Does methanol extraction avoid waxes?

They say methanol and hexane is inmiscible, it takes forever to seperate without water. I tried to use hexane 3 times and had to roto my mixture to seperate it. Heptane i had no problems with

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So I was just thinking of doing methanol extraction and then keep mixing in then sucking off heptane. You’d be getting lots of cannabinoids with very little evaporation

Are you cold extracting?

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Was planning on maybe -20 methanol? It seems to dislike waxes more than ethanol does.

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Why not just warm extract with hexane thats what i do, winterization is fun but the colors on point

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Well, because I could saturate my heptane layer quite significantly, and only need to evaporate of really minimal solvent that way I would hope.

Id still recover your methanol and save what was left in there to distill later

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Well, my hope was just constant extraction with the methanol, never needing to evaporate it. Just have a basin of it. And then saturate the heptane layer as much as I can. The idea was to cut down solvent evaporation by 80-90%

Eventually it will get saturated and have to be cleaned / rotated out id think. I know some people have talked about continuous liquid liquid but idk anyone doing it yet

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Yeah for sure. I would think it would get wax logged eventually. And a shit-ton of chlorophyll.

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O yea i bet it would look like blood after a while. The problem is youd have to cryo extract to avoid pulling fats and lipids or the liquid liquid will pull that too

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Id cryo extract in 190 proof ethanol and try it. You could even wash the heptane with water after you separate it to make sure theres no red in there. I bet youd have some potent heptane after with mostly cannabinoids

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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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