That’s impressive. What was the ratio of ethanol to extract?
There are different methedologies on purging. To acheive below 50ppm residual ETOH do you guys keep the vac on continuously? or do you only pull to 500mtorr or less or more? Just curious as to what others are doing to get low low ppm readings.
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50ppm EtOH? who’s rules are those?
Oregon doesn’t give a rats ass how much ethanol is in there…when they did it was 5000ppm.
500ppm is fairly easy.
50ppm sounds problematic if you want any terps at all.
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Yeah idk any state that requires below 5oppm EtOH.
We consistently yield below 5000ppm which is going to be the limit in Fl if they ever actually begin enforcing third-party testing requirements.
We have different vac methods for different consistencies, with sauce we pull a full vac and leave it closed for a day, open to purge headspace and drop to vac again.
I believe the cleaner your extract is going into the oven the easier it will be to remove ethanol. just some food for thought.
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What is the terp fraction like compared to regular hydrocarbon HTE ? What does it normally test at for potentcy . How easy is it to purge . Ive all ways stayed away from ethanol just cause of the higher purging Temps. Very interesting . Have you tried to do a cold crash for thca yet ?
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Thanks for the feedback. I said 50ppm because @washington710 (intsagram) said he consistently gets below 50ppm.
What temp are you purging at for the sauce? Do you separate your sauce and vac that by itself?
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Also when you say full vac, what mtorr are you pulling to before you close off vac?
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@Saucyslabz If you successfully manage to crystallize the max amount of terps your should be left with a pretty runny terp fraction at around 20-30% total THC. Removing the ethanol from the terp fraction while retaining the terp profile is the most difficult part.
For this reason I prefer sugar with a minimal amount of terp sauce. Its the easiest way to consistently stay compliant with a quality product.
I’ve tried cold crashing but didn’t see much success. After figuring out this technique I didn’t see a reason to go back.
@bg007 full vac for me is around 30 in/hg which is around 760 mtorr.
Yes, I always purge separately.
Hot enough reduce viscosity.
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Try LLE your terpenes fraction into pentane from the ethanol 
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That’s genius
Do you find that some strains just don’t want to crystallize?
Yes. Some strains make great structures consistently and others never seem crash the way I’d like. I’ve been compiling data with the inhouse cultivars here to compare the ease of making certain consistencies with the major terpenes. Theoretically this will allow me to predict which strains will work best as sauce, shatter, crumble, etc based off of their major terpenes. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide more information on this later.
Of course the potency of the extract is directly relevant to the amount of THCA that can potentially crash out. If your extract isn’t potent enough it wont have the potential to crystallize much.
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I’m working with Head Cracker (Tres Dawg IX x Tres OG) i got the trim tested prior to extraction and there were almost no terpenes. I added seed crystals and it’s barely growing at all.
Blue Dream crosses are a crystal growers best friend. I got great larger crystals. It’s all about those terps, they seem to do the majority of the work.
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Intersting the terps are a co -solvent
But to your findings some seem to have a catalist function in crystal forming
Notice any difrent morphology on the crystal it s form ?
I wonder if some terps are more acitic than others and that ph is the reason
Pff quite a pandora box about to open
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correct, I believe certain terpenes help promote crystallization. Limonene is known to be a good one for example. To make it more complicated though, it seems that strains with limonene as a major terp that also have specific terpenes at similar concentrations to limonene will not crystallize as well. The ratio of the major terpenes seems to play an important role from what I’ve seen. This may have something to do with crystallizing from ethanol. I’m pretty sure THCA uses hydrogen bonding to form its crystal structure. Since ethanol can also perform hydrogen bonding I think ethanol really effects crystal structures and the major terpenes interfere with that.
Most Terpenes aren’t effected by pH because they’re hydrocarbons but there are terpenols (terpene alcohols) that will change with respect to pH. definitely something to keep in mind for strains high in terpineol and linalool.
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From what I’ve seen, some strains make 100-200 (approx) nucleation/seed sites, and others make an uncountable amount of sugar micro crystals.
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this is a sign that you need to recalibrate the unit. I suggest contacting Orange Photonics. I had this issue a while back.