Yeah that makes sense. I think the biggest takeaway here is that without testing the spent biomass, you are mostly guessing. You can change soak time, temp, agitation, spin time, or RPM, but unless you know what cannabinoids are still left behind in the material, it is hard to say if the change actually helped.
An in-house HPLC would probably make a lot of sense if you are running enough material. Even if it is not perfect at first, having consistent internal data after each run would let you compare changes side by side and dial things in way faster than sending samples out or going by yield alone.
To me the smart move would be to only change one variable at a time, test the spent material, then compare extraction efficiency. Otherwise it gets messy fast and you do not really know what caused the improvement or loss.
Great response and I would like to add one thing to testing your biomass post-extraction. Make sure you take an aggregate sample from the bag. Take a sample from top, middle and bottom so you are getting a good representation of the extraction as a whole.
