Hello and Happy New Year!
I live in a EU country where the legislation regarding Cannabis is very strict, therefore the only thing I have access to is industrial hemp biomass with THC<0.2% and CBD 2%.
My intention is to fraction distillate the CBD out of it and I want to know if this is possible considering the low CBD percentage…
Since the most info on this brilliant site is about the real Cannabis stuff, I’m wondering if what I’m reading applies to my situation…
In other words, can I produce a CBD distillate out of industrial hemp following the guidelines from this site?
Is there something that I have to do different in my case?
I’m a total rookie into this activity so any advice will be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
What are your extraction yields like? The biomass will go over the limit when you concentrate the THC, but that’s still pretty low- may be able to use some techniques to marginally lower THC content- search for remediation ways using filter medias maybe
The major issue I see for your situation is that when concentrating 30 times over as opposed to less than 10 times (10% biomass) the levels of contamination will increase as well. Thing like pesticides and heavy metals that would be well within allowable levels could be concentrated enough to require remediation. For example lead, which is present basically everywhere on earth in some quantity, could be concentrated to unsafe levels.
3 Likes
Also depending on how much less than .2% thc is it has you may end up with a very hot product. Theoretically you could have a 10:1 cbd:thc ratio from that biomass which would be pretty hot for a hemp product. Most US hemp is around 30:1 for comparison.
1 Like
Thanks for your reply!
At the moment this is what I have: 35kg of powdered ind hemp green parts (mixture of leafs and flowers)
96 degrees food grade ethanol alcohol
Here is what I’m doing:
I’m mixing in a glass jar 1kg of hemp mixture with 3liters of ethanol, agitate every 15min (for 1min) for a total of 2 hours then vacuum filtering (Buchner Funnel w/ filter paper) the alcohol layer and centrifuging the alcohol from the hemp, after that filtering it too
Then I freeze the resulting extract for 48hours at -25C
Then I filter 3 times (Buchner Funnel w/ filter paper)…however for the second and third filtering I don’t change the filter since it remains clean…
After that I recuperate the alcohol using a vacuum distillation @40C
The yield is pretty low…like 80-100grams of extract/1kg of dry hemp mixture.
So, in order to start an SPD I need to do a lot of extract for a 5L equipment.
Please let me know if there is something I can do to improve my extraction…some relevant links about it
Obviously, my intention is to make a good CBD distillate only! (I’m not looking to concentrate the THC )
Thanks!
Thanks for your reply!
For sure the raw extract will have a high concentration of bad stuff in it! But since my goal is to distill and use ONLY the CBD distillate will the final CBD distillate be full of the bad stuff?
Thanks!
either there is a language barrier or you’re barking up the wrong tree.
you cannot separate CBD & THC by fractional distillation to any appreciable extent. the potency or ratio in your input biomass doesn’t make a (huge?) difference.
you can certainly extract CBD from said biomass. it will almost certainly still yield a primary extract that contains significant THC. as @AppalachianExtractor says, it’s also going to have more junk/unwanteds/contaminants.
you can also distill that primary extract, but you will probably have to jump through ALL the clean up hoops that most of us try to avoid, and you won’t get rid of the THC this way.
@Roguelab has probably had experience with this sort of input.
I’d suggest reading up on “warm” ethanol (rm temp) extraction and the various cleanup steps folks go through before heading distillation,
What do you mean by “hot product”? Actually I’m looking for CBD only distillate like 99%CBD and 0%THC…
Also, I’m not familiar with the cbd:thc ratio…when you say the US hemp is 30:1 you are talking about the industrial hemp, right?
Like in my case 2%CBD/0.2THC = 10:1 ratio while the US hemp should have something like 6%CBD:0.2THC.
Am I right in what I’m saying?
Thanks!
Making an extract will make a concentrate of your cannabinoids
So the 2% cbd will become around 20% and the 0.2% thc will become 2%
Any thing with a thc content of 0.3% we call hot
Therefor your extract will be hot
2 Likes
you can crystallize (much) of the CBD out of your 80%CBD 5% THC distillate. or you can look into some of the other THC remediation techniques.
you will NOT fractionally distill the CBD from the THC.
Breaking down numbers
You will realize that the max amount of cannabinoids is 23 gr on the kilo of biomass
So of that 100 gram extract 77 gr. Is additional junk you will need very good cleaning of your crude wich will have serious losses
Thanks so much for your reply!
From my part there is no language barrier but since I’m brand new into this activity I certainly do not posses all the proper terms…but I’m learning!
I know I can’t separate the CBD&THC since they have very close molecular mass and boiling temps…what I wanted to say is that I’m looking to get a good quality CBD distillate with what ever THC might be in it…I’m not looking to remove the THC but will my final distillate be illegal for my country? I guess it will since it will become a 2% THC …
Yes it will be over the Thc limits
Chromatography in the distillate will remove Thc if you need it but is very inefficient due to solvent amounts used
Thank you very much for your answers!
I just found the testing certificate of the hemp I’m using!
It is FELINA32 and the THC (measured by the state authorities) is at 0.043% so it is way under 0.2% as I stated initially!
So the final THC into the distillate will be 0.43%…almost legal (0.3%)
Thanks!
Here is something that I don’t know…
To clean the crude from all the bad stuff (pesticides, lead, etc.) I have to use I guess all type of methods. filters and multiple filtering …but how do I know when to stop cleaning and start distilling?
Process validation through analytical test results is the only way you’ll know. Also, I don’t believe you’ll be able to “filter” many of the pesticides out. You’d need to remediate using chromatography to remove pesticides
Thanks for your reply!
Bottom line…
It looks like using legal industrial hemp in EU to make CBD distillate is a bad thing to do…
- The CBD distillate will never be within the THC legal value so not good for commercial use.
- The CBD distillate will be full of shitty dangerous stuff (not even good for my own use…).
- You can remove the shitty dangerous stuff and do a THC Remediation using chromatography (thing that I don’t have the equipment for nor the knowledge) and it will make the distillate extremely expensive…
Therefore this activity is a no go in this conditions…
Please tell me that I’m wrong!!!
1 Like
Have your powdered hemp analyzed for toxins, heavy metals, and pesticides. Should it pass all of those, there are several alternative uses for the powder in its current state that may or may not yield a profit. Personally, I’d press it into pucks or pellets for hooka smoking, or turn it into incense. It takes very little shake to make a pack of incense sticks and in the right market they sell for more per gram of hemp than smokable.
2 Likes
8%-10% (100g extract divided by 1000g biomass) extraction yield is actually not that bad considering you’re starting with 2% material; however until you test, it’s impossible to know how much of that extract is cannabinoids (what you want) and how much is other stuff that you don’t want like fats and such.
If that math were true, your distillate would only be 20% CBD…
You might scrape in below 2% if you manage 90% cannabinoids (sans other methods for loosing thc deliberately).
Whoops, late to the party again…,
Nope, can’t tell you you’re wrong. If fact you now understand where we were coming from.
2 Likes