If you dissolved in ethanol and winterized you could eliminate the phospholipids and still retain most of the smell/taste compounds that contribute to the quality.
Ethanol could probably be eliminated with a water wash too. As long as the volume of ethanol is significantly lower than the volume of butter so you can avoid formation of emulsion. In this instance the cream in butter will only serve to make the emulsion more stable, so refined coconut oil would probably work best.
Would make more sense than evaporating the ethanol, because the compounds responsible for the smell will more readily evaporate out with the ethanol due to the much lower viscosity of that solution. You may potentially be able to save these compounds by transferring the cannabinoids from the ethanol to the oil via louching. Then when heat is applied to decarb, they aromatic compounds will have to escape from a solution of much higher viscosity.
Hi, I would suggest a series of different micron felt based media, a type of stair step filtration process. This way no one micron will end up having to do too much work. This can be in the from of a bag or a flat circle or whatever shape might work best in your operation. Just let us know. Thanks, Greg
In that case, you may want to try a mesh media instead of felt. This is a screen like media and would only hold back particles that are larger than the square pore or opening in the media and the liquid would all pass through. At least until it plugged. You could them press the upstream side to push through the remaining liquid.
Ideally you would want to stop adding the product prior to plugging. Then you could clean the media and use again or simple discard and replace.
That may be true, but it won’t taste as good and won’t have the same potency. You can still label it being made from dry sift. Just not include the infusion method. Which would still be the butter or vegetable oil (coconut, olive, etc), if one were interested
Since this is a home project with no fancy equipment it really falls into my specialty. I’ll outline the process that I would use if it were me or those I advise. Some has already been mentioned but not fleshed out. I’ll link videos and commentary to explain the simple steps. You can be finished in no time. I stake my reputation on the quality of the resultant butter.
When someone asks me how to do this it’s usually for a little less quantity but it’s easily scalable. Here’s the “tek”. It’s called a solvent transfer.
Decarb your kief in an oven @ 240°F for 40 minutes or use any other method you have confidence in. Decarbing can be accomplished when your oil is finished by heating @ 240°F for 2 hours once it’s reached that temp.
I use high octane ethanol, 95%, to make a concentrated tincture. Because we’re only dealing with trichs here and no other plant material we only need a fraction of the volume needed for the plant material which allows you to make a concentrated product. It takes a lot less to just cover the kief.
I usually recommend using 4g of kief for every fluid ounce, 30ml for home use, but in this case you’d use 5-6oz for that 20g of kief then another ounce to rinse it. Since it is all trichomes you’ll strip those quickly when you combine with the alcohol so this is similar to a QWET process. I normally use ethanol from the freezer in my other extractions but it’s not really as important since there’s so little chlorophyll to extract.
Combine your kief and alcohol in your jar, tighten the lid and shake a few times, not long. Set it down and let it sit for a half hour or so, just long enough for the empty husks to settle to the bottom.
After they’ve settled you’re ready to filter through a standard coffee filter. The kief will pack on the bottom and not too much should flow into your filter. Whatever does should just be placed back in the jar for the rinse.
Pour the reserved 1oz of ethanol over your depleted kief to retrieve cannabinoids that have been left behind. My lab tests have shown that a rinse can increase potency by up to 25%. Shake it around a little then pour it through a fresh filter. After it’s drained you can shake the rest of the kief into the filter and squeeze it out. Nothing fancy.
Discard the depleted kief to get it out of the way.
You should have recovered close to the total volume of ethanol you used minus the small losses. So now you have a potent kief tincture that contains 20g of your kief in just about 5oz of oil and the equivalent of 4g/oz. If your kief is 50% then this tincture is 2000mg/oz or 10,000mg/5oz. If using as a tincture this would be quite fantastic at 67mg/ml and it can be reduced further for even higher concentration but we’re not stopping here. So far we may have been busy for an hour or two for the tincture.
Here is the video and commentary for this first part of the process. I know I’ve used a lot of words but that’s to ensure the details. It reads quickly and the video is short. Kief Run 190/151 Proof w/Video Post 569
Now for the solvent transfer. We’re transferring the cannabinoids from the alcohol to the oil with evaporation of the alcohol. There is no loss from the alcohol to the oil unlike direct extraction into the oil. You’ve been able to get a full extraction with the alcohol and without heat that would have also elicited more of a “cooked” flavor.
You are also able to control the potency of your butter/oil. Simply by reducing your alcohol solution in half, to 2.5oz, you double your strength from 67mg/ml to 134mg/ml.
Determine the potency you want for your butter using the tincture scale of 67mg/ml. If you want the same as that then you would use 5oz of butter with that 5oz of tincture. The same would hold true if you wanted 134mg/ml, 2.5oz. However there are a couple of suggested alterations.
a. Because we use heat to remove the alcohol from the butter, the less heat the better. I suggest that the 5oz of alcohol tincture in our example be reduced by half so that less heat is needed over the course of the transfer. This is as @Dred_Pirate mentioned above. This means that your tincture is 134mg/ml and you’ll use the quantity of the butter used to determine the strength. If you still used 5oz of butter then if would be 67mg/ml, 4oz would be 83mg/ml, etc.
b. You can make this extremely concentrated to save space and add a bit to the fresh butter used to your desired dosing.
This process is very clean and easy. To do the whole thing including the alcohol extraction and the solvent transfer won’t take more than 3-4 hours and you’re finished. Solvent transfer of cannabinoids is difficult to explain to a lot of people so I have a video for that, too.
Nothing here is absolute and is open for adaptation as the circumstances dictate.
at a larger scale I’d suggest a centrifuge. 10um bags in 50ml tubes per the dirty diamond tek would work, but seems excessive unless you’ve got one on hand.
pretty sure if you add water to the equation (post extraction) you can get the kief to sink and the butter to float, then just put it in the fridge to separate. standard crockpot butter no?
that’s an awful lot like “Vegetarian, with bacon”…
I don’t care if the local AHJ says it’s ok to use it at home, that does NOT mean that you’re not using it as an extraction solvent. your customers may believe it, but that doesn’t make it true, or mean you should use the nonsense that marketing has come up with.
if you want solvent-less, use the dry sift directly!
You know those snapper things that you bought from the ice cream man. The ones that look like a tadpole. Basically make one of those with a couple coffee filters and your sift. Tie it somehow. And dunk it a handful of times in a few small jars of cold alcohol, using the third as a final wash and you should be good. Marry the jars as their level gets low
Haven’t given it much more work, I made a batch of brownies and attempted to let the hash settle so I could cool it/cut it out but there was too much fines suspended in the mix
I’m still considering water washing the butter after some type of filtration, I’d like to get some small micron rosin bags to play with. Cheaper is better for now
