EHO Color Remediation

Update, I’m still in the yellows or oranges even with carbon chemistry neutral carbon.
But wow are the filtered extracts incredibly smooth! Prior to any filtering, These ethanol extracts test in the low to high 90s for combined cannabinoids and tepenes so they were already pretty pure. I Also Decarbed about 100 g in an open vessel, and there were no noxious fumes, a first for me. So despite the fact that I’m only having limited success with color, there is a very real improvement, I don’t even want to touch my old extracts now, there’s a certain harshness that these lack that is desirable.
I note above someone mentions magnesol may help with orange. Any corroboration?

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I think what people are forgetting is that, most of the information about which media removes which colors come from peoples tests with butane.

There will be a big difference in how different medias perform in a different solvent. Seems that alcohol just really likes to hold onto the reds/oranges. Whereas butane, with the same medias, drops those colors like a bad habit.

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Truly it goes back to the QWET of old as the lost biologist shows above. With a low enough retention time he did pretty awesome. On the other hand I’m combining a second wash and I usually soak 10 minutes for the first wash so I’m actually happy with yellow or light orange at that point. Flavors should be the real focus anyways and as I stated we’ve made some improvements there so I think it’s all been worth it so far!

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I wish i was allowed to post pictures, we can reliably get pale golden extract using the lost biologist tek, there are certain things i have noticed though.

  1. Dont grind your material if it can be avoided. Grinding opens up cells and adds more green to your extract. Similarly, i have tried using dry ice hash (just kief really) instead of trim, but the trichomes in the hash have all been broken open, and cause the extract to absorb a LOT of orange. The less grinding/disturbing of the trichomes/cells the better. (For color)

  2. Do it cold. Freeze your ethanol. Freeze your material to extract. Freeze you extraction vessel. (Stainless steel pots for me) freeze your panda if you have one. Freeze your buchner funnels or what ever you use for filtering. You want everything to stay as cold as possible until all the plant material is removed from your extract. When i say cold, shoot for < -50C. Colder the better.

  3. Do it fast. Add frozen ethanol as fast as you can. Briefly stir to ensure total contact. 2 minutes soak, remove material to panda, 5 mins in panda. While the panda is going, filter main extract, you should be able to get it all through a course filter to remove hash/plant mater before the panda finishes. Make sure the vessel your pand spits out into is also chilled. If its not, it can warm up youe extract with some fines/hash still in it, and thats going to add some color. Once the panda is done, put that extract through the course filter too. This should take a TOTAL of 10 minutes from initial contact to having all the plant matter out. A bit longer is okay, but really, faster is better.

  4. Avoid actually putting dry ice into your ethanol/extract. Yes it will get you real cold real fast, but it will make your ethanol more acidic, which if you are making shatter, wouldnt be the end of the world, but can cause some serious isomerization if you distill it. I have also heard that it can be made even worse if you add dry ice to solution and then filter over celite/de, causing formation of carbonic acid with the dissolved co2 in your solution. Do what you gotta do to make it cold but avoid direct contact. A little wont hurt, but im not sure where the line should be draen, best to avoid.

For my filtering, i only use t5 and amercan hard wood ac. I estimate my yield, then filter over a bed of 20% t5, and 4% ac. Bentonite on the bottom.

A lot of this is just re hashing what the lost biologist tek says. To make the best extracts, this is the way to go. Longer soaks and warmer temps will get more cannabinoids out of the plant, but it will pull more color too. And the lower the initial concentration of anthocyanins/chlorophyll/ other undesireables, the more effective the filtration will be. I keep seeing you guys going a bit longer and warmer, which in my opinion is setting yourself up for dissappintment.

Just my 2 cents :slight_smile:

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I completely agree with cold and fast. Not grinding. That was said perfectly in my opinion. You hit every point i have made for yrs now

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Every time you right something I read it in Steve Harvey’s voice

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Im glad :joy:

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Is this distillate? Or is this still mixed with ethanol?

Mixed with etho.

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Any news on the scrub?

Why will pressure filtering be better than vacuum filtration?

Whats the panda?

Pressure filtering is supposed to help prevent channeling and increase flow rates, but I’ve personally used vacuum filtering without issue.

The Panda is an endangered bear found primarily in mountainous forests in China.
I’m just messing with ya. :yum:

We’re all referring to a Panda brand spin-dryer which makes a handy budget centrifuge. It is not necessarily a fire marshal approved device, but it does get the job done well.

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If youre using ethanol then using vacuum as the means of transportation for your extract thru a filter bed its not that big of a deal. But when you try to use vac to pull butane thru the filter the butane is going to expand because the vacuum just further decreased an already very low boiling point. This willl create cavities within the filter bed, causing very bad channeling and will probably just overall cause a sticky mess.

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Duly noted. I’ll be moving to butane soon so that’ll probably be handy info going forward.

My advice to you is to invest in a nitrogen tank with a regulator and a hemispherical lid with sight glasses on it. If youre going the butane route.

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if you’re referring to

then, yes. and no. if you’re running extract over media, rather that extracting biomass, the process flow looks very similar, but it’s not quite the same trick. dry loading sounds like a good plan. if you’re trying to perform actual chromatography, you might want to run your solvent in small aliquots, recover, collect your fraction from the receiver, then vac down and go again. if you’re just using ab/adsorbants, you probably want run all your solvent at once.

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im currently using ceramic buchner funnels to filter through, but it is painfully slow. Anyone have a seggestion for a larger buchner funnel (not made of plastic) and or a pressure filter set up?

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Do you have a side by side off using the [20% t5 and 4%ac] next to just [ac] or just [t5]?