Heptane and ethanol are misicible though?
Also, have you tried pentane?
Not sure about other cannabinoids, but the fact that pentane is so good at crystallizing CBD means that pentane may not be a great choice for a solvent to extract cannabinoids off plant matter.
I do like the idea a hexane/heptane extraction followed by a methanol dewax though. It seems waxes are way easier to remove than chlorophyll, which you’d pick up a ton of with methanol on the biomass.
My methanol LLE experiment yielded mediocre results, but I’d like to try it again slightly differently. I used pentane as my non-polar and I likely added way too much water right off the bat. The result was it pulled a bunch of gunk and volatiles, but didn’t really do all that much for color. I definitely got a better quality extract by doing it, but nothing super impressive color wise. I’d totally try it again, though. Like I said, it removed a ton of volitiles, so color aside that’s probably good for my pump and vacuum levels during distillation.
From my understanding, ethanol is miscible in all other solvents. Interesting that heptane and methanol are immiscible though. I’ll have to mess with that in my next extraction.
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Polarity of a solvent is only meant to be used as a general reference. Its true that cannabinoids have a higher affinity for methanol than any alkane, ill link the study if i can. And theres many more examples of non polar substances being more like methylene chloride than any alkanes.
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Sooooo, how do the cannabanoids go from his methanol to heptane?
The thing is there should be quite a bit of cannabinoids in both layers.
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Not sure if you saw this post before, but this video explains the basics of LLE pretty well. It’s specifically talking about PH swings, but it can also somewhat be applied to what we’re talking about here.
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Yea, I was thinking the same without the addition of water…
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And thats what @Beaker method is. But cannabinoids will always try to stick with the methanol layer so itnwill hurt your yeilds doing the LLE with methanol as opposed to ethanol.
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How do you LLE with ethanol when it’s miscible with everything?
Dilute it silly
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This thread is confusing me, but I’m intruiged… Gonna run some heptane/methanol extraction Monday and see what happens.
It didn’t seem to affect my yields much at all with methanol. But like I said, I added a LOT of water. Like 200ml to 75ml of methanol.
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Ethanol becomes immiscible in the non-polar solvent once enough water is added.
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Hey, do you know if there’s still cannabinoids left in your methanol after you’ve been heptane washing it for a while?
“For awhile” what do u mean
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I have found almost No more cannabinoids in the hexane layer after 3 rinses with fresh 3% water methanol
But CBN thc ~ 1 % cbd 4% and CBN 10%
In ratio’s of the crude used
95% thc jumped
75% jumped of cbd
But 33% jumped of CBN
Thus My suspicion that cannabinoids each on their own have solvent prefrances
Wich i found very interesting
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He said he ran multiple heptane washes until the heptane came out clear on his insta.
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Wait, I think I misunderstood your earlier post. You’re saying you washed the cannabinoids out of the hexane with the methanol at only 3% water??? So all the cannabinoids were transferred from the hexane to the methanol.
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Yes 
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Interesting… I guess that makes sense given methanol’s cannabinoid solubility. Do you know what exactly stayed in the hexane?
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