Does Ethanol Crude Extraction with Dry Ice pull more THC from nugs than Infusing the nugs with butter in an ardent fx?
Which will produce a stronger extraction i.e will have more THC in the final product. I want to make strong caramels. I understand infusing ghee/butter with the ardent fx will pull chlorphyl etc and have a more weedy or earthy taste. Versus say the ethanol crude having a more terpine taste?
But ultimately what extraction method is best for pulling as much thc from buds when comparing ethanold crude extration using dry ice
like in these two examples
then evaporating the ethanol away in an extract craft
vs
just infusing the nugs directling into butter or ghee using an ardent fx and then screening out the plant material to just have the butter and infused thc.
The ethanol method would be more time consuming i would assume? but would it produce stronger caramels?
Correct me if I’m wrong… but in general less ethanol can hold more cannabinoids than a coconut/ghee solution.
So if you’re talking “efficiency” then ethanol probably wins.
If you’re just trying to pull the most cannabinoids from the biomass and solvent volumes aren’t a big factor. Then milling your biomass and rinsing with fresh solvent, is probably going to be your best method for pulling almost all of the cannabinoids out.
If you want to maximize strength per caramel. Then use ethanol and evaporate to concentrate, and then dose your caramels however you want to.
I guess soaking times would be your friend. If you’re making edibles I would look into freezing your material at subzero temps for 18-24 hours prior to soaking and processing instead of full on milling because ime, when you freeze the material prior to ethanol extraction, it’ll be brittle and the plant material will break up easier in the subzero ethanol.
Again though if your aim is edibles, a longer soak time shouldn’t matter as much. And imo, If you also plan on using full spectrum then like… Filtering shouldn’t matter as much either.
imagine you can exhaustively extract 1kg of bud into a liter of either, and your starting material is 10% cannabinoids.
that means you’ve 100mg/ml oil and 100mg/ml ethanol. now you can evaporate the ethanol and end up with 150g of 75% cannabinoids. vs a liter of oil.
which allows you to put more THC in your caramels?
distill those 150g to yield 80g of 90% cannabinoid distillate, and you can squeeze even more in (although you lost some along the way).
I don’t recommend aiming any higher than 50mg/dose.
how many 50mg caramels can you make with your 150g of 75% THC?
** understand that getting more than 20mg/ml into oil is non-trivial (but has been reported eg The Economics of Lipid Infusion). ethanol is definitely superior here…simply because you can evaporate it.