Hey guys, so this is a bit of a two part/2 question post I wanted to get some feedback on. This is specifically in regards to cannabis and not hemp…obviously a licensed facility.
We bring in trim from a ton of different sources. Ideally it would be one but we have yet to find a single farm that can keep up with us. Like any responsible lab should be doing we are performing mico extractions on everything we bring in before running it. Especially when dealing with a new supplier.
Our actual extraction process is cryo ethanol running at -70 but for the purpose of micros we perform a warm ethanol extraction. I have found that conservatively 70-85% of these extractions fail. The amount of material we turn down is outstanding. I’m not talking about major obviously dirty fails, I’m talking usually right over the line and almost always something different. This is generally from very reputable farms that I know for a fact sell to many licensed operators. For the sake of this post let’s assume any possibility of cross contamination has been eliminated.|
So my first question is basically, is this right? Would you generally agree that so much of the market even from quality operators is failing material once extracted? Is it possible that the warm ethanol micro’s are more polar than what it would be in line? It’s a real head scratcher especially as I get to my second question.
Which is, along the line there’s been times we’ve had to run before results come in. This is in very rare circumstances and only with vendors we have a long standing relationship with. A few times I was surprised to find that the micro came in and did in fact fail while the final distillate came back ND everything. This is obviously due to the fact that the flash points of some of these pests are much higher than cannabinoids so they don’t evaporate and re condense and just fall off in the residue.
Which leads me to the question of, has anyone started putting a detailed list of these pests together that will fall off in distillation? Some absolutely wont but a great many of them will. Would you consider it common practice to “allow” a certain level of these pests knowing that it will fall off and not make it into the final product?
Our goal is obviously to be bringing in ND samples all the way from crude to final product but I have found that to be something of a white whale. At the end of the day in California due to wind carry over and ground contamination there is SOME level of pesticides in pretty much everything