I’m a noob looking to maximize my THC extraction rate when making tinctures for personal use. The intent is to reduce my dispensary costs (I’m not a smoker) as continued edible buying will put me in the poor house.
So unlike many posters, I have no interest in scaling up the process and the weedy and green taste of a room temperature tincture is okay.
I have done 3 tinctures.
With that said, here is my latest process.
Place decarbed flower or shake in a mason jar (I use the Ardent Lift for decarb).
Add 140ml Everclear (190 proof) per 1/4 ounce of flower or shake
Place on magnetic stirrer platform at room temperature (65 degrees) and add smallest magnetic bar to jar (comes with stirrer).
Set stirrer to a setting which is quiet and provides stable agitation
Run stirrer for 3 days in a dark location.
At end of 3 days, filter using nut bag and coffee filters.
Store in amber bottles in freezer or fridge.
I seem to get pretty good rates with the method above. It is extremely green. Three days seems REALLY long. But it was the length of an experiment I referenced that ran the solution for three days on an automatic rocker and got really good rates.
It’s at room temperature. The first tincture I tried to do was an “ice dragon” tincture. You keep it in the freezer and take it out every so often and shake it up on a schedule. Honestly though, that didn’t seem much less green than the later two which both used the mag stirrer at room temperature. Further research revealed I might need to get in the neighborhood of -40 degrees before the cold starts to really prevent unwanted plant materials from dissolving in the solution. So lets just keep it at room temperature and aid solubility.
I realize about 70-75% of the theoretical max amount of THC in the tincture using the method above. Meaning that for every 100mg of THC in the flower, the tincture ends up with 70-75mg.
I’m able to recover about 80% of my solvent. Meaning that for every 100ml of Everclear I add at the beginning, I get a tincture with 80ml. Is this normal? Am I really losing all of this in the plant material or is there some evaporation going on (jar is only ever opened to refill dropper bottle which is relatively rare)? Should I buy a cheap screw press and give the plant matter a hard squeeze before tossing?
Any thoughts on how long I need to agitate really? I’m trying to figure this out experimentally.
All that chlorophyll sounds nasty. I would go about your extraction totally differently.
Try a 5 minute soak and get a desktop centrifuge or a panda spinner. I can put together an epic extraction kit if you’d like, just need to know your budget.
Three QWET will get you essentially all the cannabinoids.
Three days at rm temp will get you a less potent final product (but more of it).
Yes, without a centrifuge or press you are losing 20% of your tincture, and thus your cannabinoids (three rinses will help…now you’re mostly losing ethanol, not precious target).
You can more efficiently make potent tinctures using percolation instead of a batch (maceration) process. Check out what I did in the thread below to see what I’m talking about. I was testing infusion into MCT oil at room temp but no reason the same method couldn’t be used with ethanol. Efficiencies will probably be higher with ethanol:
Also, direct infusion of carrier oils (as I do in this thread ^) is a great way to make an ingredient for edible production. As opposed to making EtOH tinctures, boiling off solvent, etc.
Have you considered using a magic butter machine? It seems pretty straightforward for personal use tincture batches. There’s another one called Levo too.
Ah … so … I’ve been absolutely flummoxed with respect to wash times. The “home made” tincture recipes always stress keeping it in solution for a very long time (days to weeks or longer), and taking it out and shaking it regularly. Often there is a suggestion that shaking it longer or more often will help. Where does this come from? All the pros in forums I’ve seen seem to suggest times like you guys did. Any ideas on why this disconnect persists? I would have thought the edible recipes/tincture people would have heard by now?
Also it looks like I’m losing a fair amount of THC enriched solvent in the plant matter at the end, which is a very sad thing. So the longer I keep the plant material soaking, the more time is available for the plant to soak up Ethanol, is that correct? And ironically, longer soak times lead to a worse extraction rate as it’s going to be THC enriched ethanol that is lost in a longer soak (vs. say QWET)? Wow, how irritating.
Syringes are a great low cost option for small scale work—amazon has 500 ml syringes for $15 which should run over 30 grams hand crushed biomass with room for 250mL solvent “washes.” And of course you can scale down with smaller syringes.
insert coarse filtration material (felt, cotton)
pack biomass halfway
start loading “washes” that can either drip or be plungered into biomass.
collect washes out the other end into vials (of decreasing potency)
use vials to feed into next minibatch of biomass (in order of decreasing potency)
Separate the biomass you want to run into a few minibatches or increase # of washes (or wash volume) to increase extraction efficiency