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Loucher: //lo͞oSHer// (adj.) One who performs the process of louching either intentionally or unintentionally.

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Yes they do. It will eventually rise to the top, but a lot will also form an emulsion with the water and will turn a milky color. So you basically lose a good portion into a milky nasty layer that just makes your life difficult. If you want to pour that down the drain then go for it. Usually if you have minimal amount of ethanol then you can add some water to remove it and the loss is acceptable.

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