As you can see I was mistaken, isopropyl and propyl alcohol both dissolve less sugar than either ethanol or methanol.
Why isn’t iso used more in extraction? Couldn’t you use more to achieve the same yields? Cheapest I could find so far is 1600 for 200L of ethanol which isn’t that bad
People tend to just use ethanol because its drinkable people take that to mean it’s a safer solvent. At least that’s what it seems like.
We know if u extract cold enough you can make decent extract with any of the alcohols. If you did an initial extraction in isopropyl you would pick up no sugars but more fats, you can proceed to remove these fats by reducing the volume of the solution and then adding methanol to precipitate them. @Infoseeker
I used to use iso. I think half of it is market demand for a “healthy” solvent, and half is the greater difficulty of avoiding wax pickup.
It seems like ethanol is exclusionary of fats, waxes, sugars and chlorophyll at low temps though. Seems like it might be superior if you don’t want to deal with remediation
I could agree with that
it may be wishful thinking but it would be nice to extract, filter and winterize in 1 solvent without the ultra low temps
Food grade etho 190= the best
Couldn’t you not extract room temperature in methanol. Then run it through crc column. Reduce some of it then finally do a hot winterization and filter. add any brine washes or degums to the mix if necessary?
Yes you can definitely do that, but why?
@square_root_pharms was speaking of 1 solvent for everything two post above. I figured do it as I stated before with methanol (why not)? I remember speaking to you at glg northern cali Meet up about reproofing ethonal and you to recommended I should look into methanol…
Every solvent has its place
Probably a low cost decent way to make distillate on small to medium scale.
Thanks
I’ve done 0c methanol extraction before.
You end up with a ton of browns and greens and more sugars. So either an LLE or a louche is in order after winterizing.
You’ll need to get a bunch of powders involved but I’ve made nice first pass 90% distillate from a methanol base. So it’s totally doable.
Sweet! Thanks for the input! May I ask your preferred method now?
You lle into heptane?
Depends on my desired end product.
I was most recently doing 0c ethanol with some charcoal
Then either
A) concentrate with RO membrane then louche into pentane
Or if you don’t have a membrane I run a spray fuge to a 70-80% saturated ethanol solution (about 1lb per litre) then
B) Louche directly into pentane.
After that, I’d CRC under pressure if going into shatter/etc. Otherwise I’d just concentrate and distill it, catching terps. Then distilling the cannabanoids
Thanks for sharing
Hey Everyone,
I found something recently worth discussing here. Seems you can do a near room temp winterization in an hour by using two solvents. Do a bulk extraction with Isopropyl, reduce it to oil, then rehydrate it with 95% Ethanol, you start seeing immediate wax formations at room temperature. I believe this is due to Ethanol’s higher polarity.
By placing this small amount of alcohol in the freezer and you get lots of waxes within an hour. Going further, use a little dry ice alcohol bath to reach -60f and you can have very solid waxes in the same time. The bowl of waxes you see below is sitting in a bowl of ice water.
The filtering can be as simple as pouring this through a paper napkin in the freezer. here’s a few images of just that.
Your thoughts?
…Mimi
Pictures:
#1 Bowl with ethanol and waxes.
#2 Light colored waxes in napkin filter.
I set this napkin in a funnel in the freezer so it remains frozen during the filtering. Whats interesting is, letting this sit out for 24hrs. The wax stays solid as it heats up to room temp. Even after 24 hrs, the waxes are still there, though shriveled up after the alcohol evaporates.
#3 Dark colored waxes in napkin filter.
The longer you let the waxes crystalize, the darker it becomes, so I think longer freezes might cause more cannabinoid losses. This is a 4 hour stay in the freezer.
This is where analytics come in handy.
You have access to a GC now yes?